Mary had schizophrenia, then suddenly didn't

This is due to a lack of resources to commit everyone. There are still plenty of people that are committed, such as the main character of this article.

Where do you live and what happens to mentally unwell people in your society? [Just curious]

Not to take away from your own experience at all, but you can't make sweeping statements about psychiatric medication like that. As far as I know most of them are very personal, and it's quite common for any given medication to be a terrible experience for some while it's a life saver for others.

This is noted as a common and serious side effect that many people experience. Unfortunately it's also noted as a symptom of the common diseases these medications treat. It's seemingly a mess of figuring out what parts of suffering are medication related or disease related. This is why this discovery in the article is so fascinating - science doesn't even know what causes this in the first place, thus it's impossible to decipher which is which. We just know it can address some symptoms in some people and in general some feel the tradeoff is better.

Should be obvious, but ability to function triumphs ability to be 'creative'. Hell with creativity in fact. It comes last in the list of priorities..

I'm sorry you had a bad experience with them, but that wasn't my experience. The antipsychotic I am on helps me immensely in not being sucidal and being able to live some semblance of approximating a normal human life.

Keto was invented for the treatment of seizures in children, actually. There's a guy I know that killed 2 people with his car when he had a seizure. He's been seizure-free (and obviously not driving, btw) for years since starting keto

Mushrooms and LSD have high tolerance from 24-96h where higher doses will not reproduce the same effects w/o abstinence. I find it hard to believe that a week's worth of exposure was the sole cause.

[s]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

Psychedelics are known to occasionally activate schizophrenia in genetically predisposed individuals, so this is definitely not unheard of. Given how often I take LSD though, I'm fairly certain I'm not genetically predisposed to schizophrenia, otherwise I probably would've been in the 12th inner circle of schizophrenia by now.

(I've been trying to impact the stability of my brain for years. I just want a way to destroy rational thought but that isn't lethally addictive (benzos), or irreversibly neurotoxic (deliriants), or literal poison (alcohol). Harm reduction is such a drag, I just want to safely explore unsafety!!)

This is true, but I wonder if GP spoke naively about inducing symptoms that are similar enough that we can learn about what triggers those symptoms in otherwise healthy individuals.

Kind of like how we were "lucky" to get a guy with a railroad spike through his brain to learn about how brain damage affects personality and impulsiveness..

This attribution criteria might be subject to revision based on research like this: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

> It is not possible, by definition

I use schizophrenia to refer to the experience, not to the diagnosis. I'm not sure what to call the experience of schizophrenia other than schizophrenia, given it's not synonymous with psychosis. (Though, granted, I would also want to try psychosis someday; even if it's a terrible experience and I never want to do it again, I want to truly know what it's like. Hopefully without permanent brain damage though. That stipulation heavily limits my options.)

My understanding is that the Liver King, Brian Johnson, is basically doing that right now.

I actually have done this (not by choice though), and I guess I might've gotten close to something like psychosis. Maybe I'll push it further when I'm in a less stressful environment. I neglect basic needs too much as it is, hah.

That’s not the redneck version, that’s the everybody version. You don’t need the LSD even, just pick a stimulant of choice, legal or not (meth, coke, adderral, vyvanse, Ritalin). Ingest it for days, you’ll be in psychosis in no time.

I hope one day there'll be branches of medicine for each neurotype rather than just giving up whenever a drug's effects aren't consistent in trial. there needs to be more studies into everything ever

What we think of as schizophrenia today is almost certainly multiple underlying disorders.

Historically autism was lumped under schizophrenia and before that they were both lumped under dementia. Symptomatically similar with insufficient diagnostic precision or theory to differentiate.

Many things cause psychosis. Drugs are a good example. When first discovered LSD was often characterized as causing temporary chemically-induced schizophrenia. A useful metaphor but not accurate.

A large point of the article is that the search for biological markers of the disease have turned up nothing.

> but bonafide schizophrenia comes with gray matter changes seen over fMRI

According to who?

Alzheimer's disease is not schizophrenia.

For my money Rachel Aviv is the best and most interesting writer currently on the New Yorker staff (give or take a David Grann, who is pretty much just writing books these days it seems). I go out of my way to read whatever has her byline.

Immune antibody tests are already a standard part of a lot of mental health care, particularly psychosis. My wife tells me depending on the centre it may be mandated for all new diagnoses of psychosis. It is called an "organic screen".

The article is mostly about how there are now recognized to be certain schizophrenia-like conditions that are clearly autoimmune diseases. Mentioned in the article are anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis, which responds to immunotherapy, and a previously published case of a woman mid-diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia fully recovering after being treated for lupus with immunosuppressive therapy.

Based on this, the article suggests that the rituximab Mary was given along with chemo was the key. However, they were unable to test conclusively for antibody evidence of this theory after the fact.

Probably why we keep looking at electroconvulsive ‘therapy’ again and again. Triggering the body’s systems to do something often cleans up other situations at the same time.

There was a phenomenon where sometimes a high fever would cure STDs like syphilis. We generally use antibiotics now that we have them, because they are less dangerous.