21 ms·

No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia

• stef25 7y ago
  Very interesting. I wonder if there's a link between melatonin production in the pineal gland (affected by visual perceptions of light) and endogenous DMT, also suspected of being produced in the pineal (see Rick Strassman's work) For a long time endogenous DMT, or some other endogenous psychoactive compound, was suspected of being a cause of schizophrenia. I think it's largely discredited by now anyway.
  • andai 7y ago
    The endogenous psychoactive idea is fascinating. My friend called me during a psychosis, and I was convinced he was having a really bad psilocybin trip.
    • nerdponx 7y ago
      Doesn't psilocybin work by overloading serotonin receptors in the brain? Seems like you could achieve that without DMT.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • dcolkitt 7y ago
      Modern research has actually found closer ties between psychosis and a different psychoactive compound: dynorphin[1]. In terms of recreational drugs, this is the neurotransmitter responsible for a salvia trip. From an outside standpoint, this makes more sense than the classical psychedelics. Unlike LSD or psilocybin, salvia hallucinations usually result in a total disconnect from reality, and the user is often rendered catatonic like in severe cases of schizophrenia. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322319313794 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632231...
      • andai 7y ago
        A neverending salvia trip... I would not wish it upon my worst enemy.
      • koboll 7y ago
        I remember some of the first time I did salvia. I was sitting on a couch at the end of a room, and I looked up at the corner of the ceiling, where the ceiling met two walls. Then I looked back at the people I was sitting with, but all I could see was the corner of the ceiling, where the ceiling met two walls. Then after... seconds? A minute? An hour? I could see normally again, but the room I was in began to move backward. It detached from an enormous wall, where it was revealed to be one of an infinite grid of identical rooms. I don't remember the rest. Apparently all I did the whole time was stare with a blank expression for five minutes. Salvia. It's powerful stuff!
      • psychonautLorax 7y ago
        >Unlike LSD or psilocybin salvia hallucinations salvia . . . user is often rendered catatonic. Woah! Granted I’ve see only seen a handful of people use it, but it’s the only drug which I seriously worry about it causing agitation/frenzy so severe as to induce outward violence.
  • stef25 7y ago
    EDIT - Too late to edit my original post, I should correct myself and say the theory has not been discredited (according to Dr Strassman himself)
  • paulcole 7y ago
    DMT, you say? It's entirely possible. My friend Jamie has a video about that.
  • wysifnwyg 7y ago
    Melatonin is broken up by sunlight exposure through the eyes, perhaps endogenous DMT might be impacted in a similar way?
  • davebryand 7y ago
    It's interesting that in the study they described, performed on blindfolded people, that their descriptions have similarities to the DMT experience: >>> One subject, a 29-year-old woman, saw a green face with big eyes when she was standing in front of where she knew there was a mirror—though she couldn’t see it. Another 24-year-old man, by the end of the second day, was having difficulty walking because of all the hallucinations that appeared to be in his way. He reported seeing "mounds of pebbles, or small stones...and between them was running a small stream of water." By the end of the study, he reported seeing "ornate buildings of white-green marble" and "cartoon-like figures."
  • nalllar 7y ago
    the discordianists were right > *THE PINEAL GLAND is where each and every one of us can talk to Eris. If you have trouble activating your Pineal, then try the appendix which does almost as well. Reference: DOGMA I, METAPHYSICS #3, "The Indoctrine of the Pineal Gland"
• mantap 7y ago
  It seems intuitive to me that visual centers of the brain don't develop properly in the absence of visual stimulation. Has anybody done fMRIs to compare congenitally blind people with those who became blind later in life? Also it begs the question: which blind person with schizophrenia became blind at the youngest age?
  • azeirah 7y ago
    Schizophrenia is not limited to visual hallucinations though, interesting ;o
    • 1_over_n 7y ago
      it would be interesting to know if anyone has compared activity in visual cortex in schizophrenics having auditory vs visual vs olfactory vs tactile hallucinations to controls. A quick search shows "hyperconnectivity" has been found betwen the amygdala and visual cortex in those with visual hallucinations. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4266287/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4266287/
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • bluGill 7y ago
    There have been instances of blind from birth people creating great drawings. Their visual center must be working somehow to imagine and draw things they can't see.
    • garmaine 7y ago
      Or they develop entirely different mechanism? I don’t see why the visual center of the brain has to be involved at all.
      • qnsi 7y ago
        Because its innate
• 0xcafecafe 7y ago
  Interesting. Can it also have something to do with an extremely small sample size? These are both rare conditions so intersection might be even rarer.
  • dotancohen 7y ago
    Commenter above addresses this. Considering the prevalence of each condition, if they were independent then we would expect that 2 out of 10,000 people should have both together. The fact that zero cases have been found suggests that there is either a diagnosis issue, or that the two conditions are not independent.
    • klodolph 7y ago
      That was an arithmetic error. It’s 2 out of 1,000,000.
      • archi42 7y ago
        The total 620 is actually correct again: 0.0072 times 0.0003 times 311591917 is 673.04. I suppose the 53 person discrepancy is due to rounding towards 0.03% but using a more accurate number for the actual computation (e.g. 0.0277%).
        • dotancohen 7y ago
          620 blind schizophrenics should be enough for anyone.
        • klodolph 7y ago
          You can’t just throw extra digits around like that. It’s a bit unusual and jarring to see the population of the US quoted as “311591917” even if that is the census figure, because such a high-precision number would only be true for about a minute and you don’t know which minute.
          • archi42 7y ago
• tsukurimashou 7y ago
  I would like to hear more about that, about other mental illnesses, depression etc... Does being blind also affect these?
  • dcolkitt 7y ago
    Congenital blind people have much higher rates of autism. Some models of psychiatric illness view schizophrenia and autism as two broadly opposite poles of a grand spectrum, so this kind of makes sense in the context.
    • caleb-allen 7y ago
      Do you have any further resources for this view? I'm very interested. I have an uncle with severe schizophrenia, and a cousin with autism, and just recently noted in my journal how autism and schizophrenia seem to be the extremes of one's ability to reason about and categorize the world around them.
      • dcolkitt 7y ago
        SlateStarCodex did a good job covering the high-level evidence for the view: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-autism-and-schizophrenia/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/12/11/diametrical-model-of-a...
  • macintux 7y ago
    The article discusses that.
• Retric 7y ago
  If you’re wondering about how common this should be: if schizophrenia occurs at a rate of 0.72% in the population (McGrath et al., 2008) and congenital blindness occurs at an estimated rate of 0.03% in people born in the 1970s and 1980s (based on Robinson et al., 1987), then the joint probability of a person having both conditions, if the two are independent, would be 0.02% or 2 out of every 10,000. Although this is a low prevalence rate, it is higher than the rates for childhood-onset schizophrenia (Remschmidt and Theisen, 2005), and many other well-known medical conditions (e.g., Hodgkin's lymphoma, Prader Willi syndrome, Rett's Syndome). Based on this estimated prevalence rate, in the United States alone (with a population of 311, 591, 917, as of July 2011, according the US census), there should be approximately 620 congenitally blind people with schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3615184/ That does do rule out misdiagnosis etc, but it does seem to support a correlation.
  • ocfnash 7y ago
    Just a moment, 0.72% x 0.03% = 0.0002%, which is about 2 out every 1,000,000.
    • ChrisRR 7y ago
      So even then, 600 people in the US should be both born blind and scizophrenic
      • giancarlostoro 7y ago
        That isn't a guarantee that 600 people will be born with both.
        • ehsankia 7y ago
          Obviously there's no guarantee, and there's also the fact that we may not have every case documented, but if it is true that we have 0 case documented, that's pretty far from 600. Even if it's not "impossible", then at the very least it's less likely.
• INTPenis 7y ago
  So what does that imply? That visual sensory input might trigger schizophrenia? But that would imply that blind people have diminished sensory input. I just don't buy that. They have a lot of sensory input, perhaps as much as seeing people. It's just delivered differently. Try an isolation tank. I can totally imagine someone going crazy in one of those. The original title was even more click-bait. I'm glad it was changed before posted here.
  • mennis16 7y ago
    Hallucinations are much more commonly auditory in Scz, and often language based (deaf Schizophrenic people report hallucinating disembodied hands doing sign language). If it is a real effect it could possibly have the opposite explanation- blind people tend to have compensatory improvements in other senses like hearing, so perhaps developmental auditory hyposensitivity is a causal factor. But yeah, while I think the observation is interesting, it is hard to conclude much of anything from it.
    • Jupe 7y ago
      Interesting: https://gizmodo.com/can-deaf-people-hear-voices-1675963437 https://gizmodo.com/can-deaf-people-hear-voices-1675963437 Apparently, deaf people do get Scz, and some even hear voices.
      • Forgivenessizer 7y ago
        But deaf people born blind don't. I'm blaming tinky winky. That creature is horrifying.
  • pazimzadeh 7y ago
    Light inhibits melatonin release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Circadian_rhythm.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Circadian_rhythm.svg Low melatonin levels are correlated with many diseases, including cancer and schizophrenia. > The results indicated that blind women had a 35% reduced risk of developing breast cancer. Moreover, women who became totally blind prior to age 65 had a 50% reduced risk https://news.cancerconnect.com/breast-cancer/blind-women-have-lower-risk-for-breast-cancer-NpAaFuxgUE2jHxY1UxDiJw https://news.cancerconnect.com/breast-cancer/blind-women-hav... Role of Melatonin in Schizophrenia https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676771/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676771/ Disappointing that the article doesn't mention melatonin once.
• aiCeivi9 7y ago
  Does aphantasia have any impact?
  • himlion 7y ago
    That's an interesting thought. I (think I) have aphantasia and I could easily see how you'd be less inclined to hallucinations, intrusive thoughts and the like.
    • Filligree 7y ago
      If you think you have aphantasia, you almost certainly do. I was in the same boat, but after conversations with a few friends I found that the ones which don't give very literal descriptions of their imaginations. It isn't in any way an analogy, they literally do see the things they're imagining. It's like a hallucination, except with control and full awareness that it's not real. It's easy to see how that could turn into actual hallucinations, I'll agree.
      • admiral33 7y ago
        I do not have aphantasia. The way I think of my imagination is like a virtual machine running a separate reality I'm in control of. I can roll a ball around on a plane in space and still have awareness of "base" reality. Other -non visual- sensations I am able to simulate: - Taste/smell, able to taste specific foods without eating them - Sound, able to hear conversations, music, etc. - Pain, able to feel the sensation of touching a hot stove or breaking my arm If any people with aphantasia are in this thread, are you able to "simulate" any of these experiences? Also: are you religious in any way? There is an interesting history of religion and schizophrenia [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_schizophrenia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_schizophrenia
        • Filligree 7y ago
          Well, I'm one so... No, I'm not able to simulate any of that, in the way I think you mean. I can predict the outcomes, but I can't at all claim to be experiencing any of it. It involves no more sensation than reading words on a page. (Which is to say, none. I understand that that can also vary. The only time that changes is when I'm dreaming. So I know what experience I'm not getting, I suppose.) No, I'm not religious, but nobody in my family is. We used to be subjects of the Thunderer; that was a couple of generations back. Christianity managed to break us of that, but not to make us believe them.
• meroes 7y ago
  Maybe the visual center has more trust over auditory or other parts of the brain? For example an auditory hallucination is easily discounted, but if most people witnessed a visual hallucination, they'd question their own sanity because that signal is so trustworthy? There's many other explanations just a random thought.
  • K0SM0S 7y ago
    It's an interesting thought. I wonder if the nature of schizophrenia isn't particularly conducive (almost binarily so) to being "driven" by visual signals. In my interactions with schizophrenic people (especially when untreated), I've witnessed intense and unusual attention (some would say obsession) devoted to "patterns" — I've no other word to describe it generally; to paraphrase it: "order or regularity in visual, typically geometric or symbolic sequences of objects", a particular fascination for certain shapes or symbols. Somehow, at some point in the processing, said patterns acquire additional meaning, what I'd call uncanny connections. (Schizophrenic people deeply believe that they see how to "connect the dots" — hence a particular tendency for tinfoil hatism and other paranoid world views.) It also seems to work with music and other sensory inputs, though, but as you said, it could be that the visual is beyond some threshold, or of a particular nature so as to be able to trigger the schizophrenic patterns. There's also this history of violence with the onset of schizophrenia, it seems to be an acquired condition notably highly correlated with childhood suffering (of abnormal magnitude and length), but with possibly typical genetic or epigenetic predispositions. This tells us again to search for a trigger, and it's interesting that people born blind never seem to experience such a triggering, the onset of schizophrenia, ever. But people born blind are also different in many other ways, biologically — notably circadian rythms, etc. I should know because although I'm perfectly able to see I experience a few but too many of the same kind of second- and third-order conditions that blind people have, and that led me to suspect it was related to a deficiency of mine in regions of the brain related to the processing of light in relation to time (cycles of melatonin, hunger, etc; iirc it's generally involving the thalamus). I don't really know what conclusion to make of all this, but I feel these are clues, help narrow or focus the solution space.
    • hi41 7y ago
• rezgi 7y ago
  Isn't it that when you combine two extremely low prevalence phenomenons together, you can't really make any accurate predictions because the numbers are so low that the error margin is too high? I might be wrong, but I seem to remember something to that effect. Could it be what's at play here?
  • K0SM0S 7y ago
    The thing is, if you had a discrepancy of some order of magnitude (e.g. 6,000 or 60 instead of 600), you could talk about accuracy problems. You could look into rounding errors and margins of errors, like we do with constants in physics, and that would maybe yield some new or modified equations (models). But the "binary" absence of even 1 single case hints at something else: it's a category thing, there's "in it" or "out of it", and it seems that being born blind somehow means you can't develop schizophrenia.
    • gowld 7y ago
      Or it shows underdiagnois or hard to find almost-never events
      • K0SM0S 7y ago
        Eh indeed, and it could even be that schizophrenia (whatever its "base principle" is in the brain) exists in some people born blind, but presents itself in such a different way that it's misdiagnosed for something else (so categorically, that we already have another name for it). But I think it's really worth investigating. Could yield important knowledge and may lead to new forms of treatment perhaps.
    • contravariant 7y ago
      The absence of any cases is strong evidence against the null hypothesis that the both are independent (assuming the combination isn't just much harder to diagnose), but it isn't strong evidence for it being impossible. Just because something hasn't happened doesn't allow you to distinguish between it being impossible and it being very unlikely (of course the other way around does work, then this is strong evidence that it is possible).
• rafaelvasco 7y ago
  I don't think schizophrenia has any dependence on visual input at all. This is just a probability problem, since the combined probability of both occurring is very small, as the separate probabilities are already small; Anyone that has a brain can have the disease, blind or not; The disease itself is very little understood. For example, when I was a child I had visions and heard voices. I would go to sleep and then, in the middle of the night I would wake up and start seeing things around me, hundreds of voices talking, light beings, etc. Some would call me a schizophrenic, some a medium. I could be both, could be neither;
• oxymoran 7y ago
  What if we could “reboot” a schizophrenic brain through some sort of sensory deprivation?
  • andai 7y ago
    I recently started going to a spa that has float tanks. It's the most relaxing thing in the world, and I highly recommend it. While floating, the body is able to relax completely, and this has a profound effect on the mind. It really does feel like a reboot.
    • newshorts 7y ago
      I did one and was completely angry the entire afternoon after. I think I relaxed so much my body had to rebound to my normal state of frustration and anxiety.
      • joncrane 7y ago
        This can definitely happen after things that are supposed to be relaxing. The key is to plan your day out so you don't do anything stressful right after. (unfortunately you probably still have to drive home afterwards)
      • jeromebaek 7y ago
        this is hilarious. sorry for laughing
      • kempbellt 7y ago
        Laying in a salt bath can also dehydrate you, a lot. I've felt particularly grumpy after a float session a couple of times and was able to remedy this by rehydrating.
    • TurkishPoptart 7y ago
      Do you usually pay by the hour for these services? I'd like to try it but am pretty cost-conscious lately.
• growlist 7y ago
  From my admittedly completely uninformed position, this looks so much like academics searching for some profound insight that will win a Nobel prize (or perhaps just guarantee a tasty stream of research grants) when in reality the truth could be much simpler. Let's look at an example of a group that suffers disproportionately: 'The high level of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in the UK probably reflects the interaction of multiple risk factors, many of which cluster in the black Caribbean community in the UK. Particularly significant factors appear to be the combination of isolation and exclusion, both within society (living in areas of low ethnic density and reduced participation in society) and within the family (family break-up and paternal separation). These factors seem to be more powerful than socioeconomic disadvantage, which is more likely to be a consequence than causal. Racism itself may contribute to social exclusion, increasing the vulnerability to schizophrenia. Biological or genetic susceptibility do not appear to explain high rates of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans. More research is needed about the role of cannabis, particularly in its more potent forms, and whether this contributes to the excess of schizophrenia in black Caribbeans.' Perhaps it's as simple as: people that are born blind are to some extent insulated from risk factors that are conducive of schizophrenia. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/ (just the first article I could pull up on a phenomenon I was aware of)
  • darawk 7y ago
    That would be a reasonable explanation I think if the rates of schizophrenia were merely lower amongst the blind. But what's said here is something quite ab it stronger than that: there are zero known cases of schizophrenia among the congenitally blind. If true, and if not simply a sampling artifact, it implies something pretty profound about the nature of schizophrenia as a disorder that has hitherto not been known.
  • ramraj07 7y ago
    With regards to being skeptical of scientists and their motivations, I m as myopic as they come, but even to me this is a stretch. This is a legitimately interesting observation, something that does make sense given how big a role our visual cortex plays in the brain. You're right that there are risk factors but they just increase and decrease frequencies. If a factor eliminated this condition, there's definitely need to investigate that further to understand why.
• cassowary37 7y ago
  Just queried my health system database and this statement as it pertains to congenital cortical blindness is factually incorrect.
  • eyeundersand 7y ago
    Well, do explain! You can't just say something is incorrect and not elaborate.
    • cassowary37 7y ago
      sorry, intended to elaborate: When I query my health system's deidentified research patient data registry, there are multiple individuals with both a diagnosis of schizophrenia and a diagnosis of congenital (cortical) blindness. One can of course quibble that claims codes are unreliable (ie, these people really have different diagnoses), but my real point is that the entire article is based on a very limited analysis that could readily be refuted with any of the claims/health registry data sets.... also amusing to see this downvoted, people on HN don't like to see their pet theories questioned.
• banads 7y ago
  Marshall Mcluhan hypothesized that schizophrenia may be a consequence of literacy
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    Blind people can read though. Many who are born blind learn to read and type Braille. So it would have to be specifically about visual literacy?
    • banads 7y ago
      Indeed, the written word is a purely visual medium, whereas braille is tactile
      • r4ltman 7y ago
        It's so refreshing to witness a succinct & perceptive thread, the tactility is the key
• kingkawn 7y ago
  It may only be that what we consider to be schizophrenia in a physiologic sense presents entirely different in the blind and is unrecognizable despite being present.
• orblivion 7y ago
  Even if there's some sort of genetic or environmental barrier, you would think that it would happen at least once as a misdiagnosis.
• aj-4 7y ago
  Not sure if this will get buried, but I have an anecdote to support the visual link, which may also help anyone dealing with psychic issues. I was 23, living abroad, feeling totally isolated. One day, I smoked weed which led to an "episode" I guess you could say -- quite literally I was hallucinating that I was in a hospital, while i was in my room. What happened next was weird. I felt extremely depersonalized for weeks and months after, concurrently I developed a swirling blind spot in my right eye. A distortion, so to speak. I saw neurologists and was diagnosed as having an "ocular migraine" however I never had a headache so this didn't add up. Looking back, I believe I was on the brink of becoming schizophrenic - and would have unless what happened next did. So this next part is slightly controversial -- but hear me out Through the several months that would follow I would discover and get obsessed with "RSD" -- a controversial company that teaches guys how to pick up girls. On the surface, it sounds crass and not politically correct, but if you watch their videos "get you in the door" with "game", and teach you topics of incredible value, like "growth mindset", "the power of now" / meditation and believing in abundance. Now WTF does this have to do with the topic at hand? Well, being receptive to these new ideas and absorbing them completely changed my world view. I grew up in an extremely liberal household, and did feel any agency to affect the world around me. Fixed mind set. What these guys gave me was empowerment, agency, a more conservative mindset under which the world "made sense" - there was now a framework for reality, rather than chaos. Subsequently, I was able to learn programming from scratch, start a business, go on to make 6 figures less than a year later. Somewhere along the line the distortion and negative feeling were entirely replaced. I couldn't tell you when. tl;dr: I was close to schizophrenia which manifested itself in visual symptoms, overcame with a mindset change
  • aj-4 7y ago
    Follow up: I know it seems crazy and hate to make it political but there is data to back this up... https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1227343129696702468/photo/1 https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1227343129696702468/photo/1 Try to have an open mind
• williesleg 7y ago
  No person born without a brain voted for Trump.
• drcode 7y ago
  I think the vast majority of schizophrenics have relatively mild symptoms (just as most diseases have more sufferers of a mild version vs. more severe version) and their diagnosis is made primarily because they have a disease that makes it hard for them to be 100% self sufficient, and there needs to be a paper trail in place that documents this. Although the majority of blind people have essentially 100% self sufficiency (maybe with some occasional help from family/friends on some edge cases) I suspect it is relatively easy for a congenitally blind person to get financial and other assistance in the US, since as a society we are fairly supportive of people with obvious congenital disabilities. I could therefore imagine that if there was mild schizophrenia in a congenitally blind person, there'd be far less incentive for the affected person or their family to establish a formal diagnosis to this effect. I wonder if this could be a partial explanation for this surprising statistic (and the lack of evidence for severe schizophrenia could maybe just be due to inadequate sample sizes in the OP study to detect this smaller set of people.)
• kazagistar 7y ago
  What's the chance that any two low probability unrelated conditions happen to have an empty overlap at random?
• pattisapu 7y ago
  I wonder if this points to the problems in the concept of this diagnosis. It has been seriously questioned since World War II as to whether schizophrenia is even a disease. The questioners being mostly from the psychoanalytic school (some psychiatrists), all forgotten, may have something to do with it. In my family more than half of one side of my immediate parent-generation family members have been diagnosed with the disease. Most of them get by with little to no drugs. All of them were diagnosed in connection with divorce proceedings. (We had a misunderstanding. You must be hearing voices.) I could not help but believe, admittedly biased, that this is "health" as a locus of power, blame, and control. In higher education I had close blind friends who achieved high marks and went on to work in Fortune 500 companies, at a level not unlike people I knew before they got hit with a diagnosis. Did they have disagreements with loved ones? Sure. If they had found themselves in a bitter marriage and divorce, would something they said be weaponized into a diagnosis of mental illness? Maybe. At the rate of the general population? Maybe. I don't know. I am not criticizing, accosting, or accusing anybody of anything. Just asking some questions.
• Amygaz 7y ago
  That paper suffers from a small number problem. With simple probability, using their 0.4%, it means that you would expect 0.26 blind child out of 66 to have schizophrenia. So that they see 0 is perfectly reasonable. For the other psychotic illness, that probability is 1.5%. So, out of 66 you would have expected 0.99. Maybe that kid is the lot and will develop apparent symptoms of psychosis in the next few years... In general, an epidemiology study without statistic means that they try to find something but they didn't and couldn't explain why. Now, common epidemiology statistic are going to use a 5% alpha error and a 95% confidence. So, if they were to repeat that experiment a 100 times, 95 times you would observe a value close to the mean. The probability numbers given are maximum, and I would guess that the minimum is zero. So 95% of the time, you would have a value much lower, and closer to zero individuals out 66 for psychosis.
• tidenly 7y ago
  Hearing voices in your head without having sight to confirm if anyone's actually there or not sounds actually terrifying.
• cozzyd 7y ago
  Many antipsychotics are also used as anti-seizure medicines. Seizures are often induced by visual stimuli. The brain is weird.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• ptah 7y ago
  This reminds me of a Sandra bullock movie
• turowicz 7y ago
  Correlation doesn't mean causation.
• caetris1 7y ago
  Schizophrenia is a grouping of symptoms that are generalized to an inability for a person to smoothly track reality. For example, when a person without schizophrenia attempts to track the trajectory of an object, the eyeballs follow a smooth path. When a person with schizophrenia attempts the same, the eyeballs do not follow a smooth path, with the focal point moving chaotically off center from the target. A part of the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia is testing whether or not the eye can smoothly track the movement of an object. This would likely be why it is difficult to diagnose someone that was born blind. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3212396/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3212396/
• 8bitsrule 7y ago
  Just speculating, but being born blind has (in recent history at least) led to a quite sheltered and protected life. For those cases caused by 'chemical imbalances' (genetic factors), 'sheltering' would not help. For cases that occur in response to the external world (environmental factors), the 'sheltering' might have a shielding effect. If so, then the not-blind vulnerable should avoid stress.