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I have always wondered why if someone with good logical reasoning skills got schizophrenia they clould not reason their way to seeing their delusions for what t

I have always wondered why if someone with good logical reasoning skills got schizophrenia they clould not reason their way to seeing their delusions for what they are. For example (real example I heard) if I think everyone who looks at my eyes is from the government and tracking me on my walk to the park- there simply is no agency that could field and coordinate that many undercover agents nor surreptitiously replace all normal people on my route. It seems to me dellusions must involve both imagination and somehow disable logical reasoning for an intelligent person.

colordrops 5y ago
That's me. I had all the paranoid delusions mentioned in this thread and logically walked myself out of them. I sometimes have snaps where I let my guard down and get paranoid again but they have been easier and easier to avoid with age and responsibility.
- thevagrant 5y ago
  Reading your comments, I can relate. I never found an answer but ptsd, derealisation and schizophrenia all feel like they overlap or fit on a spectrum. Perhaps some of us don't quite have the ingredients to completely detach from reality and can manage our way around symptoms. A lot of the time I think I'm just too imaginative. If I'm quite upbeat and have good happy mood (not so common) then symptoms are much less likely to occur, so it could also be a depressive state of sorts.
mjreacher 5y ago
I agree, two famous mathematicians who had severe mental illnesses come to mind, Kurt Gödel and John Nash. In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses), see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-genius-mystery https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses) I don't think it's real. I attribute it to a selection effect. Of all the people with mental illnesses it's necessarily the particularly smart or talented ones that you hear about. The more of a handicap something is, the more extreme other abilities have to be to cancel out and produce a notable accomplishment or even an average, comfortable life. People who aren't brilliant in some way, aren't going to be noticed, and have little to gain by sharing their experiences. I used to volunteer for a mental health advocacy non-profit, and they had a poster listing all the famous people that supposedly had some sort of mental illness. I didn't find it inspirational, because I suspected on the one hand it was kind of reaching for many of them, and on the other, it had the unintentional implication to me, that if you aren't Einstein you can only pretend to be, or be nothing. Society fixates on geniuses with mental illness for another reason - they are likely to be able to describe their inner life much better than the average person. But they might not be representative.
kayodelycaon 5y ago
In my own experience, reality and imagination merged. Any logical reasoning I had was dealing with massively corrupted input. I was overwhelmed trying to separate want was real and what was not real. The only way I could tell what was real and what wasn’t was by going off what I remembered to be true about the world. Well, part of memory retrieval got compromised too. There are things I knew to be “true” about the world that didn’t match my mental model of how the world actually worked. That model was all that was left in the end. The only reason I came back was the episode ended. Even then, I thought the experience was a normal human response to stress.
perl4ever 5y ago
>there simply is no agency that could field and coordinate that many undercover agents nor surreptitiously replace all normal people on my route It's entirely possible that a person can reason like that and reject some theories, and it may even be comforting to see and feel things that are easily dismissed. However, paranoia does not necessarily involve things that are so clearly absurd, even to a healthy observer. You're talking about one end of a distribution, even for a given person, and an almost infinite number of possibilities are in a gray area. It's possible to observe patterns of coincidence without a particular theory, and rejecting a theory or switching to a different one doesn't make observations go away. Those observations can be mistaken or selective, but that's a separate issue.

colordrops 5y ago

That's me. I had all the paranoid delusions mentioned in this thread and logically walked myself out of them. I sometimes have snaps where I let my guard down and get paranoid again but they have been easier and easier to avoid with age and responsibility.

thevagrant 5y ago
Reading your comments, I can relate. I never found an answer but ptsd, derealisation and schizophrenia all feel like they overlap or fit on a spectrum. Perhaps some of us don't quite have the ingredients to completely detach from reality and can manage our way around symptoms. A lot of the time I think I'm just too imaginative. If I'm quite upbeat and have good happy mood (not so common) then symptoms are much less likely to occur, so it could also be a depressive state of sorts.

mjreacher 5y ago

I agree, two famous mathematicians who had severe mental illnesses come to mind, Kurt Gödel and John Nash. In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses), see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-genius-mystery https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...

perl4ever 5y ago
>In fact there seems to be a link between the two (intelligence and predisposition to mental illnesses) I don't think it's real. I attribute it to a selection effect. Of all the people with mental illnesses it's necessarily the particularly smart or talented ones that you hear about. The more of a handicap something is, the more extreme other abilities have to be to cancel out and produce a notable accomplishment or even an average, comfortable life. People who aren't brilliant in some way, aren't going to be noticed, and have little to gain by sharing their experiences. I used to volunteer for a mental health advocacy non-profit, and they had a poster listing all the famous people that supposedly had some sort of mental illness. I didn't find it inspirational, because I suspected on the one hand it was kind of reaching for many of them, and on the other, it had the unintentional implication to me, that if you aren't Einstein you can only pretend to be, or be nothing. Society fixates on geniuses with mental illness for another reason - they are likely to be able to describe their inner life much better than the average person. But they might not be representative.

kayodelycaon 5y ago

In my own experience, reality and imagination merged. Any logical reasoning I had was dealing with massively corrupted input. I was overwhelmed trying to separate want was real and what was not real. The only way I could tell what was real and what wasn’t was by going off what I remembered to be true about the world. Well, part of memory retrieval got compromised too. There are things I knew to be “true” about the world that didn’t match my mental model of how the world actually worked. That model was all that was left in the end. The only reason I came back was the episode ended. Even then, I thought the experience was a normal human response to stress.

perl4ever 5y ago

>there simply is no agency that could field and coordinate that many undercover agents nor surreptitiously replace all normal people on my route It's entirely possible that a person can reason like that and reject some theories, and it may even be comforting to see and feel things that are easily dismissed. However, paranoia does not necessarily involve things that are so clearly absurd, even to a healthy observer. You're talking about one end of a distribution, even for a given person, and an almost infinite number of possibilities are in a gray area. It's possible to observe patterns of coincidence without a particular theory, and rejecting a theory or switching to a different one doesn't make observations go away. Those observations can be mistaken or selective, but that's a separate issue.