28 ms·

What Killed My Sister?

390 points by jamesbritt 12y ago

ngcat 12y ago
Is this really... Hacker News? Edit: Note to self: read guidelines first.
- fixermark 12y ago
  "Imagination, suggests Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, is related to the brain’s “noise” (random firings of neurons, or nerve cells), thus generating more associations. Brain scans of people with schizophrenia and their unafflicted family members show mega-amounts of random noise. Brain scans of control subjects (no schizophrenia in the family) do not." Good enough for my first-pass filter. ;)
- icegreentea 12y ago
  What's your particular objection to it? It seems to be a pretty good overview of many of the prime leads and perspectives we have to look at a fairly common and well known disease, especially one with significant cultural/social impact.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  its called flag and move on. However my simplistic bar for determining stories I like are, is it related to programming, new business ideas, or fields I am so out of my league I swap tabs to wikipedia or the like to understand the words I just read. Having worked with a bipolar person I was always interested in what knowing how they separated the two.
- LatencyKills 12y ago
  As someone who has direct experience with schizophrenia I very much enjoyed the article. It is rare to read something on this topic that is anything more than fluff.
- sophacles 12y ago
  From the guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. This article is a nice survey of science around a disease that affects people I care about. Quite cool in that gives me a bunch of search terms, etc. Much better from my perspective[1] than the SSH Kung Fu article that only reiterated things I've been doing for a decade, and were old when I first read some article about "awesome things you can do with ssh". [1] I won't complain about the SSH article though, I think it's needed for the community - see an old comment of mine for why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735386
  - ngcat 12y ago
    I just reread the guidelines. I am OK now.
- DanBC 12y ago
  I always ask when I see questions like this: What do you think should be on HN? Why do you think this specific article should not be on HN?
- sanoli 12y ago
  Look, people who always post "why is this on Hacker News": There's no active moderator here, other than the community. So whatever makes it to the front page is decided by the users. If it is here and people are commenting, then it is where it is supposed to be. I understand longtime users who rant the it used to be more techmical/strict hacker stuff, but the user base has grown, and it seems people on Hacker News like what ends up on the front page of Hacker News. Go figure ;)
  - dang 12y ago
    > There's no active moderator here, other than the community. So whatever makes it to the front page is decided by the users. I'm afraid you're mistaken. HN has always been actively moderated, and what makes it to the front page has always been a combination of upvotes and curation. Also, the call for intellectually diverse subjects has been there as long as HN has been.
    - sanoli 12y ago
      Ok, my mistake, I though it was only moderated in exceptional cases. And about the diversity on HN, just this week somebody here was complaining about the good old days of HN when it was only technical stuff, so I thought that's how it was. Thanks for the clarification!
- jamesbritt 12y ago
  I posted it because I've known a bunch of smart, creative people who happen to have some sort of mental illness. My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a mental illness, or both. It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just crazy.
  - smoyer 12y ago
    I think everyone knows people with a variety of mental health disorders. It seems that we're just now getting comfortable with the idea that we can discuss these problems publicly. I'd also say that since the "nerd" personality types (at least from a Myers-Briggs [1] perspective) tend to be over-represented here, we would probably also find a larger than average percentage of us with Aspberger's Syndrome [2] (now removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" [3] and considered an autism-spectrum disorder). [1] - http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/ http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-bas... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...
- dang 12y ago
  Yes! This post is appropriate for Hacker News. It's a solid article on an intellectually interesting subject—exactly what the guidelines call for. Although the human-interest angle ('what killed my sister') often signals fluff, here it is appropriate and tasteful. As I hope everyone knows, HN has never been only about tech and startups. Intellectual diversity is something we cultivate, and we've been running a little short on it lately. So consider this a general call for (a) more thoughtful pieces on (b) substantive topics from (c) out-of-the-way sources. (Since ngcat has read the guidelines and already turned his or her comment from a bad one into a good one, I think would it would be fair for the rest of us to apply the corrective upvotes policy and get this comment back to par. I'll go first.)
phren0logy 12y ago
Psychiatrist here; glad to see this near the top of HN.Schizophrenia is a serious illness, and often misunderstood as "split personality." It is a constellation of delusions, hallucinations, and scrambled thoughts that is often (though not always) pretty devastating to work, school, relationships, etc. For some reason, because we have no blood test or genetic test for it, the diagnosis is still met with skepticism from many in the public, even though everyone seems to accept the diagnosis of migraine headaches which similarly has no clear-cut lab or imaging findings. What most people don't consider is the change in life span: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216 Life expectancy as about 17 years less for those with the diagnosis, which is worse than most cancers. It's mentioned in the article, but worth repeating.
- andyjdavis 12y ago
  >Life expectancy as about 17 years less for those with the diagnosis That's interesting. Is that due to some sort of biological action of the illness itself or is it due to behaviors that are associated with the illness? To put it another way, is it due to illness itself shortening their life span or due to behaviors like self medicating with alcohol or a higher suicide rate?
  - michaelochurch 12y ago
    Mix of factors. Drugs play a role (especially alcohol and cigarettes) but a surprising percentage of the deaths are non-drug cardiovascular deaths, related to poor diet (many mentally ill people are obese and diabetic by middle age) and high levels of chronic stress. Being low on the socioeconomic totem pole, even for a short time, is pretty dangerous to the heart, brain, and immune system.
    - cypherpunks01 12y ago
      An also shocking percentage: One in ten people who suffer from schizophrenia dies by suicide.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
DanBC 12y ago
People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. There's an assumption that completed suicide is the only cause of death for mental health problems. But people with MH problems suffer weird sub-optionalities in health care, even in England where we have the National Health Service. Young people with a mental health problem will especially suffer from poorly funded treatment, often being sent many miles to get treatment. Off topic: For any Googlers reading this article contained an advert that minimized Google Chrome and opened the App Store. That must be a bug. It is horrible horrible behaviour. Please can you poke the appropriate team and ask them to do something?
- swalkergibson 12y ago
  > People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. My sister fatally overdosed on heroin in January of this year. She suffered close to a decade of a progressively worsening bipolar/depression/substance abuse loop, even after spending over a year in voluntary, in-patient treatment centers. Serious mental illness is no different than cancer. The trouble with mental illness is that it manifests itself in socially undesirable behavior. Drinking, drugs, erratic actions, not a visible tumor hanging off of an organ. The lack of compassion for those people with mental illness is one of the greatest tragedies of our society.
  - orionblastar 12y ago
    I agree, I got schizoaffective disorder. I had too much stress in June 2001 and got sick, had a stroke, ended up in a hospital and got diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It is a rare mental illness that has part schizophrenia and part bipolar in that it has schizophrenic, depressed, manic, and normal cycles lasting about two weeks each. Every time I tried to post about mental illnesses and startups here, I always got downvoted and flagged. I think that the high stress causes some people to develop these serious mental illnesses. Because there is no compassion or empathy for the mentally ill, they have to hide it and go untreated and this is why there are so many suicides in the startup community as well as the banking industry and financial industry with the youth. http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-out-of-work-programmer-down-on-his-luck http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-o... I post about this on Slashdot and all other tech news sites. It seems nobody actually wants to care enough to help out a mentally ill person such as myself work on side projects and startup my own company or even join their startup or even help write a blog. So I had made my own website and tried to do things with it. Nobody still cares enough to help. I was told I would not live to see 40, I am 45 now. I hope to live a long time, but been out of work since 2002 because nobody cares.
paul_f 12y ago
An amazing story. And so sad. It could affect any of us. I don't know how to react other than to be thankful it has not struck anyone in my immediate family. Hopefully we will make progress in better understanding schizophrenia and work towards a better way to manage it.
dpatrick86 12y ago
> Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off. Not entirely accurate: http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=647 http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=6...
- acjohnson55 12y ago
  Fascinating. There's so much we're only just beginning to learn about genetics and epigenetics.
malbs 12y ago
My brother has the illness. Every ounce of self-doubt I have, I worry is the beginning manifestation of Schizophrenia in my own mind. It's not a good place to be - that worry that every time you "hear voices", it's some sort of announcement about your own mental state? The worst for me is mishearing people, or muffled conversations, where I fill in the gaps with extremely negative content, causing a downwards spiral in emotion. I'm sure it's nothing, and I'm perfectly normal though.
- marvin 12y ago
  What you're describing here could just be compulsive thoughts since you're worried about getting schizophrenia. If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious, and you are at an advantage since you are already on the alert. Have you considered seeing a therapist about these thoughts?
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious I think I once read that it's common for schizophrenia to damage the part of the brain that enables you to know anything is wrong, so whoever gets schizophrenia is unlikely to be able to figure out they have a problem. That's why most people with schizophrenia are convinced of their delusions rather than having the first instinct of going to a doctor. But that's hearsay, and my memory is a bit hazy on the topic.
  - frostli 12y ago
    It's hard for people who suffer from the disease to understand what's going on and apparently, they need some help from families and friends. Most people do not know when it's right time to visit a therapist and sadly friends are usually too afraid to say: you need some therapy.
  - malbs 12y ago
    Considered, but not with any great seriousness until probably the last 12 months. I'm taking a wait-and-see. I think it's just due to more responsibilities/commitments and you naturally question your actions/motivations/decisions
tokenadult 12y ago
A very interesting submission. If you like long-form videos of scholarly conferences, there is an amazing video of a public presentation by two identical twin sisters who are discordant for schizophrenia.[1] As you can imagine, the sister who didn't have schizophrenia thrived much better in life, and indeed is a psychiatrist. I am privileged to know Irving Gottesman,[2] one of the world authorities on schizophrenia research (he was the consultant credited by the author of the John Nash biography A Beautiful Mind). He used to be one of the few researchers on the topic who thought that there were genetic influences on schizophrenia, which is now established medical knowledge. In the bad old days of Freudianism, schizophrenia was thought to develop solely from "schizophrenogenic mothers," whose bad parenting caused their children's suffering. It was adoption studies in several countries that conclusively showed that genes matter more than parenting in early childhood in triggering schizophrenia. And yet environmental factors of various kinds plainly matter too, as the cases of monozygotic ("identical") twins not having identical disease course in schizophrenia make undeniably clear. Gottesman and most other researchers on schizophrenia believe that there are a variety of genetic vulnerabilities that people may or may not have that increase risk for schizophrenia, and then stressors in the environment (and it is not excluded that some of those stressors may be purely psychological, influenced by interactions with other people) trigger the expression of full schizophrenia symptoms. This is called the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia, and the same model is believed to a helpful research hypothesis for study of depression and suicide.[3] So if you know someone who suffers from schizophrenia, the compassionate thing to do is to help the person find current medical treatment (which has improved enormously over the course of my adult life) and to cope with day-by-day life stresses. EDIT ADDED AFTER AN HOUR: Several other comments here involve participants who have close family members with related diseases, or who have related diseases themselves. That's rough. I hope Hacker News is always a compassionate community where you can share your experiences and then encounter empathy and helpful advice. We should support one another here. [1] Video hosted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI Transcript of presentation: http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html [2] http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte003 http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte... [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/
deviltreh 12y ago
No one gives a damn about your sister, only self righteous pricks who will still do nothing just "care". Caring, so usefull...
- GalacticDomin8r 12y ago
  At least caring presents a better statistical outcome on action than simply praying.
  - srl 12y ago
    More to the point, it gives a better statistical outcome than not caring.
kimonos 12y ago
Nice story especially that the infos here could be of great help for people who are suffering from the illness.
swalkergibson 12y ago
This hits me particularly hard because I lost my sister to mental illness not but three months ago. Perhaps our society will one day treat those with mental illness the same way we treat those with cancer or ALS, with compassion and love, instead of with insults and shame. I hope that I am alive to see such an enlightened society.
- primitivesuave 12y ago
  My condolences for the loss of your loved one.
Mz 12y ago
Excerpt: Epigenetics—the way genes switch on and off—is another area of intense interest for schizophrenia researchers. Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off. We inherit our genes, but environment strongly affects the switching mechanisms. This was dramatically demonstrated in a study of persons born during the “Dutch Hunger Winter” of 1944–1945—a famine the Nazis created in the Netherlands by cutting off food supplies in retaliation for Dutch participation in the resistance. Infants born during the famine to half-starved mothers, a cohort now turning 70, have higher rates of all kinds of pathology, including schizophrenia. I am super tired today, fall out from my own struggles with getting well in the face of a genetic disorder and doctor pronounced sentence of death. I feel pretty apathetic. I don't know how much is chemical, how much is situational. I get so tired of being treated like a loon by the world. The disease, malnutrition, epigenetics, inflammation -- all that stuff is stuff I have worked on to deal with my own issues. I flail about, unable to find a way to speak of it. I have mostly moved on to trying to figure out how to make money instead of how to help other people. I don't quite know what to say. Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection. Infection promotes malnourishment. Malnourishment does all kinds of wonky things to the brain. I am not having a great week, physically, and it has a track record of impacting my mental functioning and mood. My only known auditory hallucinations are related to an overdose of decongestants. I have no reason to believe schizophrenia runs in my family but the article hits a nerve in some important ways.
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  As somebody who follows this topic very closely (nutrition, inflammation, mental health and autoimmune diseases), I find Terry Wahls' work to be very encouraging. I also find the strong interest by the research communities in inflammation and its causes to be cause for hope. My personal opinion is we've created incredibly toxic environments through a thousand mildly-toxic cuts, and I hope we can make it better sometime soon.
  - Mz 12y ago
    I guess my frustration is I have been resolving my own issues for more than thirteen years. To me, this should not remotely be a hope of "sometime soon." It is something I think we have the information to be resolving in the here and now. I am baffled and frustrated that I get so much hostility for attempting to speak of my own experiences in addressing such issues. Yes, a thousand mildly toxic cuts is certainly a factor in my life, snowballed in part due to a bottleneck in how my cells function. Thank you for commenting.
danieltillett 12y ago
Schizophrenia is such a hard disease to study in the same way that cancer is a hard disease to study - it not a disease with a common cause (like AIDS for example), but a collection symptoms used for diagnosis purposes. At least with cancer we have recognised that it is not one disease (Cancer is thousands of different diseases with thousands of causes), but with schizophrenia we seem to still be looking for the "cause".
zenbowman 12y ago
Has there been any research about the prevalence of schizophrenia in communities with strong social bonds (multigenerational families under one roof, closeness with neighbors, etc) versus modern urban communities (nuclear families or singlehood, relative disconnectedness with the physical world, lots more disembodied communication (Internet, phone, SMS) as opposed to traditional face-to-face communication)? Edit: Turns out there is - http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long I was asking because I definitely notice that if I am in a situation where I am living alone, I am just flat out less happy than when my wife is home. And I'm one of those people who is actually even happier when both my wife and mother-in-law are home, basically, the more people living under my roof, the happier I am. I was wondering whether it was the same for others.
- jnbiche 12y ago
  Actually, schizophrenia appears to be one of the few mental illnesses -- maybe the only one -- to affect all cultures almost equally. Schizophrenics can be found in small African villages, Chinese industrial centers, Tibetan mountain villages, and of course in the West. There's some variation in the respective prevalence of certain symptoms across cultures (catatonia is more common in non-western cultures, for example), but the cluster of symptoms defined as schizophrenia in the DSM has been found in almost every culture known to man (I believe symptoms of schizoprenia have even been found among some people from the Yamomamo indigenous tribe of the Amazon). My knowledge of this comes from graduate and undergrad psychology, neuroscience and global public health courses -- I'm definitely not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But I am somewhat skeptical of the study you posted. I suppose it's possible that prevalence of schizophrenia might be somewhat higher in urban environments, but there's pretty overwhelming evidence that schizophrenia occurs across cultures in similar proportions. There have been many, many published studies on this phenomenon. Here's one: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-sciences/issues-2/vol-6-no-2-july-2012/cross-cultural-variance-of-schizophrenia-in-symptoms-diagnosis-and-treatment/ https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-scien...
  - onnoonno 12y ago
    I am curious: Is there a difference in the problems that show up with regards to the country that people look at?
mleonhard 12y ago
> This parasite messes with the brain, causing rats, for instance, to feel a fierce attraction to its predator, the cat. This is wrong. The parasite causes rats to lose their natural fear of cat smells, not gain an attraction to cats. The author mis-read the research: "Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors; while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors (cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to cat odors than do uninfected controls." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior
- riggins 12y ago
  I'm not sure I'd trust wikipedia as the final word http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php For example, rats infected with the parasite lose their fear of cats, and are even attracted by their scent, making them easy prey The Violinists Thumb, Toxo does even stranger things to rodents. Rodents that have been raised in labs for hundreds of generations and have never seen a predator in their whole lives will still quake in fear and scamper to whatever cranny they can find if exposed to cat urine; it's an instinctual, total hardwired fear. Rats exposed to Toxo have the opposite reaction. They still fear other predators' scents, and they otherwise sleep, mate, navigate mazes, nibble find cheese, and do everything else normally. But these rates adore cat urine, especially male rates. In fact they more than adore it. At the first whiff of cat urine, their amygdalae throb, as if meeting females in heat I haven't read the source research myself but the author isn't the only one drawing the conclusion that toxo-infected rodents are actually attracted to cat urine.
gadr90 12y ago
If you are currently helping someone go through this disease - or suffering from it - all I can say is: hang on there. Dealing with irrationality is one of the most frustating feelings out there. You will get very tired sometimes. You will get overwhelmed. Nevermind. They are having the worst of it. Keep going. You owe it to them to comfort them, no matter how many times. Remember two things: It's not their fault, and it will get better.
NAFV_P 12y ago
Deranged nutter here, glad to see mental illness being discussed in a mature manner on any website. Ignorance of mental illness is widespread, but what is becoming more popular is abusing the terms to describe your own problems. When the term "bipolar" starts to be used to describe someone's mere eccentricity, it indicates awareness of the condition has increased, but the level of ignorance has remained the same. A good example of ignorance related to depression: Many people who suffer from depression have problems with anger. From my experience being diagnosed as a loony correlates with an increase in aggression among your fellow humans that is mainly directed towards yourself. I don't see how subjecting someone with anger management problems to more anger and aggressive behaviour is going to help them. A diagnosis of mental illness is a diagnosis, not an answer to or explanation of a problem, which is usually how it is interpreted. Appropriate action will help the problem, as opposed to thinking that a prescription of escitalopram or fluoxetine will just make the problem fizzle away. One more point: people with mental health problems dislike being talked to and treated like naughty children. That is the quickest way to lose their respect.
trhway 12y ago
>A model 1987 longitudinal study of 269 patients suffering from severe schizophrenia and released from the Vermont State Hospital between 1955 and 1960 found that one-half to two-thirds of them had significantly improved or fully recovered. These were the most hopeless back-ward cases. These patients had benefited from social workers and therapists and employment counselors—an extensive support system continuing over several years and consisting of one essentially unchanging professional team. By the time of the study, a significant number of them had reintegrated into the community. i always suspected something like this. Looking at the obviously mental ill homeless people, i always feel some guilt that we, as a society, are just leaving them behind by not mustering the necessary support and help.
hellbreakslose 12y ago
I think I am having schizophrenia right now !
tim333 12y ago
I found the 2010 Discover Magazine article, I believe referenced in the American Scholar article (the stuff about Torrey and HERV-W), fascinating. A couple of excepts: "One, published by Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of people with schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people." ... "In the past few years, geneticists have pieced together an account of how Perron’s retrovirus entered our DNA. Sixty million years ago, a lemur like animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”" And then our bodies reaction to HERV-W seems to be involved in most schizophrenia. It's odd to think of modern problems like that being down to an ancestor getting a virus millions of generations ago. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus
klunger 12y ago
" Two University of Texas computer scientists programmed a voice-recognizing computer with neural networks and taught this artificial brain simple stories. They then simulated a hyped-up dopaminergic system by reducing its ability to forget or ignore. This unfortunate computer became delusional. It made up wild, disconnected stories, even claiming credit for a terrorist bombing. If computers can go crazy, can they be cured? If computers can be cured, can we be cured?" I would like to know how they drove the computer "crazy" (and how this maps to human neurology, if at all).
Kronopath 12y ago
The link in the article about the neural network developing schizophrenia is broken, leading to the UTexas homepage instead. I've tracked the linked article down to here: https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern/ https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern... More info: http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic-computer.html http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic-comput... Publication abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213 And the full scholarly article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/
orionblastar 12y ago
Sorry I cannot reply to every thread. My condolences to everyone who had a family member or friend die of complications caused by schizophrenia or some other mental illness. I myself have schizoaffective disorder since 2001 which is like schizophrenia and bipolar mixed together and less than 1% of the population gets it and it is very rare and misunderstood. I have lost friends I worked with and went to high school with to mental illnesses and they killed themselves. I've been suicidal myself in my life in the past. But I vowed I would not try suicide ever again and work to improve myself so that one day I can return to work and earning a living. You have my deepest sympathies, empathy, compassion, and love. I really care about mentally ill people and their families and friends, even ones that passed on.

390 points by jamesbritt 12y ago

ngcat 12y ago

Is this really... Hacker News? Edit: Note to self: read guidelines first.

fixermark 12y ago
"Imagination, suggests Princeton molecular biologist Lee M. Silver, is related to the brain’s “noise” (random firings of neurons, or nerve cells), thus generating more associations. Brain scans of people with schizophrenia and their unafflicted family members show mega-amounts of random noise. Brain scans of control subjects (no schizophrenia in the family) do not." Good enough for my first-pass filter. ;)
icegreentea 12y ago
What's your particular objection to it? It seems to be a pretty good overview of many of the prime leads and perspectives we have to look at a fairly common and well known disease, especially one with significant cultural/social impact.
Shivetya 12y ago
its called flag and move on. However my simplistic bar for determining stories I like are, is it related to programming, new business ideas, or fields I am so out of my league I swap tabs to wikipedia or the like to understand the words I just read. Having worked with a bipolar person I was always interested in what knowing how they separated the two.
LatencyKills 12y ago
As someone who has direct experience with schizophrenia I very much enjoyed the article. It is rare to read something on this topic that is anything more than fluff.
sophacles 12y ago
From the guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. This article is a nice survey of science around a disease that affects people I care about. Quite cool in that gives me a bunch of search terms, etc. Much better from my perspective[1] than the SSH Kung Fu article that only reiterated things I've been doing for a decade, and were old when I first read some article about "awesome things you can do with ssh". [1] I won't complain about the SSH article though, I think it's needed for the community - see an old comment of mine for why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3735386
- ngcat 12y ago
  I just reread the guidelines. I am OK now.
DanBC 12y ago
I always ask when I see questions like this: What do you think should be on HN? Why do you think this specific article should not be on HN?
sanoli 12y ago
Look, people who always post "why is this on Hacker News": There's no active moderator here, other than the community. So whatever makes it to the front page is decided by the users. If it is here and people are commenting, then it is where it is supposed to be. I understand longtime users who rant the it used to be more techmical/strict hacker stuff, but the user base has grown, and it seems people on Hacker News like what ends up on the front page of Hacker News. Go figure ;)
- dang 12y ago
  > There's no active moderator here, other than the community. So whatever makes it to the front page is decided by the users. I'm afraid you're mistaken. HN has always been actively moderated, and what makes it to the front page has always been a combination of upvotes and curation. Also, the call for intellectually diverse subjects has been there as long as HN has been.
  - sanoli 12y ago
    Ok, my mistake, I though it was only moderated in exceptional cases. And about the diversity on HN, just this week somebody here was complaining about the good old days of HN when it was only technical stuff, so I thought that's how it was. Thanks for the clarification!
jamesbritt 12y ago
I posted it because I've known a bunch of smart, creative people who happen to have some sort of mental illness. My guess is that many people on HN are in the same boat, or suffer from a mental illness, or both. It frustrates me that it's still often quite hard to have sensible discussion about mental illness. If you have a physical illness people are instantly sympathetic. But you have a metal illness, well, to many people you're just crazy.
- smoyer 12y ago
  I think everyone knows people with a variety of mental health disorders. It seems that we're just now getting comfortable with the idea that we can discuss these problems publicly. I'd also say that since the "nerd" personality types (at least from a Myers-Briggs [1] perspective) tend to be over-represented here, we would probably also find a larger than average percentage of us with Aspberger's Syndrome [2] (now removed from the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" [3] and considered an autism-spectrum disorder). [1] - http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/ http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-bas... [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu...
dang 12y ago
Yes! This post is appropriate for Hacker News. It's a solid article on an intellectually interesting subject—exactly what the guidelines call for. Although the human-interest angle ('what killed my sister') often signals fluff, here it is appropriate and tasteful. As I hope everyone knows, HN has never been only about tech and startups. Intellectual diversity is something we cultivate, and we've been running a little short on it lately. So consider this a general call for (a) more thoughtful pieces on (b) substantive topics from (c) out-of-the-way sources. (Since ngcat has read the guidelines and already turned his or her comment from a bad one into a good one, I think would it would be fair for the rest of us to apply the corrective upvotes policy and get this comment back to par. I'll go first.)

phren0logy 12y ago

Psychiatrist here; glad to see this near the top of HN.Schizophrenia is a serious illness, and often misunderstood as "split personality." It is a constellation of delusions, hallucinations, and scrambled thoughts that is often (though not always) pretty devastating to work, school, relationships, etc. For some reason, because we have no blood test or genetic test for it, the diagnosis is still met with skepticism from many in the public, even though everyone seems to accept the diagnosis of migraine headaches which similarly has no clear-cut lab or imaging findings. What most people don't consider is the change in life span: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21741216 Life expectancy as about 17 years less for those with the diagnosis, which is worse than most cancers. It's mentioned in the article, but worth repeating.

andyjdavis 12y ago
>Life expectancy as about 17 years less for those with the diagnosis That's interesting. Is that due to some sort of biological action of the illness itself or is it due to behaviors that are associated with the illness? To put it another way, is it due to illness itself shortening their life span or due to behaviors like self medicating with alcohol or a higher suicide rate?
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  Mix of factors. Drugs play a role (especially alcohol and cigarettes) but a surprising percentage of the deaths are non-drug cardiovascular deaths, related to poor diet (many mentally ill people are obese and diabetic by middle age) and high levels of chronic stress. Being low on the socioeconomic totem pole, even for a short time, is pretty dangerous to the heart, brain, and immune system.
  - cypherpunks01 12y ago
    An also shocking percentage: One in ten people who suffer from schizophrenia dies by suicide.
sillysaurus3 12y ago

DanBC 12y ago

People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. There's an assumption that completed suicide is the only cause of death for mental health problems. But people with MH problems suffer weird sub-optionalities in health care, even in England where we have the National Health Service. Young people with a mental health problem will especially suffer from poorly funded treatment, often being sent many miles to get treatment. Off topic: For any Googlers reading this article contained an advert that minimized Google Chrome and opened the App Store. That must be a bug. It is horrible horrible behaviour. Please can you poke the appropriate team and ask them to do something?

swalkergibson 12y ago
> People tend to minimize the lethality of mental health problems. My sister fatally overdosed on heroin in January of this year. She suffered close to a decade of a progressively worsening bipolar/depression/substance abuse loop, even after spending over a year in voluntary, in-patient treatment centers. Serious mental illness is no different than cancer. The trouble with mental illness is that it manifests itself in socially undesirable behavior. Drinking, drugs, erratic actions, not a visible tumor hanging off of an organ. The lack of compassion for those people with mental illness is one of the greatest tragedies of our society.
- orionblastar 12y ago
  I agree, I got schizoaffective disorder. I had too much stress in June 2001 and got sick, had a stroke, ended up in a hospital and got diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It is a rare mental illness that has part schizophrenia and part bipolar in that it has schizophrenic, depressed, manic, and normal cycles lasting about two weeks each. Every time I tried to post about mental illnesses and startups here, I always got downvoted and flagged. I think that the high stress causes some people to develop these serious mental illnesses. Because there is no compassion or empathy for the mentally ill, they have to hide it and go untreated and this is why there are so many suicides in the startup community as well as the banking industry and financial industry with the youth. http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://blastar.in/crawfraud/?p=624 http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-out-of-work-programmer-down-on-his-luck http://slashdot.org/submission/3225061/i-am-a-mentally-ill-o... I post about this on Slashdot and all other tech news sites. It seems nobody actually wants to care enough to help out a mentally ill person such as myself work on side projects and startup my own company or even join their startup or even help write a blog. So I had made my own website and tried to do things with it. Nobody still cares enough to help. I was told I would not live to see 40, I am 45 now. I hope to live a long time, but been out of work since 2002 because nobody cares.

paul_f 12y ago

An amazing story. And so sad. It could affect any of us. I don't know how to react other than to be thankful it has not struck anyone in my immediate family. Hopefully we will make progress in better understanding schizophrenia and work towards a better way to manage it.

dpatrick86 12y ago

> Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off. Not entirely accurate: http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=647 http://www.salk.edu/news/pressrelease_details.php?press_id=6...

acjohnson55 12y ago
Fascinating. There's so much we're only just beginning to learn about genetics and epigenetics.

malbs 12y ago

My brother has the illness. Every ounce of self-doubt I have, I worry is the beginning manifestation of Schizophrenia in my own mind. It's not a good place to be - that worry that every time you "hear voices", it's some sort of announcement about your own mental state? The worst for me is mishearing people, or muffled conversations, where I fill in the gaps with extremely negative content, causing a downwards spiral in emotion. I'm sure it's nothing, and I'm perfectly normal though.

marvin 12y ago
What you're describing here could just be compulsive thoughts since you're worried about getting schizophrenia. If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious, and you are at an advantage since you are already on the alert. Have you considered seeing a therapist about these thoughts?
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  If you do get it, it will probably be quite obvious I think I once read that it's common for schizophrenia to damage the part of the brain that enables you to know anything is wrong, so whoever gets schizophrenia is unlikely to be able to figure out they have a problem. That's why most people with schizophrenia are convinced of their delusions rather than having the first instinct of going to a doctor. But that's hearsay, and my memory is a bit hazy on the topic.
- frostli 12y ago
  It's hard for people who suffer from the disease to understand what's going on and apparently, they need some help from families and friends. Most people do not know when it's right time to visit a therapist and sadly friends are usually too afraid to say: you need some therapy.
- malbs 12y ago
  Considered, but not with any great seriousness until probably the last 12 months. I'm taking a wait-and-see. I think it's just due to more responsibilities/commitments and you naturally question your actions/motivations/decisions

tokenadult 12y ago

A very interesting submission. If you like long-form videos of scholarly conferences, there is an amazing video of a public presentation by two identical twin sisters who are discordant for schizophrenia.[1] As you can imagine, the sister who didn't have schizophrenia thrived much better in life, and indeed is a psychiatrist. I am privileged to know Irving Gottesman,[2] one of the world authorities on schizophrenia research (he was the consultant credited by the author of the John Nash biography A Beautiful Mind). He used to be one of the few researchers on the topic who thought that there were genetic influences on schizophrenia, which is now established medical knowledge. In the bad old days of Freudianism, schizophrenia was thought to develop solely from "schizophrenogenic mothers," whose bad parenting caused their children's suffering. It was adoption studies in several countries that conclusively showed that genes matter more than parenting in early childhood in triggering schizophrenia. And yet environmental factors of various kinds plainly matter too, as the cases of monozygotic ("identical") twins not having identical disease course in schizophrenia make undeniably clear. Gottesman and most other researchers on schizophrenia believe that there are a variety of genetic vulnerabilities that people may or may not have that increase risk for schizophrenia, and then stressors in the environment (and it is not excluded that some of those stressors may be purely psychological, influenced by interactions with other people) trigger the expression of full schizophrenia symptoms. This is called the diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia, and the same model is believed to a helpful research hypothesis for study of depression and suicide.[3] So if you know someone who suffers from schizophrenia, the compassionate thing to do is to help the person find current medical treatment (which has improved enormously over the course of my adult life) and to cope with day-by-day life stresses. EDIT ADDED AFTER AN HOUR: Several other comments here involve participants who have close family members with related diseases, or who have related diseases themselves. That's rough. I hope Hacker News is always a compassionate community where you can share your experiences and then encounter empathy and helpful advice. We should support one another here. [1] Video hosted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzDPlktZrGI Transcript of presentation: http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html http://www.virginia.edu/uvanewsmakers/newsmakers/spiro.html [2] http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte003 http://www.psych.umn.edu/people/facultyprofile.php?UID=gotte... [3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK107203/

deviltreh 12y ago

No one gives a damn about your sister, only self righteous pricks who will still do nothing just "care". Caring, so usefull...

GalacticDomin8r 12y ago
At least caring presents a better statistical outcome on action than simply praying.
- srl 12y ago
  More to the point, it gives a better statistical outcome than not caring.

kimonos 12y ago

Nice story especially that the infos here could be of great help for people who are suffering from the illness.

swalkergibson 12y ago

This hits me particularly hard because I lost my sister to mental illness not but three months ago. Perhaps our society will one day treat those with mental illness the same way we treat those with cancer or ALS, with compassion and love, instead of with insults and shame. I hope that I am alive to see such an enlightened society.

primitivesuave 12y ago
My condolences for the loss of your loved one.

Mz 12y ago

Excerpt: Epigenetics—the way genes switch on and off—is another area of intense interest for schizophrenia researchers. Every nonreproductive cell in our body contains our entire genome, and in every cell, some genes are properly switched on and others off. We inherit our genes, but environment strongly affects the switching mechanisms. This was dramatically demonstrated in a study of persons born during the “Dutch Hunger Winter” of 1944–1945—a famine the Nazis created in the Netherlands by cutting off food supplies in retaliation for Dutch participation in the resistance. Infants born during the famine to half-starved mothers, a cohort now turning 70, have higher rates of all kinds of pathology, including schizophrenia. I am super tired today, fall out from my own struggles with getting well in the face of a genetic disorder and doctor pronounced sentence of death. I feel pretty apathetic. I don't know how much is chemical, how much is situational. I get so tired of being treated like a loon by the world. The disease, malnutrition, epigenetics, inflammation -- all that stuff is stuff I have worked on to deal with my own issues. I flail about, unable to find a way to speak of it. I have mostly moved on to trying to figure out how to make money instead of how to help other people. I don't quite know what to say. Inflammation is rooted in acidity and promotes infection. Infection promotes malnourishment. Malnourishment does all kinds of wonky things to the brain. I am not having a great week, physically, and it has a track record of impacting my mental functioning and mood. My only known auditory hallucinations are related to an overdose of decongestants. I have no reason to believe schizophrenia runs in my family but the article hits a nerve in some important ways.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago
As somebody who follows this topic very closely (nutrition, inflammation, mental health and autoimmune diseases), I find Terry Wahls' work to be very encouraging. I also find the strong interest by the research communities in inflammation and its causes to be cause for hope. My personal opinion is we've created incredibly toxic environments through a thousand mildly-toxic cuts, and I hope we can make it better sometime soon.
- Mz 12y ago
  I guess my frustration is I have been resolving my own issues for more than thirteen years. To me, this should not remotely be a hope of "sometime soon." It is something I think we have the information to be resolving in the here and now. I am baffled and frustrated that I get so much hostility for attempting to speak of my own experiences in addressing such issues. Yes, a thousand mildly toxic cuts is certainly a factor in my life, snowballed in part due to a bottleneck in how my cells function. Thank you for commenting.

danieltillett 12y ago

Schizophrenia is such a hard disease to study in the same way that cancer is a hard disease to study - it not a disease with a common cause (like AIDS for example), but a collection symptoms used for diagnosis purposes. At least with cancer we have recognised that it is not one disease (Cancer is thousands of different diseases with thousands of causes), but with schizophrenia we seem to still be looking for the "cause".

zenbowman 12y ago

Has there been any research about the prevalence of schizophrenia in communities with strong social bonds (multigenerational families under one roof, closeness with neighbors, etc) versus modern urban communities (nuclear families or singlehood, relative disconnectedness with the physical world, lots more disembodied communication (Internet, phone, SMS) as opposed to traditional face-to-face communication)? Edit: Turns out there is - http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/184/4/287.long I was asking because I definitely notice that if I am in a situation where I am living alone, I am just flat out less happy than when my wife is home. And I'm one of those people who is actually even happier when both my wife and mother-in-law are home, basically, the more people living under my roof, the happier I am. I was wondering whether it was the same for others.

jnbiche 12y ago
Actually, schizophrenia appears to be one of the few mental illnesses -- maybe the only one -- to affect all cultures almost equally. Schizophrenics can be found in small African villages, Chinese industrial centers, Tibetan mountain villages, and of course in the West. There's some variation in the respective prevalence of certain symptoms across cultures (catatonia is more common in non-western cultures, for example), but the cluster of symptoms defined as schizophrenia in the DSM has been found in almost every culture known to man (I believe symptoms of schizoprenia have even been found among some people from the Yamomamo indigenous tribe of the Amazon). My knowledge of this comes from graduate and undergrad psychology, neuroscience and global public health courses -- I'm definitely not a psychologist or psychiatrist. But I am somewhat skeptical of the study you posted. I suppose it's possible that prevalence of schizophrenia might be somewhat higher in urban environments, but there's pretty overwhelming evidence that schizophrenia occurs across cultures in similar proportions. There have been many, many published studies on this phenomenon. Here's one: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-sciences/issues-2/vol-6-no-2-july-2012/cross-cultural-variance-of-schizophrenia-in-symptoms-diagnosis-and-treatment/ https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/journal-of-health-scien...
- onnoonno 12y ago
  I am curious: Is there a difference in the problems that show up with regards to the country that people look at?

mleonhard 12y ago

> This parasite messes with the brain, causing rats, for instance, to feel a fierce attraction to its predator, the cat. This is wrong. The parasite causes rats to lose their natural fear of cat smells, not gain an attraction to cats. The author mis-read the research: "Infected rodents show a reduction in their innate aversion to cat odors; while uninfected mice and rats will generally avoid areas marked with cat urine or with cat body odor, this avoidance is reduced or eliminated in infected animals. Moreover, some evidence suggests this loss of aversion may be specific to feline odors: when given a choice between two predator odors (cat or mink), infected rodents show a significantly stronger preference to cat odors than do uninfected controls." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Rodent_behavior

riggins 12y ago
I'm not sure I'd trust wikipedia as the final word http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/253802.php For example, rats infected with the parasite lose their fear of cats, and are even attracted by their scent, making them easy prey The Violinists Thumb, Toxo does even stranger things to rodents. Rodents that have been raised in labs for hundreds of generations and have never seen a predator in their whole lives will still quake in fear and scamper to whatever cranny they can find if exposed to cat urine; it's an instinctual, total hardwired fear. Rats exposed to Toxo have the opposite reaction. They still fear other predators' scents, and they otherwise sleep, mate, navigate mazes, nibble find cheese, and do everything else normally. But these rates adore cat urine, especially male rates. In fact they more than adore it. At the first whiff of cat urine, their amygdalae throb, as if meeting females in heat I haven't read the source research myself but the author isn't the only one drawing the conclusion that toxo-infected rodents are actually attracted to cat urine.

gadr90 12y ago

If you are currently helping someone go through this disease - or suffering from it - all I can say is: hang on there. Dealing with irrationality is one of the most frustating feelings out there. You will get very tired sometimes. You will get overwhelmed. Nevermind. They are having the worst of it. Keep going. You owe it to them to comfort them, no matter how many times. Remember two things: It's not their fault, and it will get better.

NAFV_P 12y ago

Deranged nutter here, glad to see mental illness being discussed in a mature manner on any website. Ignorance of mental illness is widespread, but what is becoming more popular is abusing the terms to describe your own problems. When the term "bipolar" starts to be used to describe someone's mere eccentricity, it indicates awareness of the condition has increased, but the level of ignorance has remained the same. A good example of ignorance related to depression: Many people who suffer from depression have problems with anger. From my experience being diagnosed as a loony correlates with an increase in aggression among your fellow humans that is mainly directed towards yourself. I don't see how subjecting someone with anger management problems to more anger and aggressive behaviour is going to help them. A diagnosis of mental illness is a diagnosis, not an answer to or explanation of a problem, which is usually how it is interpreted. Appropriate action will help the problem, as opposed to thinking that a prescription of escitalopram or fluoxetine will just make the problem fizzle away. One more point: people with mental health problems dislike being talked to and treated like naughty children. That is the quickest way to lose their respect.

trhway 12y ago

>A model 1987 longitudinal study of 269 patients suffering from severe schizophrenia and released from the Vermont State Hospital between 1955 and 1960 found that one-half to two-thirds of them had significantly improved or fully recovered. These were the most hopeless back-ward cases. These patients had benefited from social workers and therapists and employment counselors—an extensive support system continuing over several years and consisting of one essentially unchanging professional team. By the time of the study, a significant number of them had reintegrated into the community. i always suspected something like this. Looking at the obviously mental ill homeless people, i always feel some guilt that we, as a society, are just leaving them behind by not mustering the necessary support and help.

hellbreakslose 12y ago

I think I am having schizophrenia right now !

tim333 12y ago

I found the 2010 Discover Magazine article, I believe referenced in the American Scholar article (the stuff about Torrey and HERV-W), fascinating. A couple of excepts: "One, published by Perron in 2008, found HERV-W in the blood of 49 percent of people with schizophrenia, compared with just 4 percent of healthy people." ... "In the past few years, geneticists have pieced together an account of how Perron’s retrovirus entered our DNA. Sixty million years ago, a lemur like animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”" And then our bodies reaction to HERV-W seems to be involved in most schizophrenia. It's odd to think of modern problems like that being down to an ancestor getting a virus millions of generations ago. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus

klunger 12y ago

" Two University of Texas computer scientists programmed a voice-recognizing computer with neural networks and taught this artificial brain simple stories. They then simulated a hyped-up dopaminergic system by reducing its ability to forget or ignore. This unfortunate computer became delusional. It made up wild, disconnected stories, even claiming credit for a terrorist bombing. If computers can go crazy, can they be cured? If computers can be cured, can we be cured?" I would like to know how they drove the computer "crazy" (and how this maps to human neurology, if at all).

Kronopath 12y ago

The link in the article about the neural network developing schizophrenia is broken, leading to the UTexas homepage instead. I've tracked the linked article down to here: https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern/ https://www.utexas.edu/news/2011/05/05/schizophrenia_discern... More info: http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic-computer.html http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2011/04/schizophrenic-comput... Publication abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21397213 And the full scholarly article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3105006/

orionblastar 12y ago

Sorry I cannot reply to every thread. My condolences to everyone who had a family member or friend die of complications caused by schizophrenia or some other mental illness. I myself have schizoaffective disorder since 2001 which is like schizophrenia and bipolar mixed together and less than 1% of the population gets it and it is very rare and misunderstood. I have lost friends I worked with and went to high school with to mental illnesses and they killed themselves. I've been suicidal myself in my life in the past. But I vowed I would not try suicide ever again and work to improve myself so that one day I can return to work and earning a living. You have my deepest sympathies, empathy, compassion, and love. I really care about mentally ill people and their families and friends, even ones that passed on.