[Spliff]

My mom has a friend whose son has schizophrenia. It's severe enough that he hears threatening voices and has terrifying hallucinations when he's off his meds. She was wondering why the hallucinations and voices are always dark, threatening, violent, evil, etc? Do any schizophrenics have pleasant hallucinations or hear sweet angelic voices?

[Socially Awkward Solo]

The fact that there are 2 of these threads is ironic.

At any rate it might be as simple as it releases chemicals that make you paranoid or it effects certain parts of the brain that would cause that.

[Spliff]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
The fact that there are 2 of these threads is ironic.

Where is the other thread?

[Socially Awkward Solo]

Originally posted by Spliff:
Where is the other thread?

It is gone now which makes things even creepier.

[SpaceMonkey]

This site has a ton of info on schizophrenia. If you click on "more" under "Signs and Symptoms," there is a description of possible causes for some of the disease's symptoms. For the most part, there aren't any complete answers yet. Some of the things that the site mentions researchers are investigating are chemical inteference with neurotransmitters and structural anomalies in the brains of schizophrenia patients.

[malvolio]

Delusions may take on different themes. For example, patients suffering from paranoid-type symptoms – roughly one-third of people with schizophrenia – often have delusions of persecution, or false and irrational beliefs that they are being cheated, harassed, poisoned, or conspired against. These patients may believe that they, or a member of the family or someone close to them, are the focus of this persecution. In addition, delusions of grandeur, in which a person may believe he or she is a famous or important figure, may occur in schizophrenia.

(emphasis mine)

Google is your friend.

[Socially Awkward Solo]

I hear it gets better with age and even goes away.

[malvolio]

Originally posted by Socially Awkward Solo:
I hear it gets better with age and even goes away.

Only in 10 to 20 % of cases.
I have a cousin who developed schizophrenia. She used to be a typical, lively teenager. Then the illness struck, and she would send my parents long, bizarre letters begging them to let her come and live with them. She constantly battled her own parents because they insisted that she take her meds, and she didn't want to.

[Spliff]

Originally posted by malvolio:
Google is your friend.

Okay, so there are various delusional themes, but are any of them positive or pleasurable? If schizophrenia is a mental disorder—affecting the brain—why are the effects usually negative? Why can't voices they hear tell them something positive, helpful, or reassuring?

[malvolio]

The delusions of grandeur that were mentioned in the passage sound like they could be enjoyable.

[von Wrangell]

Originally posted by Spliff:
Okay, so there are various delusional themes, but are any of them positive or pleasurable? If schizophrenia is a mental disorder—affecting the brain—why are the effects usually negative? Why can't voices they hear tell them something positive, helpful, or reassuring?

When the voices do that it doesn't affect the life of the "patient" in the same adverse manner which makes the patient not seek help. Hence the documented schizophrenia is mostly the "dark" side of it.

[wolfen]

Originally posted by Spliff:
Okay, so there are various delusional themes, but are any of them positive or pleasurable? If schizophrenia is a mental disorder—affecting the brain—why are the effects usually negative? Why can't voices they hear tell them something positive, helpful, or reassuring?

I observed multiple interviews and research with schizophrenics.I'm going on a limb on this one, but here's my take...

The brain is largely geared for survival. Believe it or not, everyone has a bunch of "paranoia," and fight or flight undercurrents in their thinking. With our rational mind, we twist it into jokes, analyses, and various things that are watered-down, socially acceptable manifestations of fear, anxiety, etc. The hyper-socialization of our culture only occurred in the past 200 years or so, creating a sort of social conditioning that helped us "suppress" the primal brain's impulses.

But the schizophrenic doesn't have the luxury of twisting things that way. The voices and images they experience speak directly to the fearful/anxious primal aspect of the brain. Those who undergo heavy therapy and training learn to deal with this but it is always a struggle (a la, A Beautiful Mind).

The odd thing is how intelligence helps you cope, but doesn't make it go away. So, for example, I watched an interview wherein a very intelligent guy was convinced the CIA was secretly replacing citizens' genitalia . "I've learned that I can't tell other people about this," he says with a smile, "because they freak out and think I'm crazy. So I keep it to myself."

The paranoia is still there, he just learned how to cope with it. I argue that mankind, in general, is not much different in that regard.

[deej5871]

Originally posted by malvolio:
She constantly battled her own parents because they insisted that she take her meds, and she didn't want to.

Why do you always hear about people not wanting to take their meds (not necessarily your cousin, just in general)? It seems to me that once someone starts taking they would lose their symptoms, making them a rational person. As a rational person, they would want to stay that way and so they would keep taking their meds and have no reason not to. So why do you hear about it all the time? The only thing I can think of is side effects but I can't think of any possible side effect that would be bad enough that I'd want to start seeing delusions.

[Ghoser777]

I don't think people like needing meds to feel normal.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Spliff:
My mom has a friend whose son has schizophrenia. It's severe enough that he hears threatening voices and has terrifying hallucinations when he's off his meds. She was wondering why the hallucinations and voices are always dark, threatening, violent, evil, etc? Do any schizophrenics have pleasant hallucinations or hear sweet angelic voices?

I imagine the phenomenon exists, but I would doubt that people with it would report it very often. Pleasant voices tend to make people feel good, and few people would want to lose that. They might not even recognize it as an unusual situation. Many artists have talked about their "muses", sometimes in terms of actual hearing and such. I wonder if this might be just a more positive manifestation of the same thing?

[malvolio]

Originally posted by Ghoser777:
I don't think people like needing meds to feel normal.

It's not just that. There are significant side effects to anti-psychotic drugs, ranging from unpleasant to debilitating.
And there's a kind of Catch-22 at work as well. When a person is on their meds and rational, they start to think that they are no longer schizophrenic and can therefore stop taking their meds.

[wolfen]

If I had to choose between A) migraine headaches and organ damage with meds or B) seeing hallucinations...I think I'd AT THE VERY LEAST take some regular vacations from the meds.

[theolein]

I had an extremely bad mental breakdown in 1990 and was very, very close to being schizophrenic (according to the psychiatrist). It took years to get better. I was lucky in that I didn't hear voices or have halucinations, but the inside of my head was like one continuous electrical storm. It was extremely painful and, for a number of years, I had the feeling that it would never get better and was more than once on the point of suicide, something which a lot of schizophrenics go through when they can't take it any more.

Ironically, some years later, I helped out in an occupational therapy woodwork shop for mentally ill and retarded people, and there I saw many who were deeply schizophrenic and had been for years, all of them on some form of medication. Most of them would never be able to live outside a mental facility again. While I won't go into details, for ethical reasons, I will say that reading their dossiers brought a few common threads to the fore.

Most of them had had very bad childhoods, not always in the form of abuse, but often in the form of almost total neglect. Now, obviously not all people who have had bad childhoods turn schizophrenic, so it might simply be that some people are more likely, either from some kind of genetic thing or inherited chemical imbalance, to be liable to suffer from schizophrenia. I suppose such deficiencies might be bad enough in some people so that they are almost predestined to suffer from the disease no matter what background they have.

The reasons that the fantasies of schizophrenics are usually so dark is most probably, in my experience, because schizophrenia is extremely frightening and painful for most sufferers and, being a disease where the fantasy goes haywire, is more likely to bring up fantasies which are a product of the fear and pain, or vice versa. I have a personal theory that, in many cases, unresolved experiences also tend to resurface in the form of dark imagery and sounds in people's fantasies later in life.

[el chupacabra]

Originally posted by theolein:

The reasons that the fantasies of schizophrenics are usually so dark is most probably, in my experience, because schizophrenia is extremely frightening and painful for most sufferers and, being a disease where the fantasy goes haywire, is more likely to bring up fantasies which are a product of the fear and pain, or vice versa. I have a personal theory that, in many cases, unresolved experiences also tend to resurface in the form of dark imagery and sounds in people's fantasies later in life.

This sounds very true. I happen to be studying this kind of stuff right now here is maybe a way to think of it to answer the spliff. People latch onto the most negative aspects of their life. These they focus on and amplify unkowningly in their subconscience. At times when overwelmed this will result in a disorder. So you see the bad voices came first, then the schizophrenia (which is based on the trauma of one's life). If it were the other way around then maybe schizos could have good things they hear. In an extreme case people will suppress negative thoughts/emotions/unatanable-desires into multiple personalities (sort of) in order to protect the main one or allow it to maintain its current state. The suppression results in alter egos. Somtimes Happens when the voices take over to achieve what they haven't been able to achieve.

of course there is no real rules for psychology.

[wolfen]

Originally posted by el chupacabra:
This sounds very true. I happen to be studying this kind of stuff right now here is maybe a way to think of it to answer the spliff. People latch onto the most negative aspects of their life. These they focus on and amplify unkowningly in their subconscience. At times when overwelmed this will result in a disorder. So you see the bad voices came first, then the schizophrenia (which is based on the trauma of one's life). If it were the other way around then maybe schizos could have good things they hear. In an extreme case people will suppress negative thoughts/emotions/unatanable-desires into multiple personalities (sort of) in order to protect the main one or allow it to maintain its current state. The suppression results in alter egos. Somtimes Happens when the voices take over to achieve what they haven't been able to achieve.

of course there is no real rules for psychology.

From the research and education I have on this subject maltreatment and environmental factors make schizophrenia worse. They do not cause schizophrenia.

There are other disorders (called schizotypal) that have less dramatic features, but contain similar aspects of disorientation, cognitive dissonance, voices, etc. But it's important to understand that all schizoid problems are not created equal.