Schismatics

“ So much they scorn the crowd, that if the throng By chance go right, they purposely go wrong: So schismatics the plain believers quit, And are but damn'd for having too much wit. ”

“ Some people believe that schizophrenia and other psychoses are associated with violence, a perception that is often reinforced by news reports and that contributes to the stigma associated with mental illness. ”

“ Schizophrenia literally means splitting of the mind. It is a group of conditions in which the usual harmonious blending of emotions, intellect, and drive are disorganized into a seeming inactivity and resultant apathy. In the simple type the patient becomes uninterested in his environment and responsibilities. ”

“ It's not a simple case of schizophrenia that our men get. It's a schizophrenic dream. The system blocks all sensory contacts and speeds up the mind. You know how a person dreams only a few seconds before he wakes up and that dream seems days or weeks long? Can you imagine how much a dream can be speeded up and clarified by drugs, how much a dream can be controlled by hypnotic suggestion, how much experience can be—"
Murphy saw that they were on a street, the tall, angular shadows of strange buildings all around them. He heard a shuffling noise and turned to see Antarians crawling toward them. ”

“ The schizophrenic splitting of the psyche which prevents any final summing up of the conflicting and corresponding psychisms, so that the unsuitable impulse can be realised just as much as the right one, and the negative thought substituted for the right one. ”

“ Streams of aching, intolerable anguish running up his arms brought the grim reality home. The pain gripped the very fibers of his being, turning him weak and sick, A deadly fear, the first real fear he had ever known, clutched at his heart. ”

“ Further and wider experience has taught me that the laws of the Freudian psychology of dreams and the [204] theory of the neuroses must be turned towards the obscurities of schizophrenic thinking. The painfulness of the elaborated complex necessitates a censorship of its expression. [171] This principle has to be applied to schizophrenic disturbance in thinking; and until it has been proved that this principle is not applicable to schizophrenia, there is no justification for setting up a new principle; i.e. to postulate that schizophrenic disturbance of ideas is something primary. ”

“ Each psychosis repeats in itself, in tendency form at least, the essential stages in the evolution of consciousness. Every psychosis rises from the pure pleasure-pain as the lowest level of mentality like a wave, and like a wave falls back into it again. Every wave of consciousness, whether it rises slowly or rapidly, whether it subsides gradually or violently, rises from pure subjectivity and comes back to it again. ”

“ To-day we can say that the pathological images dominate the interests of the patient so completely, because they are simply derivatives of the most important questions that used to occupy the person when normal—what in insanity is now an incomprehensible maze of symptoms, used to be fields of vital interest to the former personality. I will cite as an example a patient who was twenty years in the asylum. She was always a puzzle to the physicians, for the absurdity of her delusions exceeded anything that the boldest imagination could create. ”

“ In the first place, we must remember that the mental disorder, if it belongs to the group we are discussing here, is the result of a criminal act, and following in its wake, and that therefore the plea of insanity as an excuse for the deed must manifestly be excluded. But may not this type of reaction furnish us an index to the original personality of the culprit? In other words, should we consider an individual absolutely normal, if, in reaction to some stressful situation, he breaks down mentally and develops a psychosis? ”

“ Schizophrenia is a lifelong, severe psychotic condition. One in 100 people will have at least one episode of schizophrenia during their lifetime. Symptoms include delusions (for example, patients believe that someone is plotting against them) and hallucinations (hearing or seeing things that are not there) . In men, schizophrenia usually starts in the late teens or early 20s; women tend to develop schizophrenia a little later. The causes of schizophrenia include genetic predisposition, obstetric complications, illegal drug use (substance abuse) , and experiencing traumatic life events. ”

“ The ancients of the 20th Century actually looked upon schizophrenia as a disease! Everyone felt it was very shameful to have a schizophrenic person in the family, and, since children lived right with the same parents who had borne them, it was very bad. If you were a schizophrenic child in the 20th Century, you would be locked up behind bars and people would call you—"
Mary blushed and stumbled over the daring word—"crazy." "The ancients locked up strong ego groups right along with weak ones. Today we would lock up those ancient people." ”

“ For some length of time I entertained the idea that paranoia also—or the group of cases belonging to paranoia—is a defense psychosis that is, like hysteria and obsessions it originates from the repression of painful reminiscences, and that the form of its symptoms is determined by the content of the repression. ”

“ From a medical point of view the existence of a psychosis, if associated with a consequent judgment defect, emotional instability, disturbance of volition, intellectual deterioration, delusional and particularly persecutory control, hallucinatory trends, ideas of reference, etc., is of itself quite sufficient to explain criminal acts in the insane. ”

“ The older psychiatry regarded such a complete breakdown, which it labelled acute mania, as the expression of a mere disorderly jumble of disintegrated mental process, but if we look on the whole situation as a means of reacting to the conflict between suppressed instinctive tendencies and controlling forces, it becomes a question whether the acute psychosis, with all its apparent disorder, is not merely the expression of a victory of the instinctive forces running riot after their escape from a lifelong period of suppression and control. ”

“ The theory defines schizophrenia as the incapacity to build and operate long- range models. Long-range models are required not only for the formation of consciousness but also for the prediction of problems that might occur in the future. The schizophrenic method is to solve the problems as they appear, one step at a time. An 'elaborate' form of schizophrenia is called pragmatism.
The normal way of interaction with external reality is to have long-range models associated with the external reality. ”

“ In other types of psychopathic affections the patient is entirely unaware of the whole situation, he is engrossed by the symptoms which he regards as the sum and substance of his trouble; the fear is entirely subconscious. Frights, scares, dread of sickness, instructions associated with fear of the mysterious and unseen, injunctions with fear of punishment or failure in moral standards, enforcement of social customs with dread of failure and degradation,—all go to the cultivation of the fear instinct which in later life becomes manifested as functional psychosis or neurosis. ”

“ The mental activity of the idiot resembles the lower types of animal psychosis. Although as we have already pointed out, the consciousness of the idiot and that of the animal are by no means identical, still both belong to a low type of moment, and as such, they may be put on the same level.
In pathological cases where mental degeneration sets in we also have a similar course. The moment of the higher type becomes degraded and falls to the level of lower and lowermost types, according to the advance of the process of degeneration. ”

“ How many times has it fallen to my share to soothe and counteract the fear instinct of panic-stricken psychopathic patients! A psychogenetic examination of every case of functional psychosis brings one invariably to the fundamental fear instinct.
Conflicts, repressions, imperfections, sex-complexes, sex-aberrations, and others do not produce psychopathic symptoms or neurotic states. It is only when mental states become associated with an exaggerated impulse of self-preservation and an intensified fear instinct that neurosis arises. ”

“ We have seen the mental disorder affecting modern society manifesting itself chiefly in the following forms: Mysticism, which is the expression of the inaptitude for attention, for clear thought and control of the emotions, and has for its cause the weakness of the higher cerebral centres; Ego-mania, which is an effect of faulty transmission by the sensory nerves, of obtuseness in the centres of perception, of aberration of instincts from a craving for sufficiently strong impressions, and of the great predominance of organic sensations over representative consciousness ”

“ When a schism is once spread in a nation, there grows at length a dispute, which are the schismaticks. Without entering on the arguments used by both sides among us, to fix the guilt on each other, it is certain, that in the sense of the law, the schism lies on that side, which opposes itself to the religion of the state. I leave it among the divines to dilate upon the danger of schism, as a spiritual evil ”

“ I want to read about insanity and all that relates to it.”
A curious expression flitted across the doctor's features as The Terror said this.
“Nervous system. Insanity. She has headaches, I know,—all those large-headed, hard-thinking girls do, as a matter of course; but what has set her off about insanity and the nervous system? I wonder if any of her more remote relatives are subject to mental disorder. Bright people very often have crazy relations. ”

“ Based on the above considerations, the normal definition of schizophrenia will be given:
Schizophrenia is a technological problem of the brain. The brain cannot build complex models that fit the external reality, and integrate them in a harmonic/logic way in its general structure of models. The function of building and operating short-range models is maintained.
Many times, schizophrenics on the first level (XS1) can be brilliant in the construction of short-range models.
In short, for humans, schizophrenia is short-range thinking. ”

“ From this we may suspect that in many cases there may be a thought content, although the patient's mind may [105] seem to be a complete blank. It is important to note that when a retrospective account is gained, the delusions are practically always of death or something akin to it, such as being in prison, feeling paralyzed, stiff, and so on.
In the one case of the thirty-six who presented no literal death ideas, the psychosis was characterized essentially by apathy and mild confusion, a larval stupor reaction. ”

“ The series of apparently meaningless events, the so-called madness, have now a meaning; a significance appertains to the delusions, making the patient more human to us. Here is a person like ourselves, beset by universal human problems; no longer merely a cerebral machine thrown out of gear. Hitherto we thought that the insane patient revealed nothing to us by symptoms, save the senseless products of his disordered cerebral cells, but that was academic wisdom reeking of the study. ”

“ Because unless we can somehow separate the function of the insanity from the function of the psychokinesis, we have no choice left, no hope."
Schiml looked up, his eyes wide. "No choice—"
"—but to kill them, every one. To hunt out the strain and wipe it from the face of the Earth so ruthlessly and completely that it can never rise again. And to wipe out with it the first new link in the evolution of Man since the dawn of history."
Slowly Roger Schiml's eyes traveled from Jeff Meyers' form on the bed to Paul Conroe's grave face. "There's no other way?" ”

“ That is a schizoid tendency; the flight from reality into a dream-world peopled by creatures of the imagination. You understand, there is usually a mixture of psychotic conditions, in cases like this. ”

“ The difference I conceive to be that, in cases of insanity, the mind of the patient is principally affected, while the senses, or organic system, offer in vain to the lunatic their decided testimony against the fantasy of a deranged imagination. Perhaps the nature of this collision—between a disturbed imagination and organs of sense possessed of their usual accuracy—cannot be better described than in the embarrassment expressed by an insane patient confined in the Infirmary of Edinburgh. The poor man’s malady had taken a gay turn. ”

“ This difference in type is the first great obstacle which stands in the way of an understanding concerning fundamental conceptions of our psychology. A second objection arises from the circumstance that the constructive method, faithful to itself, must adapt itself to the lines of the delusion. The direction along which the patient develops his morbid thoughts has to be accepted seriously, and followed out to its end; the investigator thus places himself at the standpoint of the psychosis. ”

“ In proportion as the neurotic attacks keep on recurring the formed pathological system is gaining in energy and in ease of manifestation. The psychopathic attacks with their symptoms emerge [148] at an ever diminishing intensity of stimulation. The resistance of healthy normal associations is ever on the decrease until a point is reached when all power of resistance is lost. The conscious and subconscious groups which enter into the psychopathic system, forming the neurosis, get control over the patient’s life, and become an uncontrollable, psychopathic obsession. ”

“ Though there is no unanimity about this among health care professionals, we will distinguish between these two kinds of problems by calling a psychosis a mental illness, as opposed to an emotional disorder. It is a matter not only of degree but of kind. A person who is severely depressed or extremely anxious is usually still able to communicate rationally, and distinguish what is real from what is fantasy or delusion. ”