Hey, so I read your post the other day, and I thought I'd respond now because I have time.

First, awesome that you're interested in philosophy and especially Stoic philosophy. It interests me a lot as well.

I bought the Ryan Holiday book recently. It's pretty good!

I try to post occasionally on the Crazy Philosophy forum as well. Maybe start a thread on there.

I'm not sure how Stoic philosophy can apply to cope with schizophrenia. The exciting thing for me about Stoicism is that the Stoics believed that mental anxiety was only mentally created, I suppose. So then does that mean that all of our thoughts are just psychological reactions to external events? If that is true, I believe it might be quite liberating. It also is somewhat scary and contrary to my experience to affirm that thoughts are mental representations of external events. One thing that stuck with me from the Stoics when I read them in college was that when you lose a person, for example, you should treat it (mentally) like you just lost an object or something like that. It stuck with me because I understand that people go through quite a lot of grief sometimes, and that's completely natural, and I do not deny that people should go through grief. However, it's also true that we can move forward and become even more strong through experiences like grief. I lost a friend right around that time in which I was studying the Stoics. And when the teacher explained that, I felt a weight lift. Not exactly in that moment; I mean, it wasn't like a scripted moment from a movie or anything, but I felt a lot better after understanding that we lose people like we lose objects. I don't believe that affirming that diminishes the importance of that person we lost; however, it's just a more balanced and rational way of dealing with things, in my view.

Hope that wasn't too much of a ramble, and hope that maybe we could start a discussion on Stoicism or any other topic in the Crazy Philosophy forum.