[precaryous]

Wow, this may change how doctors/therapists treat schizophrenia:

Published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, also.

Schizophrenia Revealed To Be 8 Genetically Distinct Disorders | IFLScience Schizophrenia Revealed To Be 8 Genetically Distinct Disorders | IFLScience

[kaliope]

interesting...thanks for the info.......

[StressedMess]

My mother was schizophrenic. I was always terrified I would have it. And in deep denial when I found myself in the grip of major depressive disorder, because there was no way I was Ill like mama.

Maybe this will pioneer a new treatment or two. Hopeful. . .

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[Partless]

Thank you for sharing. It would be nice if therapy worked for schizophrenia too. A lot of times it's only medication.

[StressedMess]

Therapy with my mom was a joke. "How are you doing?" "Fine, thank you, no issues." Then silence until the end. After all, there was nothing wrong with her, it was all the rest of us who had problems. So sad!

Sorry I tend to go off on a tangent about this one, because everything she saw and heard and believed was 100% real to her, and there was no convincing her otherwise. In her defense, she had a lot of scary inpatient treatments in the 50's and 60's that left her terrified of the medical profession.

It's hard to blame the disease and not "the system" but I know you can't force people to be med-compliant or seek help when they trust no-one.

I really hate and fear schizophrenia, it robbed me of my childhood and my mama.

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[A18793715]

Maybe that's why no meds do anything for me. I've been on 95% of all antipsychotics. Old and new.

[StressedMess]

She was on quite the cocktail after a proper diagnosis. Anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic, something for OCD to control her ruminations, and something for sleep. I remember Remeron and Zanax and amitriptylene and many others. She still had hallucinations but very few hospitalizations for catatonic states after that.

Sorry to hear you haven't found the correct combination yet. Good luck to you!

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[The_little_didgee]

Interesting. I read the article and did not really understand it. I'll have to do some more in-depth reading.

I never had psychotherapy for psychosis. Medications has always the treatment of choice. Therapy came later once the distorted thinking cleared. It focused on stress management, self-care and social skills.

[lostwonder]

My Pdoc says that I have some psychosis. I've been on anti-phycotitcs in the past, and found them to be of little help. I've been off meds for five years now and am in collage with a sciences major and a 4.0. In therapy and still hear my voices. I have a prior dxing of schizophrenia, but my current provider disagrees.

[StressedMess]

I have never heard voices or seen things other people could not see. I watched my mother wearing tin-foil hats and hanging blankets over the tv screen "they" were watching us through, then putting all of us on tv. She took us as tiny children to the FBI office to report someone was gassing us to death in our home. She would swerve into oncoming traffic to run certain color cars off the road, as depending on what side of the road and what color the car secret messages were being relayed. She talked to her delusions, carried on entire one-sided conversations for hours on end, laughed uproariously and cried despondently. In her later years her disease took on a very religious aspect, where she saw angels and demons, had a pet-name for God and talked baby-talk to him most of the time. She would scream uncontrollably at all hours of the day and night, describing the things she was seeing and hearing, the threats against us all, and praying fervently that we would all be safe from harm. She was terrified and the terror only existed in her mind. In my stupid ignorant child brain, I was embarrassed and ashamed of her. She did horribly humiliating things in public, in front of my friends, at school events and during PTA conferences. She forgot to pick us up from school many times, she forgot to cook dinner or wake us up in the mornings, she was always pre-occupied with her fantasy world.

The most confusing thing for me was she HATED taking her meds, and spit them out or stuffed them into the seams of the furniture whenever she could get away with it. She was so frightened of her fantasy world but preferred it to the real world. She had mandatory counseling in order to see a pdoc at our mental health clinic, but she would walk in pretty as you please and be as normal as the rest of us, doing fine thank you. She would be shaking with the effort of holding back until we were safely in the car, and she would rant and rave all the way home.

I loved my mama and I was scared as hell of her, and I was always afraid I would end up with her disease. Imagine my surprise when I got diagnosed with GAD and Major Depressive Disorder. No sir I do not hear voices or see pink elephants or interpret secret messages based on car color, but I am mentally ill and so ashamed of it. I'm glad there are so many treatments for my illness, and I'm sorry as I can be that she suffered from 15 to 63 taking meds to help her sleep so she wouldn't hallucinate and ruminate all night. That was the best they had to offer until very late in her life. And scary stays in the state hospital with the criminally insane, ECT treatments, and a major fear of doctors and hospitalization. And very late in her life, as her physical health began to decline, she had many catatonic episodes that required hospitalizations. She was the most lucid I ever saw her while she was inpatient, and as soon as she was stabilized she was sent home and would slowly become non-compliant again until it led to another hospitalization.

My mama and our entire family suffered due to the scarcity of good treatment for schizophrenia. I hold out hope that one day people won't have to suffer like she did.

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[archipelago]

Interesting article and discussion. I wish the article had gone farther to say how it classified the 8 different types. I mean was it a combination of the 43 genes? or a set of types of symptoms? But it makes sense to me since there is such a variety.

I'm sorry to hear some the stories. Sounds like people have had real problems with even meds for this spectrum of disorders. And I guess people do think that therapy is not useful.

I found out, kinda by accident, about a therapy that has been used in Finland and has 20 years of research backing it up. It's called "Open Dialogue," and is related to Narrative Therapy. I'm still trying to get the details on how it actually works with a person though I have read about what the principles are and the results they have found. I'm going to be working in a residential home with people with schizophrenia and am trying to design a group based on this approach.

[A18793715]

Good luck arch!