Its being a while and I still dont see evidence of fully recovered sz sufferers frequ

Yeah I don't know bipolar and sz were considered distinct at least 100 years ago it's only recently with the advent of genetics that we think there is a lot in common. But yeah you can get a totally different dx depending on the pdoc but also symptoms change over time. The harrow study actually looks at all those categories but with only 25 patients for each type other than the 50 for sz, the 25 is for sza, BP with psychosis and they even have a depression group as a control. So it's basically one psychiatrist with around 125 patients who's keeping tabs on them so his diagnosis should be consistent...everybody had a better prognosis than sz. Plus their outcome rate of 33% is really high for the US the WHO study puts high income countries around 16% recovery with developing countries at 37%. So clearly everybody should move to Chicago and partake of our healing waters...a lightly chlorinated version of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world..plus it's an awesome place to live and the pdocs are pretty cool here.

Maybe this will help?

Recovery From Schizophrenia: With Views of Psychiatrists, Psychologists, and Others Diagnosed With This Disorder

A bunch of recovered md's and phd's with sz dx and how they think about recovery.

I think people who recover from sz are unlikely to continue to be active on a site like PC. I know I wouldn't. I'd just go on with my life.

One problem I've seen over and over is that if someone says they've recovered from sz, other people immediately jump in and say, "Oh, you never had sz. Maybe you were misdiagnosed."

It's like the very fact of having recovered is evidence you never had sz. We "know" you can't recover from sz, so if you've recovered, you never had it. Or else you're about to relapse at any moment now.

Oh, we knew bipolar existed. But we still mistook some presentations (i.e. psychosis) for schizophrenia. (Similarly, we knew of DID for a long time, but still diagnosed them with schizophrenia until the 80s when there was a huge boom in DID cases. PTSD and autism are another story... Oh, and I didn't even mention epilepsy.) When someone is more psychotic than manic, it's hard to tell. Like I said, the only other "schizophrenic" I knew was diagnosed in the 70s and has recently been rediagnosed as bipolar. And I know more than one person who was misdiagnosed with a mood disorder that later turned out to be schizophrenic.

Ever hear of the book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden? The author was diagnosed with schizophrenia in I think the 60s and recovered, but modern psychologists and analysts have retroactively diagnosed her with things like conversion disorder...

Back in the day did they considered anyone with psychosis as schizophrenic?

Not exactly, but they lumped a bunch of symptoms together that often weren't really psychosis at all. Autism used to be known as childhood schizophrenia. DID often involves hearing alters' voices and having the "delusion" that you are someone else, so that was often misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, especially since it often results from sexual abuse/trauma and back in the day, it was thought that that almost never happened and women made it up because of their Freudian fantasies. PTSD can involve hallucination-/delusion-like flashbacks, hypervigilance that borders on paranoia, etc. Epilepsy (especially temporal lobe epilepsy) can still be mistaken for psychosis today.

The other diagnosis that lumped together a bunch of unrelated disorders/symptoms back in the day was hysteria (another diagnosis DID patients got stuck with), but I won't even go into that... so much pseudoscience and sexism that I can't even...

Okay, this is from Wikipedia, so it may not be valid, but it's still relevant:

"In 1970 psychiatrists Robins and Guze introduced new criteria for deciding on the validity of a diagnostic category and proposed that cases of schizophrenia where people recovered well were not really schizophrenia but a separate condition."

wow. Psychology has gone a long way.

Hi

I honestly believe that sz and psychotic disorders is a genuine problem for society. I see it myself with how i was treated in the public health system as a sz patient. I spoke of 'uniqueness' with farie moon on this thread , we usually see and understand ourselves as unique individuals , i'm sure its a large part of our identity and in someway might be a self preserving aspect of our character. The problem is when we see a pdoc , the pdoc sees us as having certain traits that are predictive of certain behaviour. So delusions and hallucinations maybe predictive of erratic and aggressive behaviour , a lack of insight maybe predictive of violent behaviour , a haziness when it comes to discussion of meds maybe predictive of non compliance , im not sure what the metrics are but do you see my point? Delusions etc maybe intensely personal to us but to a pdoc its like a cattle mart. So is this a fault of the pdoc , maybe to a certain point , but the pdocs are also human and sadly the've heard it all before. So there perceived lack of genuine empathy maybe a self preservation tool to get themselves through the day. For the pdoc who says , is there a point in genuinely looking beneath the cover of this patient?problem is they have a wealth of research open to them that says talk therapy is not very effective. Some dispute it , but the research is on record. The pdoc if he/her is an experienced physician , may also have being let down and burned by patients , patients that have acted violently etc , and i'm sure that this engenders a certain hardness in their approach. So there is that. But there is another issue and that is a social one , for right or wrong psychiatry are a large part of keeping the general population safe from psychotic acts of violence. It is fair to say that. The pdocs are custodians of that implicit agreement between them and society so unfortunately they maybe tainted by that expectation.

Well, if i ever recover , i'll come back. Genuinely , i do self identify with schiz , no problems saying that , maybe i'll have something to say about 'that a recovered sz was never a sz at all'.

That's good to know. Many people might come back once or twice to say they're okay, but they don't continue to make visiting this site or ones like it part of their regular routine.

We used to have a guy who was fairly regular here. He got a job, as I recall, and didn't come around as much. He came back once or twice after that to say he was better. What are we to make of that? Is he really recovered? Did he have a relapse after his last post? No idea. But even if he's recovered, I doubt many in this thread know of him, because you didn't join until after he left.

Yes, if you define sz as something one never recovers from, then anyone who has recovered didn't have it - by definition. But then you'd only know if someone has sz in retrospect as there's no way to know if the person in front you at the moment has it or not because you don't have a crystal ball to see if they'll recover. So, it's stupid to tell someone they have a condition from which they'll never recover. You'd just have to wait until they do or don't recover. It's useless, and no predictions can be made based on it. I can guarantee you, though, that if you go around telling people they'll never recover, and you have the kind of authority that makes them believe you, there's a much better chance they'll never recover. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here's ER's post. I hope he wouldn't mind my sharing it here. You get a sense for why people go quiet after recovering:

http://forums.psychcentral.com/2792122-post17.html

i like that costello. ERs post. that was right on.

This is true among both patients and docs....the dsm III actually said that recovery from sz was so rare that it should make you question the accuracy of your original diagnosis...so they just go back and change the dx...this is like my current pdoc wanting to make me brief psychotic disorder even though I don't fit the criteria....well I recovered so I must not be anything that even starts with sz doesn't fit the model. Genetically I have the hallmarks of sz some 20 indicators and when I first was diagnosed the fact that my grandma heard voices was considered a family history of sz...I got treatment early not because it was anything mild but because it was unbearably severe...in fact my genetics are more consistent with treatment resistant individuals stuck on the back wards than anyone else(GRM3/COMT val/val). As far as hanging out on PC I didn't even find it until I was recovered and I wanted info about going off meds...I almost left during the transition off meds because I felt like I no longer belonged here but I already made friends so I stayed...

Yeah that's Johanna greenburg slightly fictionalized....she is actually on a video interview done by Daniel mackler and there was another woman on there too Catherine penny...both of their psychiatrists were considered top notch psychoanalysts I don't believe their sz diagnosis to be inaccurate in any way Catherine penny was actually catatonic and that's certainly not bipolar. I would seriously doubt anyone who thinks that they can make an accurate diagnosis retroactively...I mean look at all the diseases Van Gogh supposedly has.

in the 50s and 60s black people who fought for civil rights were unjustly labeled schizophrenic.

Maybe, pauly, you can be successful even if you're not "fully recovered." I mean, really a lot of being successful is just faking it and your stamina to do so. I see it at work all the time. Not just me with my dx but everyone. I mean, I work 40 hours a week but I really am only functional for about 20 hours. It's not even either. I bet on Monday I'm functional for maybe 1-2 hours, vs a Friday when I can get a good 5-6 hours out of me, that's my best day of the week, actually.

But, it's not just me, it's everyone.

And being untreated and with all my problems, it's all about faking it and hiding my symptoms as much as possible when they bug me. It's about having the right job. I need a job with a pretty stable routine. (this job is actually getting harder as my needed routine turns more into chaos every day with new projects.) It's about knowing what you can do and not being hard on yourself when things are bad. Sometimes it's scary. I mean, when I'm having a constant loop of intrusive thoughts that aren't pleasant, it's not easy to answer the phone and talk to someone. Getting interrupted can throw me off for at least 20 minutes usually, but often for an hour or more. And I have to take a lot of breaks.

But, I'm proud of myself. Because I've been at this job for 6 years. That's a huge victory for me. But, at the same time, my value is not my job. My value is what I make it, and that's more important to me. This job is just money to feed my family.

This is true and black people consistently get the label more today too and there is recent evidence that black people are more like to end up on long term injectables---is it really a racial difference in disease occurrence and compliance or is it prejudice?

But yeah I think Russia is the other place that takes activists and gives them a MI label and locks them away. This is one of the reasons people are so afraid of psychiatry there is no way to prove you are sane once you have the label.

I see your point, but I just wanted to point out that catatonia can occur in bipolar. Both in depression and mania. I've actually seen catatonia in real life just once and the girl was bipolar 1, rapid cycling, and became catatonic when she was depressed.

On the one hand, it is hard to diagnose historical figures (Abraham Lincoln comes to mind) but I don't think it's impossible to rule things out, especially if you have a full memoir like in INPYaRG. (Plus that was more recent history.) Like if you read the book Sybil and then read Sybil Exposed, there is compelling evidence that Sybil didn't really have DID. But I haven't read INPYaRG, and I'm not a psychologist, so I can't really say.

So I did read INPYaRG---its been a while though---the thing that really convinces me though is that Daniel Mackler the film maker is actually a psychologist/activist and her original pdoc was considered brilliant in her time both of these people are experts who have actually spoken to her rather than people who read her book which she admits was partially fiction. The Mackler movie take these broken wings is actually much more based in reality than her book. The other woman who was catatonic was that way not briefly but for many years---she was capable of walking but had her eyes closed for much of the time so she was virtually blind she simply sat and listened to her anaylist for many years without a word---when she did get better it was clear she had long term psychosis with all the usual hallucinations etc. so the duration I think is longer than you would see with bipolar I think.

One of the things that makes me so angry is people who e-mail me that thing about Abraham Lincoln having depression and how he just "decided" to not be depressed and look at all the great work he did. Like you can't do great things DESPITE having depression. First he had to decide he didn't have it.

First off, I'm pretty sure depression wasn't even a diagnosable thing back then. Secondly, if someone with no legs wins a marathon they are a hero for overcoming their illness. But if you did the same thing with schizophrenia or bipolar, either it would get ignored or they would use that same "they decided not to have this problem so they didn't" type of attitude. It's kind of annoying. (Or they would pat you down before you even started to make sure you weren't violent.)

DSM-I was 1952 and its predecessor Statistical Manual for the Use of Institutions for the Insane was 1917 so yeah well after Lincoln---maybe he had melancholia?

I have made progress , I need to come a bit further to work.
But I am hopeful , it may happen or it may not. On functionality , if I were to be able to work , that would be a pretty good result.


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Even if you can't work full time maybe eventually you could volunteer a few days a week at something you love. Even that would be a good result. Having hope and seeing that you're progressing is really the most important thing.

I think we all have our own goals or ideas of recovery. For me, it will be when I'm able to write steadily again and work on my art regularly, and to resolve my current anger issue. Just to be able to think clearly and focus on things the way I used, or as close I could get at least, would be a good result for me.