2008-04-04
NPR's Schizophrenia program
iontank.com or lontank.com
David Banks, NPR Online,
Paranoia, perceptual confabulations, persecution delusions, Sometimes they don't see eyes, and they have the common hallucination of holes in eyes and so on. This is why they do low eye contact. They are on a stage of their own with their own actors. Usually these delusions are extreme auditory, but a little bit of visual delusion. Schizophrenia has whole different types and ranges of delusions. There's an artist who painted his delusions. "The World as We Know It". Louis Wayne was an illustrator. He made paintings and drawings of fuzzy kittens in clothing, he specialized in cats. He would illustrate stories about cats. Late 1800s, we didn't have the chemicals to treat schizophrenia. Imagine having schizophrenia with no treatments whatsoever. As he progressed in his disease, his cats began to become more demonic. When he went through his paranoid stage, he did pictures of cats that really looked paranoid. Many schizophrenics say they see energy fields around things, and that these shock things. They become less differentiated. One looks like a Buddhist god or a Chinese dragon, and then one that looks more like a teddy bare, and then one of the last ones is an undifferentiated cat, it barely looks like it. He went from a healthy career as an artist to institutionalized as schizophrenic.
Phobias list --
The level of autonomic response tells you whether it is a true phobia or not.