A Fine Story of a Great Woman

This is a wonderful essay on the life of a woman struck down by a terrible mental illness.
I see these late teen patients going south and it’s a heartbreaker. Schizophrenia is an awful thing.

Schizo Affective disorder is nothing more than the emotionally labile version of Schizophrenia. Many schizophrenics have little emotion content, flat affect, so the Shizo Affective disorder is striking. Only two things are what I would consider worse, a bad case of paranoid Schizophrenia and Manic Psychosis, which is something you never forget after you’ve seen it.
There are paranoids who have the personality disorder, but Paranoid Schizophrenics don’t have ordered brains, so they have delusions and hallucinations. They can choose to do violent things to act out their paranoia and auditory hallucinations.
As for Manic Psychotics–they are volatile, hyperactive, grandiose, have terrible judgement but they think they are superior to everyone around them so they do wild dangerous and sometimes violent things.
The Story here is a book review sort of, because the writer, from CATO, was a school friend of the subject of the book.
The tale is well told and it emphasizes one of the great achievements of modern medicine, medications that can control schizophrenia, the most important of the severe mental disorders.
There are people on major anti-psychotics who would be quite disabled without them. Lithium and some others are effective for the Manic Psychotics I mentioned above. Wonderful story about a wonderful woman who now is willing to tell her tale.
Don’t underestimate Schizophrenia and be aware that young adulthood is the time when it descends like a black cloud to cause a lifetime of troubles to an innocent–we have no clue why some people become schizophrenics–tends to be more common in close relatives, but not enough to call it genetic–and it has nothing to do with parenting or domestic problems.
Don’t confuse mental illness of these kinds discussed with behavior problems and personality disorders and mood disorder problems.
Nothing is comparable to the devastation caused by schizophrenia, except untreated or uncontrolled manic psychosis, which usually doesn’t last very long before it creates a crisis. Hypomania is the non psychotic version of mania, and in fact many successful people are a little hypomanic–hyperactive and energetic. Schizophrenics come in various severities, and some even make it without treatment. There are examples of schizophrenics who manage, but don’t underestimate how bad it can be because of the ones who are diagnosed with schizophrenia but manage without major medication efforts.
here’s the story of Dr. Dobbins, PhD psychologist who tells her tale through a pseudonym patient Jane, victim of severe mental illness.
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/what-life-can-be-one-therapists-take-schizo-affective-disorder?utm_source=Cato+Institute+Emails&utm_campaign=bda5d31f27-Cato+E-Update%2C+Jan+21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_395878584c-bda5d31f27-141388857&mc_cid=bda5d31f27&mc_eid=72b5b30ca3