Schizophrenia and the I-function: A Hypothesis Revised :: Biology Essays Research Papers

Schizophrenia and the I-function: A Hypothesis Revised In my second web paper, I tried to come up with arguments supporting the hypothesis that schizophrenia was caused by an overactive I-function. Information about positive schizophrenic symptoms (distorted perceptions of reality, hallucinations, illusions, delusions, paranoia...)(2) suggested to me that the I-function of the schizophrenic was aware of things that the I-function of the non-schizophrenic wasn't. I also felt that because reality is such a biased, individual experience, non-schizophrenics do not have the right to label the reality of the schizophrenic as false. This hypothesis is flawed. After doing more research and taking into consideration a suggestion from Professor Grobstein that maybe the problem is not an overactive I-function, but abnormal input to the I-function, I have reworked the hypothesis. One can still validly say that the reality of the schizophrenic is real. However, it is more accurate to emphasize that the reality of a schizophrenic is only real to the schizophrenic, just as each and every person's individual reality is actually only real to him or her. The difference between the realities of schizophrenics and the realities of non-schizophrenics is that for non-schizophrenics, information is processed in a more or less uniform way. That is, I interpret input pretty much the same way most people around me would. There are, of course, discrepancies in interpretations even between non-schizophrenics, hence the difficulty in relying on eye-witness accounts. For schizophrenics, though, the interpretation of input is completely different from everyone e lse around them due to the fact that the input is in some way wildly changed between the time it reaches the afferent nerve endings to the time that it ends up at the I-function. I found that an excellent way to begin to understand how schizophrenia works is by reading personal accounts. Most of the accounts I found were written by people who, with the help of medication, were in recovery from schizophrenia. They give detailed descriptions of their lives and their thoughts before they recovered. What follows is an excerpt from "Maurizio's Story." Maurizio was in law school, had an active social life, and was in the top quarter of his class when he developed schizophrenia: Within a few days in October 1976 all of this came to a crashing halt as I suddenly experienced my first psychosis. I can still remember those experiences vividly even now 18 years later. At first I thought I was coming down with the flu since the abnormal mental state I was experiencing was similar to the viral delirium of influenza but as I stayed in bed for a day my symptoms got even worse.