DrunkenBlog

Schizoaffective

Mental illness isn't something I'm as familiar with as I probably should be. I've known people with some... severe problems... but it really isn't something that goes into my mental makeup of a person. Actually a lot of things don't, such as how much someone makes, their age, physical handicaps, or their race.

They're things to take into account, and acknowledged, but mostly just as fodder for jokes. I.E., jokes often come out of ignorance and fear, but can also be a way of showing someone you're aware of something and accept it and it's no big deal. It'd be nice to say I had some sort of pure intentions or enlightened mindset, but not really. All that other crap is just too much work.

Unfortunately though, for better or worse, a lot of things just don't factor into how I think about someone and hence are fair game for humor. These are things to be acknowledged, but then to say "It's OK". Hanging around with elephants in the room provides the veneer of a friendship; to hell with that, bring them over to the table and offer them a drink.

I will say mental illness is something I'm aware of when I know someone who has it, but it doesn't factor into my mental makeup of that person for the most part, and quite honestly I often just completely forget. I think that offends people more often than the humor, but that's the way it goes.

Which isn't to say that I have no interest in it, I find the subject to be quite fascinating, but almost in a horror-movie kind of way. Reading up on it just really, really wigs me out. I happen to be in the camp that subscribes to the idea of intelligence coming about as emergent behavior; patterns building upon patterns eventually giving rise to behaviors that are much more complex than the sum of their parts, rather than implicitly designed.

Basically, we all have this huge soup of neurons behind our eyes with gazillions of tiny, tiny operations going on... all adding up to something larger. Chances are, if/when we do have artificial intelligence it'll come about in the same way.

Since we often impose our frame of reference on the world, consider your computer's operating system. While it gives the illusion of moving windows and text around, in reality there are lots of processes doing lots of small things almost completely unaware of each other in the background... yet you end up with something that looks intentional on your screen. As a whole, each of those little processes is executing a pattern of behavior while interacting with others and eventually, through these interactions, you get what we call consciousness.

If that process is executing at a low enough level, and something goes wrong, it has a disproportionate effect on everything building upon it. Like yanking out a lower piece of a house built from a deck of cards. That's pretty much both the fascination and the horror of mental illness to me; once something is occurring at that low a level you're, well, screwed.

Many people have had large foundations of their life disappear in an instant. It's shocking really, what a kick in the teeth it can be and how quickly your entire frame of reference towards the world can change. It can kick some pretty important processes in your brain to places they really, really shouldn't be.

But the soup of electrons seems to be amazingly resilient in getting itself back to something akin to a normal state after trauma or introduced events; but something like schizophrenia seems to be acting a much lower, or fundamental, level.

The idea of feeling as though your world has just shattered is one I can relate to and understand; we're somewhat equipped to deal with that. The idea of your entire world now becoming suspect must be one of the most isolating and cruel experiences a human being could go through. When you're interacting in a completely different world than everyone else, you're completely cut off. That's Twilight-Zone, pee-your-pants territory as far as I'm concerned, and can't imagine what a struggle it is for those whose genetic or environmental dice happened to come up snake eyes.

This is usually where things start getting tricky; as in if you don't give equal weight to all afflictions you're somehow elevating one above the other. It's not really about that, just making a distinction between afflictions where your reality truly sucks, but it's still reality, and ones where your reality veers drastically from everyone else. There's a difference between acting irrationally to reality and acting rationally to a warped reality. I'm not saying one is easier than the other, just that the former wigs me the hell out.

Our realities are, by and large, already interpreted and shaped from input we take in that gets processed through basic rule sets. The idea of one of those going wrong is just, well, fundamentally wrong. You only get one brain, and while you may be able to stretch things by saying you can reboot it, you sure as hell can't reinstall.

To that end, I came across a website awhile ago called 'Living with Schizoaffective Disorder' which caught my interest. Primarily because I'd never heard of the disorder, and then later because of how raw it was. The author gives a quick explanation of Schizoaffective Disorder:

Although schizophrenia is a very familiar illness to any psychiatrist, my psychiatrist seemed to find it very disturbing that I was hearing voices. If I had not been hallucinating he would have been very comfortable diagnosing and treating me as bipolar. While they seemed certain of my eventual diagnosis, the impression I got from my stay at the hospital was that none of the staff had ever seen anyone with schizoaffective disorder before.

There is some controversy as to whether it is a real illness at all. Is schizoaffective disorder a distinct condition, or is it the unlucky coincidence of two different diseases? When The Quiet Room author Lori Schiller was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, her parents protested that the doctors really didn't know what was wrong with their daughter, saying that schizoaffective disorder was just a catch-all diagnosis that the doctors used because they had no real understanding of her condition.

Probably the best argument I've heard that schizoaffective disorder is a distinct illness is the observation that schizoaffectives tend to do better in their lives than schizophrenics tend to do.

I'd really recommend you read it. It's pretty brutal. A warts-and-all account of not only his experiences but his mindset while dealing with his symptoms. I don't think I could imagine exposing myself in that way. It isn't as long as it looks, and is well worth the time. It's the kind of thing that reminds you of why the web is cool.

I'm somewhat amazed at just how little we still understand about the brain and consciousness in general, and even more amazed at how much basic research isn't going into it. There are progressions forward, but they're somewhat blind. There are way too many medications out there that work, but we only have the vaguest guesses as to why.

Going back to artificial intelligence... if AI emerges, even at a rudimentary level, chances are process will hang or become aberrant, bringing about a form of mental illness. What's I find interesting is the idea of an AI asylum. While you can reboot or reinstall an AI, chances are a lot of people aren't going to want to for a whole variety of reasons. Some probably won't even make it to an asylum, and will find havens in the network equivalent of street underpasses.

And these really will stick around. We're going to reach a point where we'll want to fix them, not just start over. Not due to any form of social enlightenment but simply because we have an attachment.

Those aberrant AIs under the network underpasses won't have really been put there, they'll probably start getting there the same way exotic species have been introduced to North America; they just accidently get loose. Oh, and I'm sure they'll have addictions to feed too. Some smart cookie will realize that these things will need to be dependent upon humans once they get above a certain level. Kind odd to think of an AI doing the equivalent of whatever the hell pornography is at the time simply because it has to feed the equivalent of its crack habit.

Just a weird idea; by not understanding ourselves, we're dooming whatever AI we create to follow in our path. Or maybe through the poking, prodding and carving up of AIs we'll finally be able to understand where we go wrong. My money is on the former.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    September 05, 2004, at 04:37 PM