Posted by Mitchell on November 15, 2001, at 22:36:15
In reply to Is misinterpreting voices a form of schizophrenia?, posted by ttt on November 14, 2001, at 19:31:23
I am not an expert in these matters, nor am I trained in the diagnosis of anything; not even the common cold and certainly not schizophrenia. But I do have access to enough information about this to formulate a reasonably informed opinion.
First, and it may be tedious, but whatever you are describing could never *be* schizophrenia, but rather could be recognized as a *symptom* of schizophrenia. And schizophrenia is only a pattern of symptoms that in turn might or might not describe a common underlying cause. Schizophrenia *could* describe symptoms of several unique biological conditions, which in turn could each be a product of genetics, or of any number of biological or social sources of stress.
So that's schizophrenia. What you are describing as the way your mind misinterprets audio stimulus could be symptomatic of a distinct biological condition. My opinion would be that your perceptions can *only* be the product of biological conditions, though the conditions could be a product of social experiences, of some biological stress or of the equipment you were born with.
To put things in context, the way we all process anything is that, when we are exposed to some sensory information and start to process it in our nervous system, we look for learned patterns that match the new experience. The basic guesses - such as shape, color, frequency, volume - tend to be pretty reliable, unless we are really wigged out by some kind of stress like fatigue or disease. As the sensory information becomes more highly processed, the neural networks that get excited tend to be a product of our best guess of what the information might be. The deeper information saturates into the neural pathways, our guesses can be iffy. It is easy to match the frequency of a sound, unless we are tone deaf, but it can be more difficult to find the right match for a more sophisticated experience, something like a word. When it gets to the very advanced level, like guessing social cues, some of us can rely more on confabulation than on reality. Maybe that is where some socio-pathological behavior comes from, but that is a different story.
Now, I said I am not trained to diagnose schizophrenia so this is where my opinion might not be the most reliable. But I suspect that some people who *are* trained to diagnose schizophrenia settle for a few checkmarks on a list of symptoms and don't try to really understand what is happening. So somebody might ask if you hear voices, you might honestly say "yes" and, if you have said yes to a few other poorly defined symptoms, a clinical worker might decide to call you schizophrenic. And once they have diagnosed you, they might conclude that diagnosis implies that certain medications will help you, with no real knowledge of, or interest in, how the medications might effect whatever causes your unique syndrome.
In my opinion, misperceptions tend toward schizophrenia when a person believes and acts on the misperceptions. You can easily have a routine pattern of misperceptions based on an anomaly of a perceptual pathway. To suggest what kind of thing could cause this, if you had a unique hearing weakness, that had never been diagnosed, you might have learned to compensate by recruiting larger interpretive networks to deliver potential matching patterns as you try to recognize a sound. It could be a compensation for tone deafness, for example. Or something else could cause your brain to return more potential matches for an auditory signal, or you for some reason could just not be very accurate in selecting the right match. But trust me, though we might each be more or less aware of it, all of our brains return lots of mismatches. As we go through our day, matching experiences with memory is the essence of perception and there is lots of room for error.
Back to my opinion, schizophrenia has to do with how much we rely upon, act upon and fail to correct misinterpreted experiences. To use a common vernacular (with apologies to those who suffer from schizophrenia) the way you misinterpret sounds doesn't mean you're crazy, but it could drive you crazy. Or it could be a symptom of something really crazy.
Simply put, if you don't consider the misinterpreted audio information to be reliable, and if you don't construct a system of beliefs based on the misinterpretations, it is probably not schizophrenia. If it bothers you, and you really want to understand it, or to treat it, I would suggest that you find an unusually talented and informed neurologist, and that you not settle for the first opinion of a psychiatrist that might say hearing voices means you have schizophrenia.
poster:Mitchell
thread:84294
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20011113/msgs/84375.html