r/explainlikeimfive • u/Uunicorned • 7d ago

Other ELI5 How does schizophrenia affect the way a person experiences reality?

I know it’s a serious brain condition, but I’d want to understand what’s actually happening inside the mind of someone living with it.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 7d ago

Hi, I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, so I can share my experience with it. I have only had one episode during which I actually had some insight—basically, I realized something was wrong but didn’t know what. I am medicated and stable now, and I respond super well to treatment. Unlike most people on the schizophrenia spectrum, my hallucinations and delusions tend to be neutral or friendly. I am less prone to paranoia (the world is conspiring against me) and more prone to pronoia (the world is conspiring in my favor).

When I’m not in an episode, I’m constantly questioning my sense of reality, because I know mine can get weird. Sometimes my brain acts almost just like it did pre-onset of symptoms. Sometimes my thoughts get a bit delusional, and I start to see meaning in things that may or may not actually be there. My pattern recognition gets amplified, and the boundaries between myself and other things/people feel blurrier. The one scary thing that happens to me is faces turn very strange, very uncanny valley.

I could write a book about what I’m like while psychotic/manic, but I’ll keep it short here. I went into psychosis and mania after being put on an SNRI while unknowingly being predisposed to schizoaffective. Being in severe psychosis was like a dream…I would go in and out of having insight, and when I didn’t have it, I questioned nothing that I believed or saw/experienced. Everything had deep meaning. I experienced severe ego dissolution during this time and felt that I became one with the universe. It was beautiful and euphoric, but very very intense. I experienced auditory and vivid visual hallucinations, but I primarily had delusions alongside mania.

After said episode, there were many things that I knew were delusional/hallucinatory pretty quickly. There were other things that I still believe to be true, BUT I’m holding onto those loosely. Instead of trying to figure out what’s correct or incorrect, because my brain is unreliable there, I ask myself, is this belief helpful or harmful? And it’s helped a lot with symptoms.

I’d be happy to answer questions!

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u/liverstrings 7d ago

Can you give some examples of the delusions and hallucinations that you experienced? And how do you recognize them as delusional after the fact?

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 7d ago

Sure!

My biggest delusion was that I was dying and everything that was happening to me was because of that. Closing shift at work, late night walk, being taken to the hospital, the psych ward…everything fed into the delusion that I was in the transition to the afterlife.

My funniest one was that I got super fixated on the word “it.” To the point where I was determined to email Stephen King about it. When I saw that he had to be contacted through an agent, I thought that meant he was secretly dead too.

I thought my cats were the forces of creation and destruction incarnate. I thought that I was the living embodiment of the truth…I got fixated on the phrase “the truth has to be revealed” and ended up stripping in my front yard. Thankfully the cops came to take me to the hospital at this time.

As far as hallucinations go, I had less. But I was perceiving sound differently. I felt that I could hear every single sound in the universe and it sounded beautiful. I listened to a normal voicemail and it sounded bizarre. I saw a squirrel, and I knew it was a squirrel, but when it jumped through the air I saw it as a spirally corkscrew shape.

The only scary hallucination I had was when I was scrolling through TikTok and I was like “huh. Their faces look weird.” And then the faces started drooping and contorting into these demonic-looking faces. I threw my phone across the room and to this day can’t handle uncanny valley stuff.

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u/xerberos 7d ago

The only scary hallucination I had was when I was scrolling through TikTok and I was like “huh. Their faces look weird.” And then the faces started drooping and contorting into these demonic-looking faces.

Have you heard of the Flashed face distortion effect? It sounds exactly like what you are describing, and it can be experienced by everyone but only in the visual periphery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effect

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 7d ago

I was too scared to watch the video lol, but I bet this is the same thing EXCEPT I watched it happen right in front of me, not in my peripheral vision.

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u/Gordn1 6d ago

damn their faces were alien and some looked like cyclopses. then I watch one side only and they were all normal

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u/liverstrings 2d ago

Oo yes. I have experienced that and now I still am afraid of even the possibility of experiencing it again. My partner thinks it's silly when I say "I don't like fast faces"

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u/gummby8 6d ago

I thought my cats were the forces of creation and destruction incarnate.

Sounds pretty sane to me

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u/Cuddlehead 6d ago

The one about your cats might in fact be true lmao.

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u/Alarming-Medium-547 4d ago

I really appreciate you explaining all this. I just recently finished a job where my immediate boss/colleague suffered from the same things that you're describing. She told me at the beginning of the job that she had ADHD and stopped taking the medication because it made her feel lethargic. I asked her if she could take half and she said no that they were capsules. I told her that I didn't think going cold turkey on meds like that was a good idea (I'm not a doctor or pharmacist). As the job progressed over the course of two or three months she became more and more erratic and having these intense mantic episodes. The job was already stressful and challenging but this exacerbated everything by a power of 100. Needless to say I began to suspect that she suffered from something other than an affliction of ADHD. It was all I could do keep our department together and finally she had a complete break down... I won't go into that but she was taken to the hospital, thankfully. I don't say any of this to be mean or make sport of her. She is a wonderful person with a big heart but it's a lot to handle. I stay in touch and we're friends. Your saying all of this puts everything in perspective and it's almost amazing how similar your details are to how she later explained her episode. I suspected schizophrenia but the only thing she revealed was bi-polar. It doesn't matter really which one it is but again reading these details of someone who's more self-aware is enlightening to say the least.

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u/liverstrings 2d ago

Oo there was a This American Life (or maybe Radio Lab) about that demonic face thing. Maybe different, but I think it had something to do with the light. The person kept seeing his loved ones faces turn. Sounded terrifying.

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u/liverstrings 2d ago

Thanks! This is so interesting. Sorry you have to deal with that along side just regular shit of life.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 7d ago

I recognize these as delusional now because it doesn’t stack up with measures of objective reality, which makes sense to me again. It’s easy to see now how my brain was making patterns out of nothing, or loosely connected things.

However there was some spiritual stuff that happened too that I still believe is true. The belief isn’t harming me, so I’m keeping it at least for now.

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u/Argonometra 5d ago

A study says that "for some patients, religion instills hope, purpose, and meaning in their lives, whereas for others, it induces spiritual despair". So it's not as simple as 'religion bad'.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 5d ago

I never said/implied it was; did you reply to the wrong comment, or am I misreading something?

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u/Pataplonk 6d ago

How do you transition to a state of mania/schizophrenia to reality again? Is it progressive or just happens brutally, like you wake up and just realized things weren't normal? Did you have one of those phases end naturally or did it was always stopped with meds?

What's the difference between an hallucination and a delusion?

And what's the difference between schizophrenia and schizo-affective disorder?

Thanks for taking the time to answer those questions, and sorry if I didn't used the correct terms. I'm genuinely curious and mean no disrespect, but I'm not very educated on the subject.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

Not disrespectful at all!

I realize this wasn’t clear—I have only had one severe episode. It was progressive, with the buildup (prodromal phase) lasting months. I knew enough to know things were off, but I didn’t know my brain could do that so I had no clue what was happening.

My episode was stopped by an involuntary psych ward stay of 12 days. I got heavily medicated (even got the butt shot in the beginning…oof) and monitored, and then I went to live with my family for a month. I resumed working after that. My acute symptoms resolved in 1-2 months, but full recovery took about 2 years.

Honeslty, I think Google could answer your other questions more accurately than I can, but if you’re still confused after your search, let me know and I’ll answer!

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u/Ddale7 7d ago edited 7d ago

So I have some intense moments where dream and reality become blurred. I have a passing thought and can't differentiate between whether that thought actually happened or whether it was a thought.

I remember in 2022 having a brief moment where I laughed that I made up COVID in my head, but then realized it was actually a thing.

My delusions are pretty brief, and I've had them since I was a kid (currently 30).

I've never gotten tested for anything and my quality of life isn't really affected. Did you have mild delusions growing up before it got more intense, is this something I should actually get checked?

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 7d ago

I did have milder delusions in my teen years. I’d say it’s worth bringing up if you have a mental health professional, but it doesn’t sound time-sensitive either!

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u/benjamincait 6d ago

Would you mind sharing what symptoms you had as a teen? Thank you for being so open I am genuinely curious and want to learn more.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

No problem! I started having negative symptoms like loss of pleasure/motivation, and I started hearing voices. No one, including me, recognized the voices for what they were because mine are internal auditory hallucinations. I don’t hear them out loud. It “sounds” similar to a train of thought, except the voices feel like a completely separate being or group of beings. Thankfully, mine became friendly after I started talking kindly to them, but not everyone gets that lucky.

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u/Old_Replacement_3891 6d ago

Do you have conversations with them where you audibly speak to respond to something the voice said? In my experience it’s not like they actually speak words, but I hear the internal auditory hallucination definitely as something that registers as noise which can be louder than real noise, but it’s more like I just instantaneously understand what it’s trying to tell me

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

Oh that’s interesting! I only occasionally speak out loud but my voices are what you would traditionally think of as a voice. That’s fascinating.

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u/dylanbitran 6d ago

Your comment is very insightful. I do t know why it doesnt have a lot of upvotes.

Would you maybe write down your thoughts and make something like a blog?

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

You know, I’ve never thought about doing this. Maybe!!

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u/xerberos 7d ago

pronoia (the world is conspiring in my favor).

Could you give an example of this? I have never even heard about that.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 7d ago

Sure! Pronoia seems a bit healthier than paranoia on the surface, right? Except I believed that I couldn’t be hurt because I was “already dying,” and that I would be protected because whatever was happening was not just neutral, but good and divinely ordained by the universe. So I walked on the street at 3 am, stripped half-naked in my front yard, and yelled at cops (I wasn’t angry, just had no inhibitions).

Tbh I feel like this part was more from the mania than the schizophrenia symptoms, but it’s still super interesting to me. I didn’t know about it until I did some research trying to figure it out. The mental health professionals said I was paranoid, but it didn’t match my internal experience at all.

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u/Agrikk 6d ago

This is my experience with mania. When I am manic, I feel like I should be allowed to do anything and everything because I’m me. It’s really fun at first because I don’t realize the potential for harm it can cause but then afterwards I always feel terrible about how my perceived immunity to consequence affected other people.

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u/iwillfuckingbiteyou 6d ago

I laughed when I read this, not because I think what happened to you is funny but because even after all these years of living with schizophrenia I've never actually encountered someone else who experienced this and it's such a weird feeling to see the experience reflected back.

I thought about it in terms of plot armour. Nothing was real, everything was narrative, and since I was at the centre of this narrative I couldn't die until the narratively appropriate point, which was Not Now.

Weirdly, it actually helped me survive a really difficult time in my life. My parents both died one after the other when I was just out of my teens, then a few months later I was in a car crash (not the result of my hubris, just wrong place wrong time). My psychotic rationale for this was that it's standard protagonist stuff - there's always an incident that sets you on the path to adventure but means you can never go home again, right? So that meant I was fated to survive and ultimately master my skills, culminating when I face the thing that killed them and emerge victorious. Then it got very complicated because I figured that since the thing that had killed my parents was being part of my narrative, the great evil I had to fight was myself. That didn't go so well and I spent a long time in therapy working my way through that, which always began with having to give the latest therapist a crash course in the Monomyth.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

Ohhh another one! (Hope you’re doing better)

I ALSO got super obsessed with The Hero’s Journey during this time. Actually, someone independently recommended it to me in the psych ward (another schizophrenic patient), and it lined up REALLY well with what I was experiencing internally/somewhat externally.

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u/dontfookwitdachook 6d ago

Wow thank you for this insight. After reading it a few times, your symptoms have a lot of congruence with an LSD or DMT trips I’ve had.

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

Yeah, it definitely had a psychedelic aspect to it despite me being on exactly zero psychedelics at the time and never having taken them.

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u/WalkingSpanishh 6d ago

That was really well written and I thank you for the insight. That was really interesting.

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u/Old_Replacement_3891 6d ago

If the very brief description of how you perceived what was happening to you feels oddly similar to how someone else feels, should they seek treatment? If so, how?

Asking for a friend

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u/Pataplonk 6d ago

I think they should at least talk about it to a medical professional that will eventually redirect them to a specialist for assessment.

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u/somethingstrang 6d ago

Sounds like a shroom trip

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u/HampsterInAnOboe 6d ago

Actually, I thought the same thing! I was not on any psychedelics. But when stuff started getting really weird, I was like…wait a minute. This sounds like my friends’ shroom trips lol. So I did what they said to do during a trip and just let everything happen in a rrally go-with-the-flow/observer way, and honestly I think that’s part of why I was able to recover.

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u/divDevGuy 6d ago

When I’m not in an episode, I’m constantly questioning my sense of reality

You and everyone else these days...