Well if it’s schizophrenia there are a number of other symptoms other than auditory hallucinations such as disorganized thoughts, difficulty concentrating, poor social skills, and lack of emotion or empathy. If you don’t have any other symptoms then you’ve truly entered into the realm of the paranormal; and once that door is open I suspect you’ll have a hell of a time closing it Hotwater
Yeah... But no. Schizophrenia is a wide term, not a narrow medical definition of exactly what is happening. It's a term that covers general deranged thoughts and belief in things that are not there. Sorry buddy. You need to stop taking unprescribed drugs and maybe get on an anti-psychotic. They're NOT real.
hmmm. "It's a term that covers general deranged thoughts and belief in things that are not there." so what you're saying is that most of the Earth's human population is schizophrenic since most of the Earth's human population is religious and believe in invisible super beings and these beliefs often cause them to have deranged thoughts. this would mean that the only humans on the planet who are sane are the atheists. maybe the Earth's water supply should be medicated with anti-psychotic drugs.
It's not an either-or question. It could be schizophrenia, it could be psychic, it could be both, or it could be neither. If there are no unusual experiential features other than the voices themselves, in most cases medication is not the answer - though in some cases it could be. It's a complex subject - in my opinion the best place to start is the Hearing Voices Network - here's their website: http://www.hearing-voices.org/ And here's part of a recent thread of mine where the psychic aspect of "voices" is discussed in some detail: http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showpost.php?p=6664380&postcount=47
without knowing more about you and circumstances, it's hard to tell... what you think is probably more important than what anyone else thinks...
Sometimes it can SEEM to be a mental health issue, but turn out to be psychic/spiritual. A few years ago in this forum a girl posted a thread about people talking to her in her mind. I was curious because of my own telepathic experiences, so I asked if they were living people or disembodied voices. She didn't know, but she had a clear vision of the individual faces of the "people" who were talking to her. In the course of our conversations, we tried telepathically contacting each other's entities. The long and short of it is: It turned out that a living person with whom I'd had telepathic communications a few years before was the exact same person serving as this girl's primary "spirit guide" - but the girl lived 2000 miles away and had no experience of this "entity" as a living person. One of my daughters hears voices and sees ghosts. She has been tentatively diagnosed with promodal schizophrenia - mainly because her experiences "appear" to be hallucinations, and she becomes severely disturbed by them at times. She's on medication to help her deal with her experiences. Maybe she IS schizophrenic. Or MAYBE she's just extremely psychically sensitive. As far as I'm concerned, based on my experiences, the jury's not in yet on this question for her. Either way, I agree that she needs the medication for the time being at least, because without it she becomes a basket case. As I said before: It's a complex issue.
hmm. i too get mental images of the faces of my two imaginary friends. i catch glimpses of their everyday lives. they claim to be real people, in bodies, on this planet, at this time. they both sound American. and ... well ... so? what's going on here? lol i mean, it's nice to have interesting company, to have deep philosophical conversations, to literally share visions and ideas but i find this mode of communication rather disconcerting. are there truly two real people somewhere who actually listen and respond to my thoughts? or am i conjuring these two characters out of my subconcious? am i really so complex that i need to have three distinct Ids with which to hold discourse with my self? or if this is telepathy how did i and these two folks end up in each others' heads? lol this is so weird! i'm sure if i found this phenom frightening instead of interesting i'd go to a shrink for some meds.
Your experience sounds a lot like the girl I mentioned - Riesay. I think you'd find our conversation in her thread interesting: http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=267190&f=49 I couldn't tell you whether your friends are real, live people or not - unless, as with Riesay, they turned out to be people I know personally and converse with telepathically - however from what I've experienced it certainly seems possible. Assuming your friends are what they say they are, you, Riesay, and I seem to be in a sort of intermediate limbo stage of psychic/spiritual development where we experience some of the psychic stuff but don't see everything as clearly as the people I call my "spirit guides." Based on this idea, I would at least keep in mind the possibility that your friends are serving as spiritual supporters of some sort. Beyond that, I can't think of much else I could say. Everybody has their own path to walk, and mostly that means figuring out what's what as best we can from our own observations and thoughts. However if you have some interesting or perplexing mental conversations or experiences you want to run by somebody else, you can always post here, and I'll offer whatever insights (or lack of them) might pop into my head. From the perspective of "mental health" - well, yeah, your friends could be subconscious mental constructs of your own. Again: Hard to know - insufficient data. From a spiritual perspective you could say that EVERYONE is a part of us in some way - everyone we come into contact with can be seen as an aspect of ourselves, brought into our life to bring us more self-awareness. Just some thoughts - to ponder or blow off, as best suits you.
I'd say so. But that's no excuse for YOU to be schizophrenic. If you are, you should at least understand what it is, and know that with your chemical/physical makeup, you have the potential for delusions. If you're hearing voices and there's no human speaking to you, it's a delusion, and the sooner you understand this the sooner you can work to conquer it.
i do appreciate your thoughts and insights. of course, you can't tell me whether my imaginary friends are real or not. how could you tell, if i can't? but if i'm constructing these folks out of my subconscious i must say ... i am impressed with my mind's creative abilities. the detail and individual emotional contrasting is amazing! so yeah, i participate in the internal dialogue as if it's real, at least in that moment, just in case something profound is going on besides a psychotic break or something. the thing is ... i'm not experiencing any heavy emotional or mental stressers so why would my psyche be breaking? generally, i'm a content person. **shrug**
Sounds like a a reasonable argument in favor of sanity. Human experience is highly varied and sometimes amazing. The one you're dealing with is pretty damned interesting - as is mine and Riesay's. You might consider keeping a journal. Who knows - someday you might want to write a book about it or something, like I'm doing...
lol why do you assume i want to "conquer it"? do i seem distraught to you? delusion or no, i find the phenom interesting. you seem more hostile toward my "condition" than i am. why is that?