How the Brain Can Recover: Rewiring the brain: A conversation with three pioneers of neuroplasticity
Could you describe in plain language (without Jargon) what happens within the brain that causes a person to hear voices please? As I believe something physically happens within the body to make this happen. Thanks
I think this is still an area of intense research - and they don’t have an answer yet to your question.
@sasone2one while studies are still going on to find the root cause of hallucinations as related to schizophrenia and no really concrete answers are out there yet I found this article on the subject and I understood it for the most part and thought it was interesting and informative enough to share …
They don’t know for sure, but there is a video on this page that has MRI evidence of how the brain possibly works differently when hearing voices other people don’t hear:
This article is part of the basis for my constant hope.
I believe its possible that if my son does keep challenging his brain, whether its video games or whatever, his brain will work to try to find ways to work around his schizophrenia.
The other part is the concrete fact that a large percentage of scz sufferers do experience some sort of relief from the of the effects of their schizophrenia in the residual stage.
I can’t find my stats on the people with scz who were tracked for years after their release from a mental institution. Nearly everyone became slightly better in the residual stages.
In another article, a sufferer wrote that it felt like a fog lifted off his brain in the residual stage.
Dr E Fuller Torrey’s book lists the predicting factors for prognosis, after the factors he writes, “These are merely statistical assertions of likelihood. There are enough exceptions to make anyone humble about predicting”.
In the case of schizophrenia, hope is a reasonable emotion.
I read The Mind and The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M Schwartz and Sharon Begley on the recommendation of MortimerMouse on the Diagnosed boards. He’s got sz but he is progressing through his studies (last I read he was one step away from a PhD in psychology). It is largely concerned with research on OCD (which resembles/is the same as intrusive thoughts in sz) and what the individual can do, how one can actually retrain one’s own brain and effectively ‘close down’ the malfunctioning circuits and build or reinforce better ones. My son and I had some very beneficial discussions out of it. We try to approach it as building good ‘habits’ step by step. So, for example, my son is reading more as a result. That’s supposed to be very beneficial for everybody’s brain. It has to be said, though, that a lot of this kind of work is much more easily achieved while on APs. In fact my son recently voluntarily reverted to depot injections from tablets because he forgets the tablets and his concentration is much better when he’s on APs at a steady dose.
Looks good - I think I’ll check it out:
It’s pretty hard going at times (for a non-scientist like me, at least) but it’s worth reading.
Here are the stats I was referring to, I wish I knew where I had seen them. When I find stuff like this I write it down, I am sorry I don’t have the source…
When people with scz were discharged from the back wards of a Vermont mental hospital they were tracked at 10 and 30 years after release. These are similar to numbers we have seen before.
10 years
10% are dead, mostly suicide
15% hospitalized
25% improved with extensive supports
25% much improved
25% fully recovered
30 years after release:
15% dead, mostly suicide
10% hospitalized unimproved
15% improved but require extensive support network
35% much improved relatively independent
25% completely recovered