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

The only conclusions I've come to are one of the following.

1. They improve cognitive abilities in some way we aren't good at measuring. 2. There is something about our modern environment that is more likely to trigger schizophrenia which has more recently increased the fitness penalty these genes confer.

We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.

We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.

Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.

For me psychosis feels like pattern matching going on extreme overdrive, while at the same time memory goes to shit. It's truly an awful illness, and what's worse is that the current medical treatments are bad. I've been fortunate enough where I can get by on a low dose olanzapine, but for many people they simply don't work at all.

Even though I'm doing well enough to function normally and hold down a good, well paying job, it's impossible to find a partner. If I were to have kids, I would have to go through one of the embryo prescreening services. I am strongly in support of these screening services - the disease is truly horrible.

There has been little progress on treatments for schizophrenia, the mechanism of action of these drugs has remained the same for decades. The side effects are almost as bad as the disease, which is why so many schizophrenic stop taking them. The only novel medication recently released is Cobenfy, which I have not tried yet.

Personally I am holding out hope that schizophrenia has some basis as an autoimmune disease. There was a cancer patient who had a bone marrow transplant and ended up being cured: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/opinion/sunday/schizophre...

I wonder if schizophrenia (or perhaps psychosis) could be in some way analogous to the LLM temperature function becoming disregulated?

I mean, what is the extreme opposite of psychosis? If it is matter of degree, which it seems to be, then there is probably a tuning mechanism. Perhaps too little and you fail to account for factors that might not be apparent but might be guessed or inferred, too much, and too much seems plausible.

If so it would be possible to have a great deal of different “causes” given the tight and complex coupling of biological mechanisms.

A schizophrenic member of my family argued in divorce court that her husband, a leading physician at one of the most famous medical institutions in the world, was secretly involved in outrageous nefarious activities.

The stories were all fiction but she was so convincing that the judge awarded her a ruling in the divorce that ruined her husband financially and took an emotional toll.

Right after the time I was diagnosed (~36), I started to become weirdly good at some stuff.

Music, for example. I've been playing for almost two decades and couldn't progress after a certain level. This changed almost overnight, and I started to learn new instruments very quickly (now I play guitar, bass, drums and piano). I'm not a genius at them, it's not what I'm trying to say. It's just that the pace at which I learn is very different from when I was younger, I can do things I never imagined being able to do.

Somehow, I also acquired some ambidextry. This might be due to learning the instruments. I now can write with both hands (not at the same time, dominant hand is still faster and more acurate). I also developed a second, completely different handwriting (now I have two "fonts" I can use naturally).

I got worse at dealing with people. Everyone seems to be in a haze from my point of view, and it discourages any kind of meaningful relationship. I can pretend though.

I am highly skeptical of the idea that any genetic component is involved in all of this (my father was ambidextrous though, but he acquired it in childhood), it seems purely psychological. I am also skeptical about the stereotypical triggers people often associate schizophrenia to.

Last year I was reading about Havana Syndrome. That was the thing that most resonated with the kinds of psychotic events I had. Weird sounds and voices that seem to come from nowhere, dizziness, balance problems, insomnia, headaches. By the time I got to a doctor, these effects were not there anymore (they last a very short time, at least for me). I was diagnosed by describing them to the psychiatrist. Since the first episode, it has happened again a handful of times. I have learned since that Havana syndrome is not a thing anymore, but there are no official explanations other than "it's likely to be psychogenic". I also wouldn't qualify for it (apparently, only diplomats and spies had it).