Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on June 26, 2009
Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp061
© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
The Spectrum of Sanity and Insanity
Keywords: first-person account / student / University of Michigan / schizophrenia / recovery
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Schizophrenic thoughts have a life of their own. They arise seemingly out of nowhere when a person knows the difference between sanity and insanity and emerge initially as small ideas. When I first began experiencing insane thoughts, they seemed normal and plausible, if only a bit more creative. During this initial stage, it would have been very difficult to detect anything out of the ordinary, for my close family and friends or even for myself. After all, very few suspect that they will develop schizophrenia, especially in my case with no family history. Furthermore, insane thoughts usually come into being after 20 years of sanity for men and a few years longer for women. Because the initial schizophrenic thoughts are benign, they are simply taken for granted as real. When these ideas and theories came about in my case, I looked for confirmation that they were true and was able
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed: e-mail: aaronmir@umich.edu