Disorganized Behavior in Schizophrenia - Day 32 of "100 Symptoms"
Channel: nednednerB the Schizophrenic
Date: 2019-05-05

What falls apart besides things? Ambitions, principles, and societies. For individuals, speech falls apart, and my focus here: behavior falls apart.

Disorganized speech is common in Schizophrenia and psychotic disorders. Words and sounds and meanings switch places on the fly, rearranged by chaos. Similarly, when behaviour is disorganized, actions, tasks, and goals get mixed by chaos.

Here's an easy example of everyday disorganized behaviour: I might be working on a task on my computer, and I'll suddenly be hit with thought about my target goal in an hour. I might quickly feel like I'm late and I might move back in my chair and even get up to put shoes and coat on.

However, I'll note that I'm early, go back to my task having lost focus and motivational inertia. Therefore, I end up having to piece back together the needs of my task. Eventually I get back on track with my regularly scheduled behaviors.

There is something that happens sometimes in the brain that kind of rudely jerks the priorities of the attention to another place and time than the one I am in; I am in that place, at that time.

In more extreme situations, such as 2002, in the middle of the Black Rock Desert at the Burning Man event, I was untreated and unsupervised. At one point I was completely disorganized. Drawing circles and strange symbols in the sand, carrying objects in a cumbersome array, ignoring real human interaction.

A few days later, there was a sand storm picking up, and I nonchalantly headed away from the desert toward the small town nearby. One person yelled at me for asking for help, another kind resident gave me watermelon. I found eventually the place my mom was in contact with, looking for me, where I talked to my mom on the phone about my plans to hitch hike to the coast and back to Canada.

I was in a "say yes to everything" kind of mood, and not connecting to the accurate picture of what was happening to me. Little did I know at that time I was severely dissociated from what had actually been happening to me for 2 years.

Real trauma and abuse are part of the experience of many individuals with mental health realities. My therapist told me the statistic that as many as 1 in 4 girls are sexually abused and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused, by someone older and in a position of influence.

The most natural behavior of someone being attacked slowly and fiercely by a predator is  disorganized behavior. There is no sane way to take sexual abuse. Dissociation and disorganization are basically the most likely outcome of abuse.

Maybe it would even be possible to predict the past likelihood of abuse based on the severity of symptoms of dissociation and disorganization. At any rate, we should seek more understanding of the location of real stress factors in the situation of a psychotic patient, who is experiencing disorganized thinking and behavior.

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You're listening to nednednerB the Schizophrenic.
That was Day 32 of "100 Symptoms."

Bye for now.

I have schizophrenia every day. Even though I was diagnosed in early 2000s, I experience and manage symptoms daily. So here are "100 Symptoms!"

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