hi! i'm working on a story where one of the main characters is schizophrenic. i've been doing a lot of research on portraying him respectfully, but not a lot talks about what things like disorganized thought processes feel like from the inside. i obviously want to write him without sensationalizing him, but accurately, so would it be okay if i asked you some questions about your own experiences with cognitive symptoms like that? if that's too personal, i'm sorry and i understand!
Hi there!! First off, that’s SO COOL!!!! There is SO little even remotely accurate and/or positive representation out there, so I’m always SUPER excited when I hear about someone’s project to write some.
disorganized thought from the inside, hmm, I’m going to try and explain some of my experience with it, but keep in mind that my disorganized symptoms are fairly mild.
First of all, disorganization usually gets worse with the level of positive symptoms. So some people are perfectly coherent while not in an episode, but then completely incoherent during an episode.
For me, though, I used to have lowkey disorganized symptoms all the time, and this is another possible presentation.
For me it’s like... my brain is slippery. I’m skiing down a mountainside, carefully zigzagging back n forth between obstacles, but the hill is too steep and it’s going too fast, and I keep slipping and gliding down the mountainside, finding myself in a new spot. So I lose my track, my trail of thought. And maybe a part of me was left behind in the spot I slid from? And it tentatively tries to carry on, but the more immediately available part of consciousness has already skiied on from the new spot.
And maybe each time this happens, new faint tracks appear. And maybe sometimes those tracks fall and crash, or sometimes they slide down into the main consciousness, and I go “OH!”, and remember where I was going originally at that time. These are the times I’ll blurt out an answer to a question asked hours ago, without any context.
And at the same time as all these tracks of *thought* are occuring, there is a right ole ruckus of noise. I don’t think in words, but in concepts. The words in my brain are mainly echolalia and little bits of old children’s song, repeated on top of each again, again and again, ad nauseum.
Imagine I’m skiiing down a slippery mountain and I have a one-man orchestra on my back.
And then sometimes I hit a rock on the track, and I stop dead in the track, and the music might even stop, and there’s complete silence as I stare into space. I don’t know what I was doing, I barely know who I am, I’m just a set of eyes, trying to decipher what I was doing from the direction of my gaze.
So yeah. It’s basically like.. there are too many tracks, and they intermingle, and everything gets jumbled up until I lose all track. I will think a thought, and while thinking it, another track will think “what if I forgot this track of thought”, and a third track will panic about forgetting, and the original trail is lost.
It’s frustrating.
Followers, can you help this writer out by describing your own experiences with disorganized thought?
Cat
