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How Culture Influences Schizophrenia
Inside Schizophrenia
The Importance of Posturing in Psychosis
Every person who experiences hallucinations and delusions are not going to experience them in the same way. Culture can really influence how you experience these issues. It can also experience how we express something that is happening to us. What was really happening was I was dissociating and going inside of my head. As a kid, I didn't know that. I just knew I could go inside my head.
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Speaker 3
One of the things that it sounds like you're saying is that hallucinations and delusions are not a one size fits all. That every person who experiences them are not going to experience them in the same way. And that culture can really influence how you experience these issues.
Speaker 1
It can also experience how we express something that is happening to us. When I was little, I would do something that was called watching TV in my mind because I was a little kid. And that that's just what I called it. That was what I thought was happening. And that's how I would describe it. What was really happening was I was dissociating and going inside of my head. It was not healthy. It was weird. As a kid, I didn't know that. I just knew I could go inside my head. What's interesting and South Asia, many people with psychosis who do the exact same thing, relate it to religion. They relate it to meditation, to finding an inner detachment. What they're describing though many times is part of their psychosis, but they don't know how else to describe what's happening is that I've fallen into a meditative state because that's what the culture talks about around them.
Speaker 3
It really seems like when people talk about these symptoms, it's all in your head. Are there any physical symptoms of hallucinations and delusions?
Speaker 1
What most people are going to say is, well, yeah, the person starts acting crazy or they start talking to no one. That's what we assume, right? That is a sign somebody is losing touch with reality. Very incredible. There is a Japanese mental hospital who observed something and there were different patients who had schizophrenia specifically who were doing very odd posturing. It was something that is Japanese, traditional Japanese settings. It is not something you would see in a hospital and it is not something you would do towards clinicians. What I mean by posturing is one of them is you drop down to the floor with your face on the floor and you don't move like you're begging for forgiveness. A lot of times we've seen this in mafia movies. The guy drops down like, please don't kill me. It's similar to that, but it's an old traditional type of Japanese movement. The thing, they start asking these patients, why were they doing it randomly? What they found out was that it was in response to their hallucinations and the worse the patient got, the more formal they got in their posturing. When they got anti-psychotics, they stopped doing those weird postures of dropping to the floor. The idea behind what was happening was that as the Japanese person lost touch with reality, they started to express themselves more formally. That was showing that their social cognition was going. They didn't know what was the appropriate way to act around people around them. It's funny because the minute I read that, whenever my brain starts to get off, I get incredibly apologetic. Because it's like my brain, I'm trying to think and I keep saying I'm sorry, excuse, and I just immediately thought that's what's happening. But if you don't know that and you have a person with schizophrenia who keeps dropping to the ground when you come by, you're going to think it's catatonia. You're going to think there's some other situation going on there when in reality, no, this is in that person's mind the correct way to respond.
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