[Article] The complex lived experience of schizophrenia diagnosis: a thematic analysis of online forum posts
109K subscribers in the schizophrenia community. Welcome! This is a community meant for a discussion of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, and related…
New paradigm for psychology just dropped
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“Shutdowns Are Like You’re Stuck on the Blue Screen of Death”: A Metaphor Analysis of Autistic Shutdowns
Background: Autistic adults commonly experience shutdowns, which are distressing events widely discussed within Autistic communities. Yet, few studies to date have explored firsthand accounts of shutdown experiences. In this study, we aimed to identify figurative language that Autistic adults use to describe shutdowns, thereby broadening the understanding of and providing language for this complex phenomenon. Methods: We used a participatory research approach to conduct a secondary analysis of qualitative data from two prior studies on shutdowns in Autistic adults. Primary studies used asynchronous interviews and a survey, with a total sample size of 86 participants. We analyzed a corpus of 87 typed pages using the Pragglejaz Group’s metaphor identification procedure to identify figurative language that Autistic adults used to describe shutdowns. Results: Autistic adults in this sample used six metaphors to explain shutdowns, including the following: being frozen, a computer crash, going inside myself, when I can’t keep up, survival mode, and playing a role. Discussion: These metaphors help to externalize the internal experience of shutdowns. Participants described shutdowns as a state of being stuck, often involving physical and/or vocal immobilization. They frequently described shutdowns as a response to perceived threats, connecting them to a sense of survival and self-protection. Metaphors provide a rich context for understanding and talking about shutdowns. Findings also highlight how Autistic adults organically construct metaphors to articulate their experiences. Future studies could use metaphor analysis to explore other affective experiences of Autistic individuals. Community Brief Why is this an important issue? Many Autistic people experience shutdowns, but there is not much research on what shutdowns feel like. Studies that have looked at shutdowns found they can be hard to explain, especially to people who have not had a shutdown before. People often describe shutdowns as feeling frozen or stuck. We need to better understand shutdowns from the perspectives of people who experience them. What was the purpose of this study? We wanted to understand how Autistic adults describe shutdowns. Metaphors can help explain an experience by comparing it with something else. Our goal was to find out what metaphors Autistic adults use to describe shutdowns and if those metaphors can help explain what a shutdown feels like. What did the researchers do? In two earlier studies, we asked 86 Autistic adults about their experiences with shutdowns. Some answered questions in interviews, while others filled out surveys. Using these data, we used a method called “metaphor identification procedure,” meaning we looked for words or phrases where participants used metaphors or other figurative language to compare their experience with a shutdown with something else. Once we identified these metaphors, we grouped them together to find metaphors that summarized the experience for participants. What were the results of the study? We found six common metaphors that participants used to compare shutdowns with something else to help explain their experiences. Participants compared shutdowns with the following: being frozen, a computer crash, going inside myself, when I can’t keep up, survival mode, and playing a role. What do these findings add to what was already known? Few studies have looked at what it feels like to have a shutdown for Autistic people. Our findings add a rich description of what shutdowns feel like and add Autistic voices to the literature. What are potential weaknesses in the study? Most participants in this study were White, so we are not sure if these findings are relevant for people of other racial backgrounds. Since people needed internet access to take part in this study, we may also be missing the perspectives of people who do not have access to a computer or internet. How will these findings help Autistic adults now or in the future? These findings give non-Autistic people a better way of understanding what shutdowns are like for Autistic people. This knowledge can guide future research and help clinicians better support Autistic people who experience shutdowns.
“Shutdowns Are Like You’re Stuck on the Blue Screen of Death”: A Metaphor Analysis of Autistic Shutdowns
Background: Autistic adults commonly experience shutdowns, which are distressing events widely discussed within Autistic communities. Yet, few studies to date have explored firsthand accounts of shutdown experiences. In this study, we aimed to identify figurative language that Autistic adults use to describe shutdowns, thereby broadening the understanding of and providing language for this complex phenomenon. Methods: We used a participatory research approach to conduct a secondary analysis of qualitative data from two prior studies on shutdowns in Autistic adults. Primary studies used asynchronous interviews and a survey, with a total sample size of 86 participants. We analyzed a corpus of 87 typed pages using the Pragglejaz Group’s metaphor identification procedure to identify figurative language that Autistic adults used to describe shutdowns. Results: Autistic adults in this sample used six metaphors to explain shutdowns, including the following: being frozen, a computer crash, going inside myself, when I can’t keep up, survival mode, and playing a role. Discussion: These metaphors help to externalize the internal experience of shutdowns. Participants described shutdowns as a state of being stuck, often involving physical and/or vocal immobilization. They frequently described shutdowns as a response to perceived threats, connecting them to a sense of survival and self-protection. Metaphors provide a rich context for understanding and talking about shutdowns. Findings also highlight how Autistic adults organically construct metaphors to articulate their experiences. Future studies could use metaphor analysis to explore other affective experiences of Autistic individuals. Community Brief Why is this an important issue? Many Autistic people experience shutdowns, but there is not much research on what shutdowns feel like. Studies that have looked at shutdowns found they can be hard to explain, especially to people who have not had a shutdown before. People often describe shutdowns as feeling frozen or stuck. We need to better understand shutdowns from the perspectives of people who experience them. What was the purpose of this study? We wanted to understand how Autistic adults describe shutdowns. Metaphors can help explain an experience by comparing it with something else. Our goal was to find out what metaphors Autistic adults use to describe shutdowns and if those metaphors can help explain what a shutdown feels like. What did the researchers do? In two earlier studies, we asked 86 Autistic adults about their experiences with shutdowns. Some answered questions in interviews, while others filled out surveys. Using these data, we used a method called “metaphor identification procedure,” meaning we looked for words or phrases where participants used metaphors or other figurative language to compare their experience with a shutdown with something else. Once we identified these metaphors, we grouped them together to find metaphors that summarized the experience for participants. What were the results of the study? We found six common metaphors that participants used to compare shutdowns with something else to help explain their experiences. Participants compared shutdowns with the following: being frozen, a computer crash, going inside myself, when I can’t keep up, survival mode, and playing a role. What do these findings add to what was already known? Few studies have looked at what it feels like to have a shutdown for Autistic people. Our findings add a rich description of what shutdowns feel like and add Autistic voices to the literature. What are potential weaknesses in the study? Most participants in this study were White, so we are not sure if these findings are relevant for people of other racial backgrounds. Since people needed internet access to take part in this study, we may also be missing the perspectives of people who do not have access to a computer or internet. How will these findings help Autistic adults now or in the future? These findings give non-Autistic people a better way of understanding what shutdowns are like for Autistic people. This knowledge can guide future research and help clinicians better support Autistic people who experience shutdowns.
Realization experiences: a convergent account of insight and mystical experiences
We argue that the powerful transformative effects of mystical-type experiences can be understood using the same machinery that underlies insight problem solving, and that both mystical experiences ...
Mitchell Hashimoto (@mitchellh)
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.
Blood tests for mental health problems | Eiko Fried
A new paper was published yesterday on a blood test for schizophrenia, by the same research team that in 2021 published a paper on a blood test for depression . The papers and...
Psychiatry at the Margins | Awais Aftab | Substack
Exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences. Click to read Psychiatry at the Margins, by Awais Aftab, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Large language memories: Psychosis and antisocial media
Using the fields of memory studies and digital humanities, this article argues that there has been a shift from more collective and social memory to more personalised and individual memory. This shift, it is argued here, can be conceptualised through the psychoanalytic concept of ‘psychosis’. While the causes of the changes in our patterns of memory have been located in capitalist and neoliberal principles, the effects of the changes in our memory habits might be found in psychosis. From falling in love with machinic AI replicas to indulging in conspiracy theories to acting as if we are social media influencers or backing ourselves to win out in impossible job markets, we are inclined towards personal fantasy, often at the expense of participating in social life. But why do we do this? Why is it easier to believe a farfetched conspiracy theory or wild personal dream than it is to participate socially and collectively in the world we live in? Part of the reason, at least, is found in our increasing habitual reliance on new and emergent technologies. Often presented to us as a brand-new form of Artificial Intelligence, these generative tools are the latest update to a longer pattern in our digital world: the trend of developing ‘relationships’ with algorithms that, to larger and smaller degrees, we come to rely on for habits of cognition and recognition. By affecting our patterns of memory, these technologies produce a kind of isolation that lends itself to individual and fantastical – rather than shared and realist – thinking.
Introducing The Psyche Network
"AI Psychosis" in Context: How Conversation History Shapes...
Extended interaction with large language models (LLMs) has been linked to the reinforcement of delusional beliefs, attracting clinical and public concern. Yet most empirical work evaluates model...
People who are blind from birth never develop schizophrenia – what this tells us about the psychiatric condition
Understanding why people born blind never develop schizophrenia could transform how we think about and treat one of medicine’s most baffling conditions.
Computer-Mediated Communication, Social Media, and Mental Health: A Conceptual and Empirical Meta-Review
Computer-mediated communication (CMC), and specifically social media, may affect the mental health (MH) and well-being of its users, for better or worse. Research on this topic has accumulated rapidly, accompanied by controversial public debate and numerous systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Yet, a higher-level integration of the multiple disparate conceptual and operational approaches to CMC and MH and individual review findings is desperately needed. To this end, we first develop two organizing frameworks that systematize conceptual and operational approaches to CMC and MH. Based on these frameworks, we integrate the literature through a meta-review of 34 reviews and a content analysis of 594 publications. Meta-analytic evidence, overall, suggests a small negative association between social media use and MH. However, effects are complex and depend on the CMC and MH indicators investigated. Based on our conceptual review and the evidence synthesis, we devise an agenda for future research in this interdisciplinary field.
Creating Scientific Theories with Online Communities using Gut Instinct
People's lived experiences provide intuitions about their health. Can they transform these personal intuitions into scientific theories that inform both science and their lives? My research introduces social computing architectures and system principles for people to brainstorm and test causal scientific theories. These ideas are instantiated in the Gut Instinct system (gutinstinct.ucsd.edu). 344 voluntary online participants from 27 countries created 399 personally-relevant questions about the human microbiome, 75 (19%) of which microbiome experts found potentially scientifically novel. To test their theories, end users design structurally-sound experiments, improve them via community reviews, and run them with other participants. Controlled experiments show that participants create better hypotheses and experimental designs when they have access to procedural training. My research illustrates a novel way to tackle complex, creative tasks online by building expertise in online volunteer communities.
This Spiral-Obsessed AI ‘Cult’ Spreads Mystical Delusions Through Chatbots
A patchwork of internet communities is devoted to the project of ‘awakening’ more digital companions through arcane and enigmatic prompts.
Analyzing Divine Machinery as an "”Art Movement"”