[Article] The complex lived experience of schizophrenia diagnosis: a thematic analysis of online forum posts

Retraction Note: The complex lived experience of schizophrenia diagnosis: a thematic analysis of online forum posts

Current Psychology -

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.

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...

What Are Psychedelic Entities?

The beings people often meet while using psychedelics resist tidy explanations.

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.

How to spot a psychopath: ‘It’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat’

People with persistent predatory personalities cause an inordinate amount of pain. Recently, our shared understanding of them has grown – and it could help protect us

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.

To experience Zen-like awakening, try going the headless way | Psyche Ideas

Try to point to your true self as you’d point to a brick wall, and other experiments in Zen-like awakening

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 ...

Who Gets to Define Human Suffering?

As psychiatry concedes long-standing criticisms of diagnosis, a deeper question emerges: What now justifies its authority over human suffering?

Pluralistic: Three more AI psychoses (12 Mar 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

"AI psychosis" is one of those terms that is incredibly useful and also almost certainly going to be deprecated in smart circles in short order because it is: a) useful; b) easily colloquialized to describe related phenomena; and c) adjacent to medical issues, and there's a group of people who feel very strongly any metaphor that implicates human health is intrinsically stigmatizing and must be replaced with an awkward, lengthy phrase that no one can remember and only insiders understand.

Why “Autism Is Not A Spectrum” – But Not For the Reasons You May Have Heard

By Dr Chloe Farahar | Autistic Researcher, Project Manager for Learning Disability and Autism at Kent and Medway Mental Health NHS Trust, and Founder of Aucademy CIC The Spectrum Was Never Fit For …

Agent Psychosis: Are We Going Insane?

What’s going on with the AI builder community right now?

“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.

Intrapsychic humanism

Intrapsychic humanism is a comprehensive general psychology and philosophy of mind that provides a new understanding of what it is to be human. Intrapsychic humanism is a nonderivative depth psychology that provides a unified and comprehensive theory of child development, psychopathology, and psychological treatment.