Is something mentally wrong with my friend?

Lots! keep in the loop- hopefully her mother has an eye on her and the teachers, too. Who knows what could have caused her to behave so differently but she definitely needs to be kept an eye on, her mother could take her for an evaluation if it gets much worse. I hope she’ll be alright-

@trailsillustrated Apparently she’s in the hospital in the moment for ‘testing’
I just wanted to understand what was wrong with her

Sounds like a schizophrenic break, off the top of my head.

who knows but thank god she’s in hospital, I agree with avooooo but it could be so many things. go see her. let her know you care.

Definetly something is wrong there. Manic-depressive, schizophrenic, bipolar, depression, etc all have some of the symptoms you mentioned. I am not a doctor though, and neither are most of the people you will find on this site. Its good she is in a hospital.

Hamlet strikes again. (It is an incredible piece of literature.)

It might be a response to stress. You mentioned she’s a straight A student. That doesn’t just happen; people need to work for that, and usually pretty hard. Her sudden refusal to accommodate teachers and hand in homework could be, like, a psychological reaction formation or a value shift that would help her avoid the stress of school.

Hope she’s okay. If you want to counteract Hamlet then you can send her The Tempest or something, and hopefully she’ll find solace in a character who is able to control the world around him.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like schizophrenia to me. I rather think that’s what she’s getting evaluated for right now. If someone walked in and told me that list of symptoms, that would be my tentative diagnosis and I’d put them into the fast lane to be evaluated by the psychiatrist so they could get back in touch with reality ASAP.

@nxknxk Hahaha. I dont know what it is with Hamlet… But I am really worried about her.
She’s never always about School though.. It has never seemed to take over her life, you know?

@avvooooooo Schizophrenia is treatable.. but only if you take medication, right?
I heard it’s hard to treat..
Does it matter about race? I heard that black people have a higher chance of being schizophrenic (might be a myth). She is half black and half Japanese.

@naivete The right medication, the right therapy… It takes a while to find. And then people start feeling like they don’t need to be on their stupid meds and go off them… Yeah. Very hard to treat.

I don’t think that its more prevalent in one ethnic group over another. But if I had to guess I’d say it was more prevalent in Caucasians.

This happened to me, pretty much.

The summer between sophomore and junior year I started experimenting with different belief systems. I had always been very religious, and shared the conservative political views of my parents. After shedding those beliefs for different ways of thinking, I applied my questioning to more than just religion and politics, to the way I viewed my life here on a tiny planet in a vast cosmos.

In the fall I began falling deeper and deeper into the existential void. The absurdity of everything is laughable. I began to occupy myself with questions: What is the purpose of life?, Why is there something rather than nothing?, How can we know anything? How can people get angry over trivial things?

Rather than do my homework at night, I’d read Nietzsche, or Herman Hesse novels, or Kirkegaard, or anything. Or I’d write in my journal, or just sit and think. This was the time I stopped watching television, and I read more during that time than ever before. I felt what I was doing was more important than school work, and, to a large extent, I think it was. It was liberating to discard the scale of importance that most people used, and simply use my own scale. To me, the most important thing one could do was contemplate life, and the universe, and all those ‘big questions’ that don’t have answers. Some of those answers can be found.

What really happened to me was this: I stopped taking my beliefs for granted. I was willing to consider any worldview, but I refused to accept any of them, because there was no certainty in any of them. I wanted truth, but the universe did not yield any answers to its secrets. I don’t think the universe knew either.

After you hit complete detachment from the common view of “the world” and laugh about it for a while, the only thing left to do is to regain that view. Slowly I started getting irritated by things that people did, rather than puzzle over them. Catching the bus on time became important again. I became normal again.

In my case it was a healthy journey, one that I am a much better person for. Once you reach the point where you can be sitting at the dinner table listening to your family talk about the most ridiculous, commonplace things as though everything in the world makes perfect sense, while you can’t even be sure of your own existence, because everything in the universe (the universe!) is so strange and amazingly complex and doesn’t explain itself, there’s nothing left to do but stare at the walls and laugh. I suggest having a long talk with your friend. See what is on her mind. Because she does sound a lot like me. I was a very quiet, straight A student, I gave up going to a lot of after school activities (except, not surprisingly, philosophy club,) and I could see Hamlet being an excellent trigger to thoughts like these.

She may simply be going through something that some people are lucky enough to go through. Before she ends up with a the label of a disease or disorder applied to her and medications that will fuck with her brain prescribed, try to find out if she’s just experimenting with a new way of looking at the world. If she’s going through the marvelous thing that I went through, it won’t last forever, and she’ll probably be herself (or an improved version of herself,) in several months time. Or maybe she isn’t going through what I went through at all, and maybe she does need help, or treatment. But, if this is what she’s going through, (it sounds quite like it to me,) she is probably right in saying that you’ll never get it. It’s something you need to experience to understand.

@nxknxk Fighting fire with fire? I like it!

Oh, heavens, a psychotic break! I’ve experienced those before as a witness; I was a child living with an adult who’d go through this every so often, and I had no idea what was happening when I was smaller or what to do when I was older. Something is wrong with your friend, and I’m glad she’s in the hospital for observation.

There is evidence that suggests that all the common mental illnesses are just slightly different forms of the same thing. There is one gene that is common to all of them. So the exact diagnosis could be problematic, depending on the prejudices of the psychiatrist. They will provide meds, but they don’t know what will work in advance, so they may have to try a dozen or more meds before they get something that works. If it is schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder, one person in my group has done well with geodan.

Anyway, you can educate yourself at DBSA. Find out what to expect and how you can help. She needs good friends, and I’m glad you’re asking about this. Far too many friends disappear as soon as someone goes crazy. Or sometimes we make our friends disappear. That’s what I’ve done. I miss them now, but I can’t seem to get myself to take steps to get back together. I don’t know how I can explain what happened, and I don’t know if they will want to understand.

Anyway, stick beside her. Let her know you care and plan to be there no matter how nasty she might be. Be prepared for he to be quite nasty for a while until her meds start working. My recovery took more than a year. It can take longer, too. Know that she is lucky to have a friend like you, and some day she’ll be able to express her appreciation.

I really do not think that this poor girl has schizophrenia. It is a very serious mental condition and is not easily diagnosed. Also one most be perceiving distortions such as hearing voices or seeing images that are not real. You did not mention a symptom similar to this. It is a life-long condition and although it is treatable it is not curable (not in the US or developed nations anyhow).

I think that @nxknxk has the right idea. She is probably over-stressed. It also sounds like a possible reaction to trauma. Hopefully that is not the case. I’ve actually seen a few teens go through this sort of behavior. In most circumstances it was a cry for help. It was simply a way of getting attention so that someone would do something to help them. Often these teens just don’t know how to find the right help and go through an internal crisis that causes them to have odd behaviors. I am hoping that is the case here.

I think what i’ve seen many teens go through is what @petethepothead describes very well. “After you hit complete detachment from the common view of “the world” and laugh about it for a while, the only thing left to do is to regain that view. Slowly I started getting irritated by things that people did, rather than puzzle over them. Catching the bus on time became important again. I became normal again.”

Please keep us updated.

@RedPowerLady As I actually have training in diagnosing mental disorders instead of relying on a couple of undergraduate psych courses, I think I know what I’m talking about. I interpreted the “spend an hour staring at the wall and laughing periodically for absolutely no reason” as a possible hallucinatory symptom. Also the “laughing out loud in class during moments of complete silence” could be indicative of hallucinations and/or a break with reality. “All of you don’t get it.. You wont ever get it” might be a paranoid delusional symptom. In addition, the other symptoms that @naivete describes (disorganized behavior, possible avolition) fit with possible schizophrenia. If you own a DSM IV, read the criteria. I think that telling @naivete that her friend might possibly have schizophrenia based on the many schizoid-type symptoms is not at all unreasonable. I also think that her wanting to find out more information about things her friend might have is not unreasonable. No doubt a diagnosis will be provided by someone who has examined this girl, but it is entirely possible that this is a diagnosis they might come back with.

If you have an alternative possible diagnosis based on your knowledge of disorders and human behavior, why not propose it instead of trying to shoot others down without cause?

@avvooooooo You can attack every answer I post and I will be unaffected. I have a right to disagree with your opinion and in no way said anything horrible towards you. I simply said I disagree that the girl has schizophrenia and this is why.

In fact this is Fluther. The whole idea is to get different perspectives…...

As far as your personal attacks are concerned I am asking very seriously that you knock it off.

@RedPowerLady The fact is that she did mention symptoms that could be interpreted as hallucinatory, had you read the question. Your disagreement made a point that did not take into consideration the facts posted in the question. I addressed that point and pointed out the symptoms that do indeed point to possible schizophrenia, expanding on my previous opinion. I asked that if you have something other than “not that” to say that you say it.

My problem is someone with very little training in mental health pretending like she knows what she’s talking about. If you get some magical master’s or lots of knowledge past a Bachelor’s level courses, fine. Until then pretending you know quite a lot about a subject matter based on very little training is wrong. I’ve had the training, I know what a boost of knowledge it is over the bare minimum provided by undergraduate courses. The difference is that I don’t flaunt it as “proof” that I know what I’m talking about.

@avvooooooo please keep your personal attacks in private messages, this is disrupting the thread, oh by the way that GA was accidentally me

@RedPowerLady Which one? I have several in this discussion. If you address something in a discussion from an place of “expertise” on a question, then questioning said “expertise” on said discussion is not off topic.

@avvooooooo: Certainly you’re flaunting something, though.

As far as I’m concerned we’re all in the dark here because we lack access to/direct observability of @naivete‘s friend. No one questions your credibility, but none of us has anything but a recounting of the situation. It’s limited information and it limits you as well as the rest of us in our attempts at diagnoses.

I’m not schizophrenic, but I have eaten lunch in high school by myself, and I have stared at walls for lack of anything prettier to stare at, and I have laughed at personal jokes or amusing memories that often come to people in moments of solitude like that, and I have drawn suspicious looks from other students for it. The only thing I haven’t done is tell people they “don’t get it”, but I think most of us would be liars to say we’ve never thought something similar at least once.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the girl is stable, of course; likely there’s something troubling her profoundly. And given ample information, you would, avvoooetc., probably be the best equipped to offer an opinion. But considering how little we know, your suggestions seem, um, anachronistic.

@nxknxk @avvooooooo @RedPowerLady Thank you all for your opinions.Nxknxk: This isnt something she would normally do as she has many friends and she isnt one to stare at walls and laugh randomly (I forgot to mention the crazed look in her eyes) @petethepothead : Your answer was the one that seemed THE MOST similar to what I was trying to describe. I really do hope it’s just something she’s going through in term of her opinions and who she is as a person. Thanks for the reassurance!

@nxknxk Do you see my education posted on my profile? No? You never will. It doesn’t have to be, doesn’t need to be, the fact that I know what I’m talking about speaks for itself. I don’t have to post what I’ve done to try and lend weight to my knowledge. She was asking what could be wrong. I provided that. I was told that there was no basis for my idea, I showed that there was. My knowledge speaks for itself, I don’t have to post my educational achievements on my profile to try and back up what I say.

@naivete Hope she’s doing ok, I predict that someone who’s as good of a friend you are will be very helpful to her in dealing with whatever, even if she has a hard time accepting help. :)

It sounds more like a drastic change in worldview than a sudden development of a psychological disorder. But from your description, I could easily see my way to either supposition. How has it turned out? Is your friend still acting oddly?

@avvooooooo If you “don’t have to post what [you’ve] done to try and lend weight to [your] knowledge” then it’s kind of hypocritical of you to claim that some of your knowledge is more accurate because you have had a certain amount of education in a field, or because you have read a book a few times. And isn’t saying something like “I actually have training in diagnosing mental disorders instead of relying on a couple of undergraduate psych courses, I think I know what I’m talking about” making precisely such a claim?

@wildpotato She was in the hospital for a couple of days but now she’s back at school and seems to be fine! I’m glad it wasn’t something serious

Thank you all!