Are the "Details' in this question a form of Schizophrenia?

There is no way a lay person would be able to diagnose schizophrenia. This type of thing is best left to psychiatrists who have been trained for years to recognize the symptoms. Why on earth would anyone want to put a psychiatric label on the behavior of another person?

What I would say about the person you have described is that he/she needs to find a competent psychiatrist and receive a proper medical diagnosis, followed by the individual treatment program prescribed by the physician.

A proper clinical assessment is required to evaluate a person exhibiting symptoms like those you describe. A trained clinician must do this. Clinical Psychologists, some specially trained social workers and Psychiatrists possess the education and clinical experience to assess and treat individuals with such symptoms.

No competent clinician would offer a diagnosis in public and on-line.

This person probably requires professional care and should be referred to a competent and licensed clinician.

I make no claim to be a psychologist or psychiatrist, and I am not capable of diagnosing anybody, but I do know of one of the methods that is used to diagnose mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, of DSM for short. The criteria for schizophrenia in the DSM can be found here
Even with this information, I must echo the previous answers and say that for any real diagnosis, you need a professional, and don’t trust anybody else’s answer until you can find someone competent to answer your question.

I am a Psychology Major and from one paragraph one cannot diagnose a person at all. If you really want diagnosis you would have to have client history, as well as family history , along with current stress issues. The paranoia could be Paranoid schizophrenic which is a higher organized schizophrenia but also has features of psychosis (loss of touch with reality). They could also be borderline personality disorder, or anti social – I am taking words from your paragraph. The best thing to do would be to visit a psychiatrist not a psychologist as if it is schizophrenia or a more serious mental illness, medication would be prescribed.

@Just_Justine Well, dang. You beat me to it.

@daemonelson loll, it’s not often I come fist, so I will be smug for a minute hehe

@YARNLADY: There is no way a lay person would be able to diagnose schizophrenia. This type of thing is best left to psychiatrists who have been trained for years to recognize the symptoms.

you show the same unwarranted superstitious trust in the priest caste that I find typical. shrinks as little gods.

psychiatrists study medicine and then they study psychology. they do the rounds, read the literature (which I have also read) and see what other shrinks tend to call schizophrenia or not schizophrenia. it does take years of talent and skill to learn medicine. doling out psychiatric diagnoses requires nothing of the sort.

at a medical bookstore where I browsed while bored I found a cute little blue book, less two hundred pages of large text in all, with literal checklists telling shrinks how to diagnosis people according to the DSM and mnemomic acronyms to facilitate this. the schizophrenia one: UFO AIDER. (I fortunately have forgotten the others.)

quite seriously, you could drill a smart 12 year old or a mildly adult for a month and not by observation or by reason but by simply remembering the DSM diagnoses. with the cute little blue book, perhaps even less time.

it has that much to do with medicine or with understanding what goes on in another person’s psyche.

lastly, before anyone calls me ignorant or uniformed on this, just test me. just try me. see if I have just given an opinion because I don’t know any better.

@LeopardGecko: and, by the way, don’t you claim psychology as one of your Fluther fields of expertise? wouldn’t you know the answer to this question already?

the OP illustrates what I see as a primary function of psychiatric diagnoses. you use them to scapegoat. @LeopardGecko does not like this person. so as best as I can determine goes for (at most) validation or (at least) confirmation.

you know, that taking what you said at face value, people who alienate others often feel paranoid, with good reason. if people really do dislike you, then you suspect them of acting on the dislike. it tends to snowball.

@Just_Justine I guess coming first can be a good thing :P

@daemonelson shock!! horror loll

@Ria777 You are overlooking or ignoring the fact that any diagnosis has to take into consideration that symptoms might be the manifestation of a tumor, or other easily treatable medical disorder, and nothing to do with mental illness at all. To believe that any person over the age of 12 could accurately diagnose a serious illness, either mental or physical is a dangerous proposition.

yes, it does require great knowledge and experience to determine if a person has a medical problem like a tumor.

given a person who you know does not have a tumor you only need to have obtained a copy of the DSM, read it and understood it, and you know essentially all you need to know about how to go about labeling a person as one thing or another.

(if you wanted to, you could also go in the DSM and fake one of the labels by doing no more than following the descriptions. [of course they’d regard your act as more convincing versus more rare.] I don’t think you could fake, say, diabetes if they gave you a blood test.)

there you have the difference between medicine and psychiatry.

the above assumes, of course, that the person putting on the label even has medical knowledge and has even considered the possibility. a number of critics of psychiatry have argued that people with psychiatric diagnoses have nutritional problems. I agree. Omega 3, 6 and 9 have helped me a lot.

finally I want to repeat Thomas Szasz in saying that you cannot have mental illnesses because the mind does not belong to the body. if you then want to say that perhaps I don’t believe in neurological syndromes, well, I do. I do believe in them. I do not believe in “mental illness”.

I would say which politician is he/she

@Ria777 While I do agree with you that the DSM is fallible, the DSM is not as basic as you make it seem. The DSM works on a multi-axial system; The first two axes are what you would commonly think of when discussing mental disorders. Axis one is clinical disorders, and axis two is personality disorders and mental retardation. Axes three and four are just what you are saying that it doesn’t have. Axis three comprises medical conditions and physical disorders, and axis four deals with psychosocial and environmental factors. Finally, the fifth axis is the global assessment of functioning. So, to properly use the DSM, you need to have all the information about all of those factors. including a person’s medical background

I agree with you in that many aspects of psychology are in need of empirical evidence like that which exists in the medical fields, but that is not to say that all of psychology is fallible, and it certainly doesn’t point to the existence or nonexistence of mental disorders.

The bottom line is that this question assumes and I believe rightfully so that schizophrenia is a legitimate illness, and one still needs to fully understand the situation, like psychologists are trained to do, to make a valid diagnosis.

when I said “the DSM”, then I oversimplified. I meant the parts of the DSM where a medical screening cannot determine their presence, which rely on definitions hammered out through committees, by consensus.

now in the world of science, do the work out accepted fact by politicking? they do not. with the DSM, they do.

your reference of schizophrenia does not mention that schizophrenia has gotten broken down into several different subcategories. schizophreniform, etc. and how do you work out the difference? opinion. you can’t prove this scientifically.

imagine future archaeologists poring through the ruins of this civilization after it has ended. they go through the DSM and find it useful in determining what our society considered right and wrong, in determining our values and what it does or does not believe.

a number of the entries in the DSM have to do with treating people badly. they have to do with immoral or evil actions, with not having a conscience. no more scientific than this.

in purely sociobiological terms (I pass no value judgements), we could make an argument that homosexuality and transsexuality happen because of fetal brain development. still, even though from a strictly scientific POV, gay people and transsexuals count as having neurological atypical brains, the DSM does not list gay people as having a pathology and while it does list transsexuals as having a pathology, I expect that they will change with the new edition.

why does it not? because societal attitudes have changed (and rightly so). the DSM does not rest on science. it rests on societal acceptance.

I finally want to say that the upcoming edition of the DSM would have made so much behavior canonically “pathological” that it caused great controversy in psychiatry. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring that they label as much as possible as pathological so that they can market their products. (this does not even just apply to psychiatry. it applies to the signs of aging etc.)

The fact that the DSM relies on social acceptance is because social acceptance is a key factor in determining mental illness. Coming up with a decent definition of mental illness while leaving out societal views and norms is impossible. an illness is a problem. If there is no problem, then there is no illness. A problem is something that is in need of fixing. So, if there is no perceived need to fix something, there is no problem, just as what happened with homosexuality in the DSM.
In short, it is impossible to discuss mental illness without considering societal views. Personally, coming from a scientifically minded person, I too find this disconcerting, but I have realized that this is the only reasonable way to deal with mental illness.

@ekans I tend to agree with your assessment with one exception, people who are so mentally disturbed I don’t use ‘ill’ they literally cannot survive without help, aquiring food and such. A disorder that severe is not dependent on societal norms.

define “survive without help”. by a strict definition of the term, only those of us who know how to grow their own food or hunt could truly survive without help.

@ekans: Coming up with a decent definition of mental illness while leaving out societal views and norms is impossible. an illness is a problem.

by your definition,then regimes which have accurately labelled dissidents as, as you would call it, mentally ill, have had every right to do so. I could give you other examples.

and this goes back to my definition of a mental so-called illness as a “medical” label for behavior other people don’t like. (this could include, by the way, behavior I don’t like.)

@Ria777 I agree with you, the definition of mental disorders is very flawed, but my point is that, no matter how hard I look, I have not been able to find a better definition. Personally, I think that using the current definition is better than having none at all.

If anybody could come up with a more reasonable definition for mental disorders, I would definitely go with that one as opposed to the current definition. I am not tied to the current definition, and hold many similar reservations about it as you do.
Perhaps a better definition does exist and I am just ignorant of it, but as far as I know, the current definition is the best that we have, and I think that it is better than nothing.

your point about medical labels for behaviors that the majority don’t like is also valid, but I also see no reasonable way around that, which goes back to the fact that the definition is inherently flawed, but not better alternative exists.

Still, I am not a psychologist by any means, I just have an interest in the field, so I am sure that there is much that I don’t know, and there may be a better definition that I don’t know of.

@ekans: your point about medical labels for behaviors that the majority don’t like is also valid, but I also see no reasonable way around that, which goes back to the fact that the definition is inherently flawed, but not better alternative exists.

so what if the label “mental disorder” no longer existed? rioting in the streets? what negative consequences do you suppose would arise? why the attachment to the label?

when humanist religion did away with the concept of heresy, do you feel that they removed a vital component of faith?

Still, I am not a psychologist by any means, I just have an interest in the field, so I am sure that there is much that I don’t know, and there may be a better definition that I don’t know of.

you know real science doesn’t depend on definitions. it depends on evidence. psychologists study the psyche. you can’t derive scientific proof from it.

to address this more directly, though, psychologists don’t have a better definition than laypeople. I believe you would find more skepticism towards the idea of normality and disorder in psychologists than you would in the general population.

@Ria777 The only reason why I am attached to having the label of mental disorder is that, without it, the problems that people have would not be taken seriously. Having the label of mental disorder means that the people who need help can get it. If we had no label for these people, then how would they receive any help? The first step in helping people with with any problem is finding out who has the problem.

To address your point of psychology not being an exact science, you are right to say that it isn’t. However, we recognize that there are people that have problems that we can’t determine medically, problems like schizophrenia. To address this problem with what knowledge we have involves the use of the already discussed definition of mental disorders. To do nothing in the face of these problems to me seems ridiculous. Thus, I see that my best choice is to follow the definition and label, even though they have many problems, I believe that they help more than harm.

To address your final point about psychologists being skeptical of the idea of normality and disorder, I am not a psychologist, but, based on my own learnings in the field, I think that both the definition and label of mental disorder are necessary.

I just have to say that to claim getting rid of labels would somehow magically make everyone “normal” is simply not true. That’s just like saying if you never invented the word cancer, people would never develop it.

With mental disorders, the problems appeared first, then a name was developed to describe it, not the other way around.

@YARNLADY: I just have to say that to claim getting rid of labels would somehow magically make everyone “normal” is simply not true.

if you go over my previous posts you will find that I never claimed this. I mean that a) people internalize the labels, identify with them and even act in stereotypical ways according to the nature and that b) it affects in profound ways the way that the “helping professions” operate.

That’s just like saying if you never invented the word cancer, people would never develop it.

imagine the reverse scenario then. let’s say you had a malady which doesn’t show up on medical tests. it has such-and-such symptoms. you would have people claiming to have it and acting as if they had it.

I don’t say that people don’t have problems, though. I think that without realizing it they have applied psychiatric diagnoses to themselves which act as a distorting mirror so that they can tap into their own innate wisdom.

@Ria777 thank you for clarifying that for me. What you are saying here ^ makes sense. It sounds the same as Medical Student Disorder, which students develop when they begin to identify with the illnesses they study.

I see it a lot in various questions and answers that talk about narcissism, crazy, Alzheimers and terms that should be reserved for professional diagnosis. It seems to be a fad to misuse professional jargon in everyday speech. Some descriptive terms have to be changed or discarded because of the negative connotations that they take on, such as idiot, dumb, retarded and other words that have been similarly misused.

@YARNLADY: It sounds the same as Medical Student Disorder, which students develop when they begin to identify with the illnesses they study.

‘zactly. and the pharmaceutical companies encourage this by encouraging us all to see shrinks to see if we “have XYZ”.

what you call a fad I call a permanent (unless reversed) shift in thinking.

I see it a lot in various questions and answers that talk about narcissism, crazy, Alzheimers and terms that should be reserved for professional diagnosis.

‘kay. do you understand that I don’t believe in “diagnoses” such as narcissism? mental disorder or mental illness means “crazy”. just a pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific word for the same thing. like crazy, it also has no validity. I don’t believe in exchanging this for another pseudoscientific label. I do believe in reclaiming our emotions as emotions not as “conditions”.

@ekans: BTW, I will get back to you. not enough time right now.

I would say that this describes someone with a personality disorder, a malignant Narcisist or a Sociopath. Whether this is a form of schizophrenia, I wouldn’t like to say but from what I have learned, this is a clear description of someone who is mentally disordered, these are all classic traits.