Hey Doc,
I’m a high functioning paranoid schizophrenic. (Sorry to have hidden it from you--I didn't understand my fears before.)
I have a BS degree in Behavioral Science, so I already understand a good deal about this type of mental illness, and have long suspected this was the correct diagnosis in my case, but my paranoid delusions were preventing me from fully accepting or understanding my cognitive disorder until this past week.
It is my new understanding that I have been experiencing delusional auditory hallucinations which I now believe to be rooted in a cognizance of cognitive dysfunction, which led to paranoia about the untrustworthiness of my thoughts, which created a need for me to compensate by delusionally believing that my true (masked) intelligence is immeasurably high--compensating (maladaptively) for what is actually hidden insecurity about my cognitive dysfunction.
I want to talk to somebody who can help me learn more about what I (and others) am dealing with, and hopefully, someone who can help me deal with it in better ways than I have been so far. Because my compensatory delusion appears to be all about protecting my vulnerable ego from admitting that my cognitive dysfunction is real, my pathology makes it almost impossible for me to simply ask a doctor (an expert who knows more about a subject than me) for help managing my defective thinking. Deep down, what I fear most is the exposure of my shame.
Being in the position of having to ask someone who is more of an expert than I am for help with this actually makes me feel so unbearably vulnerable, that I although I have long consciously held the intention to obtain assistance with my known problem, I had always found myself inexplicably incapable of following through with an actualized action--until this last week, when a compassionate doctor who knew I was hiding a need finally figured out how to break through enough of my walls to help me to find the courage to begin to tell her about the real help I actually need.
But as I come to understand the nature of my paranoia and my compensatory delusions, I am realizing that there are already experts all around me who know a great deal more than me about all kinds of things I desperately need help with, and since I understand that delusional thinking is definitively irrational, I’m beginning to see through my illogical fears, and I’m beginning to understand that the folks in the white coats are unlikely to judge me the way I am delusionally paranoid that they will (even if my pathology really does preclude the possibility of me feeling emotional security in this entirely logical conclusion), and I want to use this insight to achieve actualization of intentions I’ve had all my life, but which I’ve been unable to realize, due to my paralyzing fear.
Can you help me, Doc?
Remastered Notes from Underground: Reassessing Schizophrenic Sanity
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Paronomasia could be a key.
Let’s see if we can’t agree on what words mean.
Paronomasia may be the key.
When I’m not in my right mind, I still can completely competently maintain a sinistral point-of-view.
Paronomasia can be my key.
(left perspective logic outside gate function lock create inside illogic view right)
Paronomasia must be in key.
(right view illogic inside create lock function gate outside logic perspective left)
Through the keyhole always sees the key from in between.
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A Sick Sense of Humor (Laugh at My Pain)
(As I have always told my readers of my writings: none of my puns are ever not intended.)
I have written millions and thousands and hundreds and scores of words in my life. Writing isn’t just my favorite game, it has also always been my therapeutic exercise for coping with delusional thoughts, as a paranoid schizophrenic. Of course, I haven’t always fully understood everything I was saying at any given time, which isn’t merely a question of some normal latent Derridean differance, but rather alludes to the fact that, until very recently, I haven’t recognized intentional illusions in my text to be delusions.
I now believe I have been hiding allusions to my delusions in alliterative, paronomastic poetry--scattering the seeds of my insanity across the postmodern landscape of the internet, grounding schizoid roots in the discursive subtext of nominally normal conversations, and waiting to reap whatever fruits should ensue. All the while I truly feared that some sinister dissociated genius in the left side of my head was abusing my right mind with some incomprehensibly mantic metaphysical power of language--simply by adding puns (triple entendres) as an extra layer of meaning (which spoke about my own centrality in universal meaning itself) to my text. It has been, unfortunately, a really frightening experience at times; luckily, frequently, it all also seemed extremely comical to me. And to tell the truth, the clearly disordered logic of my former delusion still sounds perfectly sound to me. But in the slightly saner reading I am now writing over my erstwhile reality, I can see how the hidden entendres were obviously simply hidden in my choice of signifiers, and extraneous latent meaning which related to me could only realistically be interpreted by someone with access to all of my highly paranoid and delusional right brain thoughts.
What I’m beginning to think was really happening was that my logical left brain, which is presumptively in charge of knowing the meaning of words, knew logically that the words my chaotically creative schizophrenic side was requesting were for delusional stories, and my logical mind was trying to send messages about how ridiculous my delusions were, so my left-brain would slip puns (bad jokes) into my writing by choosing esoteric words that I delusionally thought only a “genius” logophile could simultaneously comprehend in multiple senses, containing some kind of “inside” pun--which was actually initially intended as rational (or not) commentary on my own delusional narrative.
It has made my writing very turgid, prolix, and idiosyncratically (angrily) solipsistic--I’ve always had a need to explicitly (and condescendingly) tell any audience who reads me that I’m not writing for them, I’m choosing my words for ME. When I’ve written for an outside audience, like for a professor or in a discussion forum on the internet, I’ve frequently been criticized for confusing word choices, and I’ve often responded (over-emotionally) that I was the only person who had the right to determine the best words for whatever I was trying to say.
I’d guess that it’s possible that my logical left brain might not know how to tell any jokes other than puns, due to lateralized functionality, so--like all puns--my hidden, rationally-minded jokes are all most likely bad “dad” groaners in some theoretically objective sense, but since my primary coping mechanism for dealing with schizophrenic vicissitudes has always been irony/humor, the puns have always seemed to me to be subjectively funny to a degree that has objectively been nothing less than crazy: I have been laughing maniacally at “inside” puns, written into discursive formats, which I thought only I was intelligent enough to “understand”--because it fed my “genius” delusion, which was really compensating for a masked cognizance of cognitive dysfunction; but I was also injecting dysfunctionally-loaded communication patterns into my streams of thought, because I desperately needed a laugh, and that is how irony works.
The circular logic of “life is a bad joke” humor seems to me to reflect the circular logic of this emotional cycle, through which I believe my left and right hemispheres may have remained tenuously connected to some sense of “sanity.”
I’m pretty sure I’m saner now than I have ever been, because I now finally can give a rational explanation for my insane sense of humor: I think my rational left brain has been literarily heckling my crazily confabulatory right brain whenever I would write, and because it made me laugh so much, I’ve been deludedly believing that I had the most brilliant sense of humor in all of written history, because that’s just how important my laughter was to me as my coping mechanism for all of my distress. That was the only way my left and right brains could obtain a healthy mutual understanding of each others’ very disparate trains of thought/meanings--through puns--which would unfailingly cause me to howl with glee at the literary irony. (OK--I admit that still sounds pretty crazy.)
But in the end, all those reams of paronomastic logodaedaly were also nothing more than a mess of schizophrenic puns.
I truly believed at the time that there was a chance that I was a living conduit of the Nonexistent God of Irony, revealing divine Jokes which had ironically been coded into the metaphysical fabric of Meaningless Reality as a punishment for my lack of faith in my true non-existence, but now it seems...almost as likely...that it was all just my ill-humored logical “right mind” trying to help “the sinister side of my mind” see another side to things, other than the delusional meanings, and my deluded brain’s surprise at seeing the logical side (or vice-versa) would result in the relief of a moment of levity and laughter. My puns made my craziness seem entirely logical, in a way that not even a vastly more intelligent person than myself could possibly understand, and laughing helped me cope with all the consequences of craziness.
And since I was putting my schizophrenic puns in as a third layer of meaning at a minimum, the “superficial” double entendre was usually enough to confuse much of the audience as to what my doublespeak might mean on any given topic, which fed my delusions of incomprehensibly high intelligence, while permitting me to safely engage in “laughter therapy” with the voice in my head by writing unintelligibly esoteric subtext into the third (or more) layer of the puns!
I was always right--just as I always blissfully maintained--that none of my interlocutors could fully understand my idiosyncratic style, and I can now see that this is what created so much conflict with the more intelligent interlocutors, who occasionally were piqued by my pride so far as to insist they were capable of understanding all intelligible meanings in my words, but who clearly couldn’t see the relevance of additional schizophrenic meanings which were not available to objective, rational minds--and thus my glee when they (like me) seemed mad whenever I condescendingly explained that they just couldn’t understand my extra layers of meaning...
I’ve been openly joking about exactly how crazy I am in my writing for years, all the while laughing crazily that no one else could see the irony! lol
At any rate, it seems that my pathology is written into my writing, and now that I’ve gotten the glitch in my glibness, maybe I can learn to write with more control over my literary stutter and my “Toorhetorical Syndrome.”
And maybe this insight also means that I should apologize to some people for acting like a gaslighting, schizophrenic troll on the internet all these years, but it makes me really happy to think that it may also mean that my highly unusual ability to break through my schizophrenic delusions might very well be related to my unusually obsessive love of bad puns!
I may have been deluded about my intelligence, but my delusional mind now is claiming that it might have been somewhat closer to the mark in regard to my sense of humor, which the voice in my head has always said is well beyond insanely funny--the voice has long maintained that there aren’t two ways about it: my sense of humor is truly sick!
And I finally now get that I’m not smart enough to be the sole universal arbiter of whether or not an esoteric joke is truly ironic, no matter how insanely funny any given punchline may seem to be when it really connects with me.
I still don’t know if I’m thinking perfectly: I now honestly believe that a poem I wrote about paronomasia is a literal key with which I can unlock my formerly fettered sanity--I honest-to-God believe that the words are an actual magical spell. Maybe that means this is all just part of a new delusion for me--but I’m really perfectly OK with that. It suddenly seems like it just doesn’t make any sense at all to have to always know best, since I know now that all that really ever meant to me was that I had to suffer fits of maniacal masochistic laughter for the rest of my meaningless mortal absurdity, while a voice patiently explained to me--seemingly quite reasonably--that someone like me simply doesn’t deserve to be happy.
I’ve decided I’m going to try not to always be so certainly right and ornery. I think I’d simply rather be a different kind of me--even if it always seems dumb to me, my priority going forward is going to be to be happy.
-seekingprometheus
Proposed Treatment Plan
So...I hypothesized that the auditory hallucinations are a result of my emotionally dysfunctional right brain requesting verbal information from my logical left brain.
The hallucination is occurring in the short term memory, so a cognitive treatment in the long term memory could provide a workaround.
Proposed treatment: I crafted a rational verbal response to the emotional need (I'm OK, I'm awesome, and there is nothing wrong with me), and encoded the script into my long-term memory as a repeating response to emotional requests for verbal information for a duration exceeding the span of the short term memory (15 seconds) whenever stressors activate a need for an emotional response in the cognition processes underlying judgement.
Results:
Day one of the trial: Subject claims he doesn't feel crazy for the first time ever.