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Great idea...let's continue the discussion.
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Excellent, excellent perspective.

This was amazing!

Many mental 'illnesses' can lead to sensory hallucinations, and it's likely that everyone knows someone with some such condition. There are neuroscientific reasons for these hallucinations, where sensory information is cross-linking with different portions of the brain. A person experiencing this is certainly abnormal, though the result can be harnessed as advantageous for a person to gain superhuman powers. A person who hallucinates halos of color around numbers gains an extra pneumonic for remembering them, a person who perceives a halo of color around people gains insight towards some of their own hidden feelings toward that person.

Many of us have problems dealing with traumatic events, or finding a healthy way to emotionally cope with problems. Some of us find healthy ways, and many of us don't, though it's an internal struggle for all of us. In her case, her condition let's her have an EXTERNAL struggle with her problems, which she uses as a tool to help her cope with otherwise unmanageable emotional issues.

Kudos to her for helping to remove some of the stigma for some of these mental disorders! I wish she could expand her horizon to people with other disorders, to help them achieve the same level of understanding and benefit.

Great comment! You raised many interesting points.

One important thing to note that the modern human mind is essentially like an advanced piece of software which runs on antiquated hardware (sort of like running Skyrim on an N64). As many as 7% (though I don't currently have a source for this at hand) of the general population are estimated to experience auditory hallucinations, and surprisingly enough, most of those people aren't psychotically structured. This is why auditory hallucinations are seen as a secondary, rather than primary, symptom of schizophrenia.

Rather, what is actually happening is that the antiquated hardware, for whatever reason, is showing its faults. The primitive responses which tend to stay dormant for most people are finding their way to the surface.

In other words, the truth of schizophrenia is that it isn't so much an illness as it is a regression to a more primitive version of the human mind. And as both you an Eleanor pointed out, this can have both pros and cons. Another example of a broken system which can produce contextually positive results is eidetic memory, which causes a person to be unable to forget.

And this is also something that I find to be quite interesting, because what it means is that mental illnesses are, in fact, contextual illnesses. A schizophrenic person is essentially "sick" because he/she has a bug in his/her software and as a result is unable to download patches from the rest of society. Go back 3000 years and it is entirely possible that auditory hallucination would have been the norm.

The reason for the stigma being so harmful is that it simply focuses on the wrong thing. It takes a secondary symptom, i.e. hearing voices, and makes it seem like the actual disease. In truth, the auditory hallucination is just an externalized version of a process which is actually internal. Where most of us simply have thoughts, the schizophrenic might instead hear a voice. To turn stigmatize those auditory hallucinations is to potentially cripple the sufferer's ability to perform basic maintenance on themselves.