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A study carried out by The University of Western Australia has provided compelling evidence that congenital/early cortical blindness – that is when people are blind from birth or shortly after—is protective against schizophrenia.
The unusual discovery has fascinated scientists and may lead to a better understanding of what causes schizophrenia – a question that has baffled scientists for decades.
Schizophrenia is characterised by symptoms such as losing touch with reality, hearing voices and having visual hallucinations. However, despite numerous bodies of research, the exact cause still remains a mystery.
Lead author Professor Vera Morgan from the UWA Neuropsychiatric Epidemiology Research Unit in the Schools of Population and Global Health and Medicine said they also found no one with congenital or early cortical blindness had developed any other psychotic illnesses.
Can being born blind protect people from schizophrenia?
British Psychological Society Digest Report
[Abstract]: Blindness, Psychosis, and the Visual Construction of the World
[Source]: The University of Western Australia
I didn't know about this nor did I make such a connection. Has anyone here observed this connection, that blindness prevents schizophrenia ??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @06:14AM
I don't see any connection. But I'll ask Hyde.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 25 2019, @06:16AM (1 child)
Hang on a bit, I need to ask my blind alter-ego when he gets back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 25 2019, @06:18AM
There [soylentnews.org] he is! Now, quick, ask him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Funny) by coolgopher on Friday October 25 2019, @06:17AM (3 children)
It seems like this might need a double blind trial to confirm...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday October 25 2019, @06:41AM
The blind asking the blind?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Funny) by coolgopher on Friday October 25 2019, @07:09AM (1 child)
Insightful? It's supposed to be Funny! Are you blind? ;P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @10:40AM
Nope. Just one of your egos.
And stop taking to yourself, it pisses us off.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday October 25 2019, @06:32AM (19 children)
My theory: When people really struggle with something (e.g. blindness), they don't have time to dwell on misery and develop mental health issues. This one problem soaks up any spare thoughts. How many people in 3rd world countries develop schizophrenia? A lot of people develop mental health problems for lack of other challenges.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @06:46AM (1 child)
Lol Common Sense Man, saving the day 50% of the time!
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday October 25 2019, @09:36PM
That sounds like a proverb...
(Score: 1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Friday October 25 2019, @07:51AM (3 children)
Interesting idea. My thinking takes a different path though. Vision is an important part of our being. It affects our thinking, our actions, our reactions to the world around us, it determines our abilities. The thinking is key to my way of thinking. Schizophrenia is what - a crazy way of thinking? Vision affects thinking. In fact, a substantial portion of our brain is dedicated to interpreting visual input. It's almost like those connections in the brain associated with vision are responsible for schizophrenia. Or, if not responsible, they are at least important to the development of schizophrenia.
Seems like someone should be doing some research to map what a schizo's brain looks like, compared to this subgroup of blind people. That subgroup is probably important - congenital and/or early cortical blindness. You can't take some old bastard like me, who is slowly going blind as a senior citizen, and make him part of that subgroup.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @07:58AM (1 child)
Yes, Runaway, we know. However, we are just not completely convinced it actually is "thinking."
Ah, of course! Your knowledge of neurophysiology is nearly as great as your understanding of law! Bravo, Runaway! With intellectual giants like you on SoylentNews, all our problems will soon be solved and American made gratis again.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @10:57AM
Hear, hear!
Not enough, that's for sure, but one can't ask more from Runaway.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday October 25 2019, @09:08PM
No, schizophrenia is not "crazy thinking". Schizophrenia is when one has trouble processing what reality is.
Does that mean people have trouble literally seeing what reality is? Well, auditory hallucinations are far more common than visual ones (outside of drug induced schizophrenia).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @08:50AM (3 children)
If this map [wikipedia.org] is correct the data don't support your theory. The page contains a link to the WHO data the map is based on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @10:47AM (1 child)
Awww, you and your facts!
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Friday October 25 2019, @09:51PM
GP wrote:
That is a conditional statement rather than a "fact". A fact is something that we absolutely know to be true, like 1+1=2. A WHO map does not fall in the same category. There are all kinds of sampling and bias issues that could turn this map on its head. The proper term for the map would be "evidence" against my theory. Oh well, it's just a theory that may or may not be true.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:17AM
Thanks for the map, but I find it hard to believe that it's possible to know the true rate of schizophrenia in poor countries where it usually goes undiagnosed. As usual, the justification for this essential claim is hidden deep in some reference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @10:43AM
Many. Most of them die young, others become prophets. Just think how many of those are mentioned in the bible.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday October 25 2019, @12:52PM (1 child)
my theory:
from a darwinian point of view, multiple personalities and self destructive voices in the head are deeply unhelpful for the survival of the individual.
They also are difficult to implement from an information system POV.
It makes more sense to give credit to countless and trans-cultural empiric theories of demonic possession. So the brain acts like an antenna more than a self contained computer. A part of the antenna being damaged, resulting in cortical blindness, prevents the demon to enter the body.
How I got to this theory? when you have discarded the impossible, all that remains...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 25 2019, @01:18PM
You could extend that theory by exploring its exceptions.
Everybody around you is dying of undercooked pork meat causing massive parasitical infections... Well 1 in 1000 people occasionally being nutty about claiming God speaks to them, even a blind dog finds a bone once in awhile, and "God told us not to eat pork" is gonna save a lot of unsanitized poorly cooked lives. A couple thousand years later its turns out to be a kinda useless idea, but at the time being nuts was a positive survival instinct.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 25 2019, @01:14PM (2 children)
That's pretty interesting AC. I had almost the opposite hypothesis where from an EE-like communications theory perspective, vision provides tons of super high bandwidth input signal and enough of some kinda bab signal might help overload or otherwise distort something. Therefore lack of stimulation in the brain would result is lower odds of something breaking.
I suppose a fMRI of a blind dudes brain would be interesting. Some kind of FFT to gauge total activity of various blind and non-blind brains vs mental health result and see if there's correlation. I suppose stuff like anxiety disorders and OCD stuff would max out brain activity (probably?) and those might be co-morbid so that issue would have to be researched.
The mental model of an analog computer full of bazillions of neurons emulating opamps or the other way around would seem to imply lower input levels would result in lower dysfunction levels?
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:05AM (1 child)
From personal experience, I know that self-discipline is more difficult to maintain than discipline imposed by external constraints. I don't know anything about life with congenital blindness, but can imagine that the external constraints are far more significant than average. That is the basis for my theory. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @06:27PM
I've lived with the condition since late teen/early adult age and for various reasons I went many year without treatment. I have an analytical mind and a very good memory, and I've spent lots of time observing and trying to make sense of the phenomena distorting my reality when I'm psychotic.
I've come to basically the same conclusion as you from my first-person perspective. I think the signal, the hallucinations, while garbage, is still actual perceptual signal. Just distorted beyond recognition. I've described my conditions to others as being as like the whole world being turned on hi-gain. Amplified beyond what my hardware was designed to handle and with a horrible SNR. That's how I perceive it.
I've been on meds for years now and luckily, they're very effective for me. I'm now leading a relatively normal life. But even without acute symptoms, I find that my gain having been trained by years of trying to make sense of shitty signal seems to have given me something. I have a very acute perception of the world around me.
Make of that what you will. Maybe I'm just a blabbering AC psycho.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday October 25 2019, @08:41PM (1 child)
IIRC (not too certain) being impoverished is not associated with a decrease in mental health issues, but only with their being detected and treated. Certainly schizophrenia was known among the serfs during the middle ages. Some came to the attention of the religious authorities.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Saturday October 26 2019, @04:27AM
That sounds like a claim that "mental-health advocates" would promote. For anything promoted by advocates, an extra dose of skepticism is warranted.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday October 25 2019, @09:02PM
Which would be fine if mental health issues were purely developed from behavior. Some may be, as talk therapy helps many. But it is also known as fact that many conditions arise out of imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain. Or at least, when the right neurotransmitter is found by trial-and-error there are patients who make good recoveries. If they are medication-compliant. This article [psychologytoday.com] suggests that this aspect - medication compliance - may be what caused 1970's and 1980's disparities between better recovery rates. (i.e. third world countries may be able to compel medication compliance instead of the United States cycle of 'put them on it, they get better, they get released, they stop taking the meds, they come back in again.') Although Psychology Today is a popular source, the argument sounds interesting.
And a lot of people develop schizophrenia in 3rd world countries. Interestingly, these numbers suggest [wikipedia.org] that the United States ranks 181st in terms of disability-adjusted life years. There is a lot of debate concerning actual prevalence rates. Not for the least that in many countries admitting to a mental illness means one is immediately stigmatized. If you lived in a country where acknowledging your problems (like being schizophrenic) would mean a lifetime of commital to an insane asylum (if not just being shot) you might not want to admit you have problems either.
At any rate, I'd have to say that your theory that mental disability develops because of lack of challenges is flatly wrong, unless you have proof otherwise. Until then, I'll just chalk up your thoughts to that same stigmatism that keeps people quiet about the subject instead of getting needed treatment.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @03:25PM
It seems strange to me that we openly accept that how we use every muscle in our body has a direct effect on our body. Exercise, your muscles become stronger and more effective - don't exercise and your muscles atrophy and become dysfunctional. Or for your digestive system eat too much and you become fat, eat too little and you become a stick. Yet when it comes to our brain suddenly everything has to be entirely outside of our own control and something that is primarily to be treated through various psychotropic or other pharmaceuticals.
What I mean is imagine trying to discover the cause of better performing muscles if we ignore the obvious reality that it's how we use them. You'd find all sorts of weird correlations. People who work outdoors would have more effective muscles. So perhaps muscles are caused by fresh air or sunlight? People who bike or walk would have more effective muscles than those that drive or ride everywhere. Again perhaps evidence that fresh air causes muscles. And once again you'd probably also notice a general trend that those who live in urban areas have less effective muscles than those who live in rural areas. And I'll be damned, once again providing evidence to the notion that fresh air causes muscles. And even once the fresh air hypothesis came up empty (if it ever did..) you could undoubtedly find countless other interesting correlations that are strong enough to hint strongly at causality. Yet of course none would, because nothing else would be causal.
When you look at the trials of psychotropics such as those used to treat depression or various other issues, their performance is generally barely better than a placebo. And that is really telling because the side effects of these drugs are completely brutal. If you take e.g. prozac/fluoxetine you know you're getting the real thing because it messes you up something fierce early on. This completely destroys double blinds since it becomes rapidly apparent to both the subject and experimenter who is getting the real deal and who's getting sugar pills. So in fact the slightly better than placebo results could be explained almost entirely by this effect alone.
So what might cause things..? What if these issues come down to how we literally think. Not even in the sense of a disorder but in the sense of something that can be remedied by learning to train our brain in a different fashion. I realize how off-kilter this might sound, but consider even things such as the placebo effect itself. It is very real, and also very real evidence of just how powerful one's own mind truly is. One problem with studying this is you'd like to analyze individuals who develop schizophrenia, but before they do so, and perhaps compare how they think contrasted against normal or blind individuals. In what fashion do their thought processes and behaviors similar, and in what ways do they differ? Perhaps the secret is not in trying to decrypt 'brain plaque' but determining if there are individual behaviors that drive such.
Anyhow, just intriguing to consider that the medical theory of humorism persisted for thousands of years even though it was 100% wrong. The lesson I'd take from that is that we often become too dedicated to the status quo when it works at least reasonably well. It may be the case that our entire serotonin theory for e.g. depression is completely wrong, but because things like SSRIs at least kind of work, sometimes, on some people - we just kind of keep rolling with it. And indeed treating imbalances in the 4 humors would have similarly kind of worked, sometimes, on some people - and so people just kept rolling with it. If it wasn't for microscopes proving the germ theory and and for all, it's very likely that today we'd still be treating our 4 humors while thinking ideas outside of this fold were hokey or eccentric.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday October 25 2019, @07:02PM
Are you sane then? Or just a little crazy?
Vision is very CPU intensive. The brain doesn't have enough resources to maintain sanity after dealing with our lying eyes. I mean, first it has to invert the picture, constantly adjust the exposure, trying to ignore all the garbage floating around inside... It's hell, man! And all these lights, flashing and blinking... I can't stand it anymore!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..