Schizotypy and Drugs

Drugs. Everyone knows what they are, nearly everyone has seen them, and most people have taken them in one form or another. A lot of people like to do drugs, and people with SPD are no exception to this. I'll talk about two forms of drugs: medication and recreational substances.

Medication is usually given to people with SPD, as with almost any other psychological disorder. What isn't common knowledge is that there is no specific treatment regimen for SPD, and in fact there aren't really any drugs that can alleviate the symptoms of the personality disorder. Most people with SPD realize that medication is by and large ineffective and that the desired goal of the treatment (which is to "fit in") is basically impossible, leading them to be overall skeptical of taking any sort of prescribed pill. This is actually fairly common among personality disorders in general.

Where recreational substances come into play can by and large vary. The person with SPD could have gotten into drugs early in life through friends or information on the internet, or he or she could have started experimenting in adulthood out of curiosity and psychonautic exploration. He or she may think that these substances are what truly helps them cope with their problems, or they may see them as being a temporary means to an end, such as using DXM to gather insights and a sense of perceived divination. When confronted about their drug habits by friends and family, they will probably make a statement about how they were/are doped up on various legal medications with plenty of side effects, and that they don't see how their prescribed medication is any less harmful than the recreational substances that they use.

In some ways, this is true. Many legal medications have a wide range of side effects that could in fact impair the patient in the long run. These more or less go unnoticed or ignored, which is dangerous to the patient. With illegal substances, however, there are no standards of manufacturing as well as little to no research in how they impact the body. You could very well be putting something totally different in your bloodstream than what you intended, due to the common condition of pharmaceutical contamination/impurity. So as such, taking illicit substances is more or less just as reckless or as harmful.

There is a wide consensus among most people that drugs cause psychosis in people if abused often enough. While this may be true in certain cases, for the most part drugs do not cause psychosis; they simply make psychotic symptoms appear earlier in people who would be prone to developing them. Mind you, I am taking this from the general opinion of experienced drug users, which may lend itself to to bias. But it is still something that needs more research to be done, and proper research at that. Most of the research that goes into illicit drugs are funded by the "War Against Drugs" groups, meaning that they would try to find out every negative thing that they could about drugs and then exaggerate them. This is both unprofessional and unscientific, and can be counterproductive.

The Family Situation

Nearly everyone has a family that is significant enough to influence one's psychological and developmental dynamics, and those with SPD are no exception. What makes the case of the schizotypal person unique, though, is that they are often put into a role that they cannot escape from. This is usually the role of the "patient" or "broken person" of the family. The experience of this really has to be felt first-hand in order to really understand what I'm talking about. What is it like, and what does it constitute and ultimately mean for the person?

To be frank, it is basically a segregation from the family, meaning that one is treated and dealt with very differently from the other members of the family. This almost goes without saying. What isn't quite well-known, however, is that the label that is carried by the schizotype completely dominates how the other members of the family think and feel about him or her; they simply cannot think outside of the artificial construct that a diagnosis provides to observers. This can be irritating, but it is especially detrimental when this occurs with a misdiagnosis (such as being mislabeled as being "autistic"); it can completely destroy the person's relationships within the family and can cause identity confusion as well. What is also a sign of this dynamic is how everything is focused on the schizotype; if something happened wrongly, then he/she MUST have done something wrong. The ones who focus never look at themselves in this light, let alone try to fix their own problems. The blame gets put on the person with the label because the label signifies imperfection.

As such, this can cause a lot of grief. Family members of mentally ill patients must take heed in this so that the person does not have to deal with even more unnecessary obstacles in life.