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no person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia


no deep reason for sharing this, other than i stumbled across it randomly on twitter tonight & found it very, very interesting.

It was something Tom Pollak had heard whispers about—an odd factoid, referred to now and again, usually with bewilderment: No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Over the past 60-some years, scientists around the world have been writing about this mystery. They've analyzed past studies, combed the wards of psychiatric hospitals, and looked through agencies that treat blind people, trying to find a case.


rest of the article here...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/939qbz/people-born-blind-are-mysteriously-protected-from-schizophrenia?utm_campaign=sharebutton

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Isn't sensory overload regarded as a symptom or contributing factor in schizophrenia ? That might explain why blind people don't get it. What about deaf people I wonder ?

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re: deafness - here is a quote from the article:

Congenital blindness doesn’t seem to protect against any other mental illness, so it’s not a safeguard overall. Congenitally blind people have been reported to have had eating disorders and arachnophobia—a person can have those disorders without ever having seen their bodies or a spider). And if a person is born both deaf and blind, it doesn’t seem to offer protection either—that comes with higher risks for psychosis.

There’s a disease called Usher syndrome, in which people are born deaf and lose their vision early in childhood; it’s been associated with schizophrenia and psychosis. Silverstein said that it’s unclear why adding deafness to the mix removes the protection that blindness seems to offer. “One possibility is that blindness by itself presents a surmountable challenge to cope with the environment and thereby fosters compensatory sensory, perceptual, and cognitive changes that lead to a surprisingly high level of functioning,” Silverstain wrote in a 2013 paper. “Deafblindness, on the other hand, may so seriously restrict the opportunity for environmental interaction that it also stunts the development of cognitively based coping strategies.”

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Fascinating. Thanks for that !

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That actually is interesting.

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What's the rub? No person born blind has ever flown a fighter jet either.

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But how about commercial jet?

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Depends. Does Otto from Airplane count as blind?

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Strange...good link, the human brain is the biggest mystery, never mind the bottom of the oceans

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That's one of the stranger things I've heard.

Here's something else you'll never find: a beekeeper with arthritis.

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Is that beekeeper thing true, or is it a joke that I'm too dense to get?

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That's incredible.

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I relate to Einsteins brother, lol I have no idea what he was like but i picture all the voices of the aristocrats of the time inside his head torturing him

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Did you mean Einstein's son? Because he never had a brother (he did have a sister, but not a brother), but he did have a son (Edouard) with schizophrenia.

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Yes

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Its absolutely true. Its a nightmare.

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