Thread by @TheRingsSystem

Paper time! Let's talk about: "Schizophrenia, dissociation, and consciousness" doi.org/10.1016/j.conc…
(By talk about I mean here are some quotes which are thought provoking!):

In 1911 Eugen Bleuler introduced the term “schizophrenia”... he wrote: “It is not alone in hysteria that one finds an arrangement of different personalities one succeeding the other. Through similar mechanism schizophrenia produces different personalities existing side by side.”

He described the personalities as "these several personalities endowed with consciousness.”

"These important ideas proposed by Bleuler are historically linked to the concept of dissociation developed by Pierre Janet"

A lot of research is cited, leading to: "The clinical evidence related to the concept of dissociative subtype of schizophrenia suggests that several patients with schizophrenia, who have traumatic history may exhibit cognitive and behavioral changes described in DID."

"In this context, Scharfetter (2008) proposed a relationship between dissociation and schizophrenia and suggested that schizophrenic syndromes were on a continuum with other disorders, such as dissociative identity disorder (DID) and borderline personality disorder."

"Consequently alterations in... underlying specific ego-state related changes in subjective experience are likely related to specific alterations in connectivity of various parts of the brain and these alterations may manifest as abrupt changes in patterns of neural activity."

There's then a bunch of neuroscience that I won't make y'all sit through that backs up these claims and points to orbital-frontal deficits in both schizophrenia and dissociative disorders - it ends up at:

"the process of dissociation could serve as an important conceptual framework for understanding schizophrenia and that specific network pathology similar to dissociative disorders could be related to a deficit of inhibitory functions and disintegration of consciousness." Neat! 👍