Schizophrenia is the archetypal definitely-biological mental disorder, but recently for reasons relevant to the above, I’ve been wondering if that is wrong/confused. Here’s my alternate (admittedly kinda uninformed) model:
Psychosis is a biological state or neural attractor, which we can kind of symptomatically characterize, but which really can only be understood at a reductionistic level.
One of the symptoms/consequences of psychosis is getting extreme ideas at extreme amounts of intensity.
This symptom/consequence then triggers a variety of social dynamics that give classic schizophrenic-like symptoms such as, as you say, “preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others’ thoughts or being influenced by other’s thoughts”
That is, if you suddenly get an extreme idea (e.g. that the fly that flapped past you is a sign from god that you should abandon your current life), you would expect dynamics like:
People get concerned for you and try to dissuade you, likely even conspiring in private to do so (and even if they’re not conspiring, it can seem like a conspiracy). In response, it might seem appropriate to distrust them.
Or, if one interprets it as them just lacking the relevant information, one needs to develop some theory of why one has access to special information that they don’t.
Or, if one is sympathetic to their concern, it would be logical to worry about one’s thoughts getting influenced.
But these sorts of dynamics can totally be triggered by extreme beliefs without psychosis! This might also be related to how Enneagram type 5 (the rationalist type) is especially prone to schizophrenia-like symptoms.
(When I think “in a psychotic way”, I think of the neurological disorder, but it seems like the way you use it in your comment is more like the schizophrenia-like social dynamic?)
In general, mental illnesses, and mental states generally, provide a “tropism” towards thoughts that fit with certain emotional/aesthetic vibes.
Depression makes you dwell on thoughts of futility and despair
Anxiety makes you dwell on thoughts of things that can go wrong
Mania makes you dwell on thoughts of yourself as powerful or on the extreme importance of whatever you’re currently doing
Paranoid psychosis makes you dwell on thoughts of mistrust, secrets, and influencing/being influenced
Also tangential, this is sort of a “general factor” model of mental states. That often seems applicable, but recently my default interpretation of factor models has been that they tend to get at intermediary variables and not root causes.
Let’s take an analogy with computer programs. If you look at the correlations in which sorts of processes run fast or slow, you might find a broad swathe of processes whose performance is highly correlated, because they are all predictably CPU-bound. However, when these processes are running slow, there will usually be some particular program that is exhausting the CPU and preventing the others from running. This problematic program can vary massively from computer to computer, so it is hard to predict or model in general, but often easy to identify in the particular case by looking at which program is most extreme.
Tangential, but...
Schizophrenia is the archetypal definitely-biological mental disorder, but recently for reasons relevant to the above, I’ve been wondering if that is wrong/confused. Here’s my alternate (admittedly kinda uninformed) model:
Psychosis is a biological state or neural attractor, which we can kind of symptomatically characterize, but which really can only be understood at a reductionistic level.
One of the symptoms/consequences of psychosis is getting extreme ideas at extreme amounts of intensity.
This symptom/consequence then triggers a variety of social dynamics that give classic schizophrenic-like symptoms such as, as you say, “preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others’ thoughts or being influenced by other’s thoughts”
That is, if you suddenly get an extreme idea (e.g. that the fly that flapped past you is a sign from god that you should abandon your current life), you would expect dynamics like:
People get concerned for you and try to dissuade you, likely even conspiring in private to do so (and even if they’re not conspiring, it can seem like a conspiracy). In response, it might seem appropriate to distrust them.
Or, if one interprets it as them just lacking the relevant information, one needs to develop some theory of why one has access to special information that they don’t.
Or, if one is sympathetic to their concern, it would be logical to worry about one’s thoughts getting influenced.
But these sorts of dynamics can totally be triggered by extreme beliefs without psychosis! This might also be related to how Enneagram type 5 (the rationalist type) is especially prone to schizophrenia-like symptoms.
(When I think “in a psychotic way”, I think of the neurological disorder, but it seems like the way you use it in your comment is more like the schizophrenia-like social dynamic?)
Also tangential, this is sort of a “general factor” model of mental states. That often seems applicable, but recently my default interpretation of factor models has been that they tend to get at intermediary variables and not root causes.
Let’s take an analogy with computer programs. If you look at the correlations in which sorts of processes run fast or slow, you might find a broad swathe of processes whose performance is highly correlated, because they are all predictably CPU-bound. However, when these processes are running slow, there will usually be some particular program that is exhausting the CPU and preventing the others from running. This problematic program can vary massively from computer to computer, so it is hard to predict or model in general, but often easy to identify in the particular case by looking at which program is most extreme.