Jeg synes det er interessant at den gengse overbevisning er at psykoser udløses af signalstoffer og vice versa. Men ligesom f.eks. depression afspejles i manglen på serotonin, og psykoser afspejles af overaktivitet af dopamin, så er der kun tale om et symptom, og sandsynligvis ikke årsagen. Jeg har for nylig læst en teori om psykoser, altså årsagen til dem... der er mere og mere forskning der tyder på, at den psykotiske tilstand er en vågen REM tilstand, dvs. en drømmetilstand, men ved bevidsthed. Folk der bliver psykotiske får lavet rod i deres REM mønstre og da REM søvn og REM perioder er en nødvendighed for at hjernen og kroppen kan opretholde sin homeostasis går den over i REM-stadiet mens man stadig er ved bevidsthed.
Citat:
A psychotic breakdown is almost always preceded by an overload of stress and severe depression in a person’s life, which, as we know, results in excessive REM sleep. We are now convinced that, when people are in psychosis, they are in fact trapped in the REM state, a separate state of consciousness with dreamlike qualities. In other words, schizophrenia is waking reality processed through the dreaming brain.
To illustrate this, we only have to look at a number of typical schizophrenic behaviours and experiences and see how they relate to the REM state.
Patients in a psychotic state often describe weird relationships with bodily feelings. One said that her legs felt empty: another that her arms didn’t belong to her. This is a well-known REM state phenomenon and is also noted in hypnosis: patients may feel that their bodies are dissolving because, in the dream state, most sensory perceptions about the body are shut out.
It is also known that people with schizophrenia are unusually resistant to pain: even more so during severe psychotic episodes. One patient jumped out of a second storey window of a hospital, broke both his ankles, and walked to the shops oblivious of the damage he had done — damage that would have caused excruciating pain for any person in a normal state of mind.
Again, this imperviousness to pain occurs in the REM state while dreaming, as we are cut off from sensory information. (Anyone who has woken up in agony because a limb, or ear, has been lain on in an unnatural way for a long period during dreaming will recognise this. The pain this causes is only noticed after you wake up.) It is this fact that is exploited when hypnosis is used for pain control or anaesthesia during surgery.
Psychotic patients may also talk about hearing voices. In the dream state, which is the province of the right hemisphere of the brain, people are not usually capable of independent thought, the province of the left hemisphere, because the mind is ‘locked’ into the metaphorical script of the dream. But if an individual is trapped in a waking REM state, with waking reality happening around them, there is still likely to be activity in the left hemisphere of the brain.
We suggest that, because the REM state operates through metaphor, the only way it could make sense of these independent left brain thoughts would be to create the metaphor of hearing voices, or being watched, or spied upon by aliens — which easily becomes paranoia.
The visual illusions or delusions associated with schizophrenia are totally characteristic of the dream state, which generates hallucinatory realities that we believe in unquestioningly for the duration of the dream. Stage hypnotists make use of this when they put subjects into what is in effect a psychotic state, and induce them to believe that they are someone else or that non-existent people and objects exist.
Rapid eye movements are often seen to occur in psychotic states, which, of course, are the defining sign of the REM state. Psychotic patients also very quickly convert thought into sensory experience, with the result that they can become highly emotional almost instantly. When recalling a distressing memory, for example, they can be instantly transported right back into that memory and re-experience the emotions connected with it. That phenomenon, too, is a characteristic of the dream state, when arousals from the emotional brain trigger a thought pattern, in the cortex, which is immediately converted into a sensory metaphor — the dream.
http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/psychosis.htmForskningsresultater tyder i samme retning:
Citat:
Résumé / Abstract
Dopamine depletion is involved in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease, whereas hyperdopaminergia may play a fundamental role in generating endophenotypes associated with schizophrenia. Sleep disturbances are known to occur in both schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease, suggesting that dopamine plays a role in regulating the sleep-wake cycle. Here, we show that novelty-exposed hyperdo-paminergic mice enter a novel awake state characterized by spectral patterns of hippocampal local field potentials that resemble electrophysiological activity observed during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. Treatment with haloperidol, a D[2] dopamine receptor antagonist, reduces this abnormal intrusion of REM-like activity during wakefulness. Conversely, mice acutely depleted of dopamine enter a different novel awake state characterized by spectral patterns of hippocampal local field potentials that resemble electrophysiological activity observed during slow-wave sleep (SWS). This dopamine-depleted state is marked by an apparent suppression ofSWS and a complete suppression of REM sleep. Treatment with D[2] (but not D[1]) dopamine receptor agonists recovers REM sleep in these mice. Altogether, these results indicate that dopamine regulates the generation of sleep-wake states. We propose that psychosis and the sleep disturbances experienced by Parkinsonian patients result from dopamine-mediated disturbances of REM sleep.
Og fra et interview med Joe Griffin, en af de førende eksperter inde for teorien:
Citat:
You have also ventured into one of the biggest minefields of all, psychosis, where you suggest that schizophrenia is waking reality processed by the dreaming brain. How does that work?
First you need to separate out the REM state in which dreaming occurs from the content, which is the dream. The REM state has the same characteristics as the hypnotic state – the left neocortex is generally much less activated, we have instant access to metaphor and our emotions, and we are responding to our own emotional inputs much more than we are to external reality. Now imagine someone who has been so stressed and depressed that their dreaming process has broken down – their brain doesn’t properly click out of the REM state. They still have to try and make sense of the waking world but are stuck in the emotional right-hemisphere ... whose only language is metaphor. It’s a frightening place to be. They are going to experience all kinds of weird things.
Such as?
Take hearing voices: left-hemisphere thoughts are still being generated in a psychotic person although they are overwhelmed by the power of the REM state that they are now largely operating out of. The only way the dreaming brain of the right hemisphere can make sense of left-hemisphere thoughts is to put it into a metaphor of ‘hearing voices’. And, as in the dream state, your sense of self is dissolved because you are now acting out a dream script.
So if you are trying to process reality, you won't have a sense of self with which to orient the experiences coming in, and you’re going to feel that somebody else must be controlling everything. We are not saying that this is a complete explanation for psychosis, but when it has been put to people who have experienced psychosis, they have told us, “thank goodness, that makes such sense to me”.
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