Schizophrenia often is characterized by a feeling that one is losing control. Thoughts may race so quickly that it becomes impossible for untreated patients to focus on a single subject or topic. In Ronald J. Comer's Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology, one patient describes his thought process.

“My thoughts get all jumbled up. I start thinking or talking about something but I never get there. Instead, I wander off in the wrong direction and get caught up with all sorts of different things that may be connected with the thing I want to say but in a way I can't explain … . My trouble is that I've got too many thoughts. You might think about something, let's say that ashtray and just think, oh! Yes, that's for putting my cigarette in, but I would think of it and then I would think of a dozen different things connected with it at the same time.”

It is easy to understand how difficult it would be to organize your thoughts and use them to be productive when you are handicapped in this way.

This loss of control is not like attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which involves the persistent inability to pay inattention or focus on a task or issue and/or excessive physical activity and a tendency to active impulsively. The loss of control in schizophrenia is more a loss of control of mental processes including thoughts, impressions, feelings and associations. Thoughts flash into consciousness in a helter-skelter manner. One thought is replaced by another before the person has time to analyze it.

A Maze of Experiences

Another patient quoted in Comer's text and in E. Fuller Torrey's book Surviving Schizophrenia describes a similar challenge. For her, schizophrenia means “trying to think straight when there is a maze of experiences getting in the way, and when thoughts are continually being sucked out of your head so that you become embarrassed to speak at meetings.” It is easy to understand how difficult it would be to organize your thoughts and use them to be productive when you are handicapped in this way.

The same woman provides an overview of her experience. For her, schizophrenia means “fatigue and confusion, it means trying to separate every experience into the real and the unreal and sometimes not being aware of where the edges overlap …. It means feeling sometimes that you are inside your head and visualizing yourself walking over your brain, or watching another girl wearing your clothes and carrying out actions as you think them. It means knowing that you are continually ‘watched,’ that you can never succeed in life because the laws are against you and knowing that your ultimate destruction is never far away.”

A consumer quoted by the Canadian Mental Health Association recalled: “It was like I was having a million thoughts all at once and yet I was so disorganized, nothing was getting done. I was frightened and anxious because I felt someone was trying to harm me. Increasingly, I spent most of my time alone in my room doing nothing. I didn't want to be bothered with friends or family. The television started having special messages meant only for me and I was hearing voices commenting on what I was doing. Looking back, I realize things just weren't making sense anymore. At the time though, it seemed normal and I didn't mention what was happening with me to anyone.”