This lecture comes with a stern warning because, by some estimation, in today's political climate there is a 50/50 chance that you are a paranoid schizophrenic. Clearly, it is the most common type of schizophrenia and all you have to do to identify the sufferer is to note the degree of withdrawal from reality.

So far so good? Are we on the same page?

That's the general picture but we are skating on thin ice because that is not what it means to be out of touch with reality in the schizophrenic sense.

To do that, I defer to the intellect and the insight of Stanford University Professor, Robert Sapolsky, one of the brightest thinkers in the world and he said as follows; he asked and answered:

"What is schizophrenia? It's a disease of thinking abnormally. This is a disease of thinking differently from everybody else. This is a way of thinking in a way that everyone else thinks isn't right, and suddenly we are skating on thin ice of this transitioning from a world of neuropsychiatric disorders and medicine into a world of all sorts of agendas of abuse. And psychiatry has been hand in hand in bed with all sorts of ideologues over the decades, over the years, and willing to hand out diagnoses of schizophrenia to political dissidents, to people you want to get rid of. And this is a totally, totally loaded diagnosis, when, most fundamentally, this is a disease of everybody else thinks you're not thinking normally. Because, some of the time, that describes a florid psychiatric disease that destroys your life. And some of the time, it describes people who are just a pain in the ass. And some of the time, it describes people who are going to transform the world by thinking differently.

How can you possibly approach this disease in an objective way rather than it having just shot through with ideology?"

One way to develop a greater understanding about what schizophrenia is, or more significantly, what it is not, is to develop a common grounding in the historical, evolving views regarding this complicated, mental illness.

Unlike the prevailing views of the 1950's, schizophrenia is not caused by childhood experiences, poor parenting or lack of willpower. The cognitive functioning of the schizophrenic is impaired, not because of individual difference or questionable, child rearing practices but because of a brain abnormality that is heavily anchored in the frontal cortex.

Structural abnormalities in the brain cause schizophrenia. Relative to individuals without schizophrenia, schizophrenia patients have enlarged ventricles and that means that there is less functional brain tissue. In particular, enlarged ventricles cause the cortex to compress, especially in the frontal cortex and that explains cognitive impairment.

Moreover, the brains of schizophrenics have fewer hippocampal neurons and some of them are facing the wrong way. Sequential thought is impaired if you have neurons pointing in the wrong direction.

Fewer neurons in the frontal cortex are also an indication of a lower level of cortex maturation, and it should now be very clear the factors which can lead to a brain that is not normal are complex, numerous and varied. Those who simply theorized or claimed that abnormal parenting caused schizophrenia were frankly cruel and wrong. The chief culprit of that line of reasoning was that children who received conflicting messages were impacted by a sufficient degree of psychological stress that caused schizophrenia and that is simply not true.

Perhaps glaring misrepresentations that ignored biochemical disorders simply emphasize the fact that mental illness is as common as cancer; we all have it in one form or another and sooner or later, it will kill us all. And that's life.

Trump can say he is a stable genius but that is impossible to prove and that is the rub because in this world and/or the next, if it exists, it is more important to be credible than to be sane. The #1 symptom of paranoid schizophrenia is delusions. And when you have a difficult time distinguishing what is real from what you see and experience as reality in your mind, you become fearful, scared and paranoid whether someone is out to harm you or not.

Like the diagnosis of cancer, the underlying mechanisms of schizophrenia are complex. For example, a neurotransmitter like dopamine is involved in the advancement and reinforcement of the abnormal thought patterns in schizophrenia. Psychosis is also attributed to the faulty distribution, regulation, and function of dopaminergic neurons.

Finally, let us be very clear and very precise about all the junk bond psychiatrists and psychologist who use loose talk in effort to discredit anybody they do not agree with. Schizophrenia is not a disease that is subject to their common and multiple misdiagnoses, for whatever reason. It is a disease that is too precise to misdiagnose and people who still claim the thought processes of the 1950's must lose their licenses to practice because they do more harm than good.

While the attributed thought disorders that are supposed to be represented by common phrases like "loose thinking" and "tangential thinking" are certainly meaningful and thoughtful observations when they are made by competent therapists, Junk Bond practitioners who use loose talk in effort to discredit anybody they do not agree with, spout pure nonsense.

Even those who suffer from schizophrenia have structured hallucinations which should provide the competent therapist the opportunity to provide a definitive rather than the scattered misdiagnoses that are common in the hands of junk bond scientists.

Next: Mental illness is not adequately diagnosed. .