Alien hand syndrome, schizophrenia and getting research commissioned

I don't know what the process is which gets researched commissioned. I wish I did because I would tell mental health commissioners to stop wasting time on biomedical research.

Then, in a typically we sort of way, I would ask them to looking into the prevalence of schizophrenia in people who've had a corpus callosotomy. This is the operation used to treat severe epilepsy in adults where the connection between the two halves of the brain is severed. In fact I would be interested to know about these individual's experience of consciousness and if they ever experience psychosis.

It is an exercise which seeks to answer a question which only I'm interested in: is psychosis or a form of psychosis a battle between the two hemispheres and consciousnesses which are forming separately in the two hemispheres.

This isn't such a silly question because of alien hand syndrome. This is where a person who's had a callosotomy loses voluntary control of one half of their body. The best known example if the fictional character Dr Strangelove. One side of his body is a fan of the Nazis and occassionally Dr Strangelove does a Nazi salute in the eponymous film.

This research is purely biomedical and does little to help patients which is why it is as pointless as much of the rest of the neuropsychiatric research which seems primarily aimed at seeking to justify the medicalisation of the mental illness of schizophrenia.

My greatest fear is that if, perhaps, some forms of psychosis and schizophrenia are a battle between the two hemispheres then doctors would use psychosurgery for mental disorder which is totally inappropriate. They wouldn't think to think this may be an evolutionary process or schizophrenia is a result of a suppressed evolutionary process. They would just seek to treat the supposed biological problem like epilepsy.

My hope is that no one who has had this drastic operation experiences psychosis or schizophrenia and they also have a different experience of consciousness, one which is different from the ego dystonic state seen in coping voice hearers. My hope is people could see it as a positive evoluntionary process - two consciousnesses are better than one. Perhaps there is conflict but the conflicts can be resolved which new forms of treatment which then allow people to regain function and excel with the next step in the evolution of human consciousness.

I would guess this evolution when it works in harmony is what a lot of people experience anyway. Lots of people have a voice in their head or experience an internal dualogue which they consider normal and an essential part of their decision-making process. Though it isn't considered as such the internal dualogue is a conversation, something which requires two consciousnesses. These may exist operating on each hemisphere.

Perhaps.

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