I Am a Little Bit Crazy

Twiddler: I know of some examples in which schools are very relevant. In our current society most people have to be able to sit still and work with abstract problems. For a rather large group of children this can be very difficult and they are therefore considered to have a disorder: the AD(H)D.

Evolutionarily it is quite possible that what is now thought of as a disorder was actually an adaptation, moving around a lot and taking risks make good foragers and hunters but unfortunately not successful office workers.

Similarly it seems that the people who have dyslexia have trouble reading, but even just using a different kind of alphabet might relieve this difficulty. Such as learning the japanese way of writing instead of the latin alphabet. Interestingly enough it seems like there are groups using both that have trouble because of the alphabet, but if they were allowed to switch to the other alphabet they might not have any trouble at all.

In my own case I also have had a lot of trouble because of the way schools are. The affective part of schizoaffective is that you get mood episodes. This means that from about the age of twelve I got depressive episodes when I could not really do much and then from the age of 15 I started getting hypomanic episodes in which I would be extremely active. This meant that in a very short amount of time I would excel at everything and sleep very little which meant I had lots of time to be with friends, take a lot of extra classes and so on but after a year I would crash into a depressive episode.

I have spent a lot of time catching up because the model student in a school develops in a linear way. You start out with being pretty bad at something and then you learn more and more and the more you learn the easier it gets to study. Then you move to a more advanced course and the cycle begins again.

Having hypomanic and depressive episodes makes you very non-linear. I would start a course when I was in a up-state or normal and quickly advance through course after course until I crashed and then I would be completely stagnant because depression makes you stupid and unmotivated and really tired. On top of that, the schizo-part, depression makes me psychotic.

So schools, and society and their focus on what is considered normal has a lot of consequences for a lot of people who might have been a huge resource if society and the schooling system would have been more flexible.