In my fourth year of my PhD on schizophrenia and I'm currently writing up my thesis. I'm procrastinating right now so thought I'd do something useful with what I've been studying.
And no, schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder.
Edit: I have to get dinner and run some errands. I'm really enjoying this so I will definitely get back and answer the rest of the questions.
It feels bad to ask this, but I genuinely see this advice all the time. If you ask if you're schizophrenic, people on the internet will always tell you "no, you're not because you're wondering if your schizophrenic." That's insane bullshit right, or is there some truth to that? It seems absolutely impossible that schizophrenic people are completely unaware of their condition or introspecting on themselves! but somehow I see that repeated everywhere.
not op or an expert but this is absolutely incorrect. Plenty of people with schizophrenia are cognizant of their condition. These people are conflating "schizophrenic" with "in the midst of a psychotic episode". And even within a psychotic episode you can retain a (variable) degree of lucidity.
What /u/death said is correct.
There are a lot of people with schizophrenia who have poor insight- in my unscientific opinion, it certainly seems to be more than for other disorders. Like, I work with a guy who conceptualizes hearing voices as "people talking in the hallway".
But that's certainly not everyone with psychosis. And IME, even people who "lack insight" into the symptoms themselves have a lot of insight into how those symptoms affect their functioning- they just don't think about those symptoms as being different from the typical experience.
I think the reason that this advice is repeated so often is because so many people who just have run-of-the-mill anxiety tend to perceive themselves as "losing their mind" and start attributing relatively common things (like seeing/hearing things just before falling asleep) to schizophrenia. It's not that people with schizophrenia can't tell they have it, it's that so many people who think that they do are really just catastrophizing. Statistically speaking, if you think that you have schizophrenia, you almost certainly just have anxiety. You should see a therapist/psychiatrist either way though.
Oh yeah for sure. Diagnosing yourself with anything like that over the internet is asking for trouble.