Inside Schizophrenia Podcast: What is ‘Schizoposting’ and Why it’s Dangerous

“Schizoposting” is a growing internet trend that involves posting violent images, videos, text posts, and memes as if the creator is having a mental breakdown. It has become associated with hate movements, and people are using schizoposting as a medium to desensitize and encourage others to violent impulses and unpredictable behavior.

In this episode of Inside Schizophrenia, host Rachel Star Withers, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and co-host Gabe Howard explore the online world of schizoposting and how this affects people diagnosed with schizophrenia. 

Guest Dr. Jim Johansson, who has been studying schizoposting and its growth on alt-right internet platforms, joins for a discussion.

Guest Bio & Inside Schizophrenia Podcast Hosts

Dr. Jim Johansson is a nursing clinical instructor (mental health) and a registered nurse based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

His program of research focuses on the intersection of mental health and the criminal justice system. He has presented his work across Canada and internationally.

Rachel Star Withers creates videos documenting her schizophrenia, ways to manage and let others like her know they are not alone and can still live an amazing life. She has written Lil Broken Star: Understanding Schizophrenia for Kids and a tool for schizophrenics, To See in the Dark: Hallucination and Delusion Journal. Fun Fact: She has wrestled alligators.

To learn more about Rachel, please visit her website, RachelStarLive.comm.

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, “Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations,” available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author.

Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can’t imagine life without. To learn more about Gabe, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Episode Transcript

Producer’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you. 

Announcer: You’re listening to Inside Schizophrenia. Hosted by Rachel Star Withers, an advocate who lives openly with Schizophrenia.  We’re talking to experts about all aspects of life with this condition. Welcome to the show!   

Rachel Star Withers: Welcome to Inside Schizophrenia, a Healthline Media podcast. I’m your host, Rachel Star Withers, here with my great co-host Gabe Howard. Today’s episode, we are going to be talking about a growing internet trend: schizoposting. Posting disturbing violent images, videos, text posts and memes as if the creator is having a schizophrenic mental breakdown. Joining us today is Dr. Jim Johansson. Dr. Johansson has been studying schizoposting and its growth on alt-right internet platforms. Now, Gabe, when I first brought up the topic for today’s show schizoposting,  had you ever even heard of it?

Gabe Howard: I’ve never even heard of this. It never even occurred to me that this was a thing. And I’m. I’m really disturbed, honestly, that it is so far.

Rachel Star Withers: Probably a few years ago, when you go in, you’re posting something and you type in hashtags and it’ll give you suggestions, hashtags. I saw it pop up then, and honestly, I thought it was like some sort of schizophrenia like campaign, like a badly named campaign for like pro schizophrenia or some sort of group. And I ignored it and I kept seeing it pop up. And finally one day I clicked on it and I’m like, what? What is happening here? And I realized it was some disturbing content. And then didn’t really think about it. And a few months ago, some very strange videos appeared on my Instagram from in the explore page. And, unfortunately with the algorithms nowadays, the longer you look at something, it then starts to show you those type of things. So I’m watching these videos thinking like, what? What is this? And it led me down a very dark rabbit hole. And I had no idea that schizoposting had become so popular on these platforms, these mainstream platforms.

Gabe Howard: What exactly is schizoposting for our listeners? Is there like an official definition?

Rachel Star Withers: Yes. So the kind of lay person definition for like you and me. What Urban Dictionary says is it’s the act of putting unfiltered thoughts onto internet forums, particularly when the author is believed to be schizophrenic in a very soft-core example, because I don’t want to glorify violence and gore in today’s episode, even though, unfortunately, that’s what a lot of schizoposting is, would be “My brain can hear the noise that the grass makes. And then the night weighed down my brain stem, and I wandered into the lot alone to hear God. Blood brains are petty and stupid.” So it’s kind of like a little text poem. It’s like what? What exactly was the point of that? Like a weird, unhinged poem kind of thing. And that, that describes a lot of the schizoposts. They’re rambling. They could be wild conspiracy theories. Many of them are about anger, arrogance, and unfortunately, many suicide posts and violent posts attacking people and animals.

Gabe Howard: So just to make sure that I understand this correctly, any unhinged post on the internet is considered schizoposting because it’s believed to have come from somebody with schizophrenia? Or is this just a kind of a phrase like, oh, that’s crazy, or oh, that’s nuts? If somebody reads something online that they don’t like, they’re like, oh, that person’s just schizoposting like it’s another pejorative against people with schizophrenia?

Rachel Star Withers: No. This is specific content that is made as if the person is having a mental breakdown.

Gabe Howard: And are they doing it on purpose, or do they believe that the person is being genuine?

Rachel Star Withers: That’s the question that keeps coming up. And unfortunately, the answer is no. A lot of it is people cosplaying like they’re having mental breakdowns. What do they think a schizophrenic would say? One reason it’s always so violent and disturbing is that it’s just like what people who watch horror movies and who’ve never met a person in real life with a serious mental disorder, that’s what they think we’re like. We’re like crazy serial killers. And that is a lot of this content to me. When I look through it, I think obviously a person with schizophrenia did not write this or did not make this. It’s like stuff from horror movies and what you expect a serial killer to write and someone who’s going to plan a mass murder and it’s, they’re characters. They’re just characters people are pretending to be.

Gabe Howard: But the character they’re specifically pretending to be is an unhinged person who is violent and rambling about suicide or homicide, violence, death,  or just other insanity.

Rachel Star Withers: And specifically schizophrenic insanity. They’re, they

Gabe Howard: Wow.

Rachel Star Withers: Have latched on to this word. This is not bipolar posting. This is not even depression posting. It is schizophrenic posting. This is the type of character we’re pretending to be. Which is interesting because I feel like maybe psychopathic, like they’re sociopathic, there’s so many other things you could have went with. But no, this is very much schizophrenia cosplay.

Gabe Howard: This is just wild to me. You’ve used cosplay as an example a couple of times for those who don’t know what cosplaying is, it’s dressing up as characters, right? So think Halloween, except not on Halloween where it’s role playing for  lack of a better word. So you can pretend to be Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Renaissance festivals, you pretend to be the Knights of the Round Table. So you’re cosplaying, you’re in costume, and you’re playing a character. When I when I think of schizophrenia cosplay for first off, how do you pretend to be somebody with schizophrenia? The other examples, you know, Batman, Superman, they, they have uniforms. They have they have costumes. They’re superheroes that have always looked a certain way throughout history, and movies and comic books and etc. What’s a person with schizophrenia look like? I’m staring right at you, Rachel and I, I guess I could see Rachel cosplay. But even then, you you’re a fully-fledged person. You’re not. You have dimensions and nuance, etc. I’m thinking about the schizophrenia cosplay idea and the fact that they’re, they’re focused in on this extraordinarily narrow version of a schizophrenic that’s largely based in stigma, discrimination and, frankly, misunderstanding. And that’s of this homicidal, suicidal, sociopathic, psychopathic, violent, mad person, crazy person, insane person who is out to both spew nastiness and insanity, isn’t very intelligent and is also very dangerous. That’s got to hit you. You keep using the word cosplay. How does it make you feel to know that people are out there cosplaying a schizophrenic? And that’s the version that’s in their head.

Rachel Star Withers: It’s scary and it’s one of the reasons this is such an important topic, because it is next level feeding that stigma towards people with serious mental disorders, specifically schizophrenia. When you said, what would a person look like if they were physically cosplaying a schizophrenia? Well I’ll tell you, because a lot of these memes are videos and pictures and it’s usually a person covered in blood mutilating themselves or others. So these are not, oh, this is a normal person I’ll see in day-to-day life. These are horrific images that you would think from horror movies. The horror movie that is commonly attached to these memes is American Psycho. And if you’ve seen that movie, it’s about a serial killer who goes crazy murdering. And of course, he’s a very good-looking serial killer. But he’s covered in blood in many of the shots, and that’s what they like to put in these different images. That’s the schizophrenic. That’s what they look like. They’re these people covered in blood coming at you with an ax, doing horrific things. And  this has been tracked by Hatepedia. And Hatepedia is an online database and resource center for educators, parents that’s actually through the government of Canada’s anti-racism program. They have tracked it to be associated with lots of different hate movements where people are using the schizoposting as a medium to encourage others to violent impulses and unpredictable behavior. Fantasies about a mass shooting, this fantasy about hurting unsuspecting people, about being this dangerous, psychotic person that can do all this harm.

Gabe Howard: I’m of two minds here

Rachel Star Withers: Mm-hmm.

Gabe Howard: As a mental health advocate. This is just insulting. And

Rachel Star Withers: Yes.

Gabe Howard: It’s degrading. It’s dehumanizing, it’s demoralizing. It’s stigmatizing. It’s horrific. Like, I am angry as a person who lives with bipolar disorder, and I’m angry as a person who is friends with many people who live with schizophrenia. But then I’m of another mind where I take like the 30,000-foot view and I think, wow, how could people not be afraid of people with schizophrenia? They’re just they’re just inundated with all of these examples of the violent schizophrenic, of the homicidal schizophrenic, of the of, of the, the, the poorly educated, drooling, sociopathic psychopath that is schizophrenia. And that’s all they see over and over and over again. They see it on movies, they see it on television, and they see it online. I mean, they’re literally seeing representations of schizophrenia in this one narrow, untrue version. How could they not believe it? So when I hear people spouting, well, people with schizophrenia are dangerous and we have to avoid them, I’m struggling to be mad at them because why would they believe anything else? The common representation in our culture is this.

Rachel Star Withers: Exactly. Exactly. And there’s so much talk nowadays about mental health and acceptance across the board. The internet should have even more resources for mental health. And then you have a growing community that’s the exact opposite, a growing community of the most outrageous stigma you can imagine. In 2021, there was actually a subreddit, and it was about schizopostings, and it started kind of juvenile and fun, and then it had to be shut down when it had over 20,000 members, and they had begun posting pictures of dead birds and mutilated birds that they had supposedly killed in a competition to see who was the top schizo. In the past few months. Gabe, I have been researching this and I actually joined a few different groups to look into this. And while I was actively reading through one of the groups on Discord, which is a video game style platform, it was shut down due to how violent the posts had turned. So this is a constant thing that the schizoposting is connected to violence and gore. And unfortunately, very active online communities.

Gabe Howard: All of my shock and horror aside, I do wonder is there any potential to turn this around? Could it be turned into something positive or a good community? Can these people be educated?

Rachel Star Withers: I personally don’t think so. Because one thing, I was reading through these posts because I was trying to think do these people have schizophrenia? Obviously I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, and I’m not sitting down with these individual people. I’m just going off the different postings. And to me, they were just so disturbing and violent. No, this isn’t camaraderie. This isn’t to like, hey, connect with other people going through a hard time. This is let me see who can make the weirdest content. Let me see what I can do that’s most sick. That will get the most likes. It’s very like performance to me. Like it’s actually the cosplay. It’s people like, what can I do to get the most attention? And people think I’m the craziest person ever. I’m the sickest person ever.

Gabe Howard: And this is all being done in the name of schizophrenia?

Rachel Star Withers: Yes. To me, the schizophrenia, they’re using that as an excuse. In fact, some of the people who are called schizoposters who create this content, this is the reasons why they say they do it. Schizoposts often carry messages struggling with depression and losing grip on reality and suicidal thoughts of ideation. Their ironic in the sense that they are subversive. Another person said. It’s cathartic. It’s attempting to vicariously experience positive emotions through memes and using the irony to cope and express emotions that are not socially acceptable. My favorite here. It’s a kind of performance art of the mind. None of those comments are written by a person who has schizophrenia. I feel like each one of those is someone trying to sound really smart and like, intellectual, but is using this as an excuse to say depraved, gross things? Lots of people online try and argue that it’s art, and I feel like that’s so dangerous because what is and isn’t art? How come I can’t post a picture of a mutilated animal and say, well, it’s art. And a lot of it is falling under free speech and art. And across the board, this could only hurt real people with schizophrenia.

Gabe Howard: I am a huge proponent of free speech. I do believe that we should be free to say whatever we want. I believe that a s a person, as an American, as a podcaster, as a writer, as a speaker, I want the free flow of ideas. But I also believe in consequences. The things that you say, they mean something. The context matters. And the context here is, is a dehumanizing of people living with schizophrenia. It’s an attack on people living with schizophrenia. And your actions or the actions of the schizoposters are hurting people living with schizophrenia. I believe that they are absolutely free to say and do whatever they want, but I also believe that they should not be allowed to escape the consequences. And the reality is, is anybody who is doing this is either one willfully ignorant. And that’s a problem. Or two, they are malicious in their intent to disparage an entire group of sick and vulnerable people. Either one of those things is awful. Given the amount of information that’s available, they should know better. I can express very clearly that you can be both pro free speech and love art and not think that that gives you a pass to hurt or harm or disparage whomever you want.

Rachel Star Withers: I absolutely agree with you and other people have seen this as a tool to promote their own very dark agendas. Schizoposting taken off on a lot of extremist sites and being used for extremism. And if you’re thinking, well, like, I don’t understand how would a suicide post, a pro-suicide post lead to extremism? One of the ways it does this is that because these are so graphic and disturbing, is it desensitizes you. It turns something very serious into a joke. And humor can bind people even if it’s not the right type of humor. There is some camaraderie in it of, hey, I’ve had this sick idea before, or hey, I find mass shootings kind of funny in this light. Or hey, wouldn’t it be funny to really tell off my boss by doing this? We’ve all had disturbing thoughts, and they can play on that and pull people into these very dark corners of society. I don’t want to list any mass shooters because I don’t want to give them any more publicity than they already have, but many of them have been seen when they afterwards looked through their internet accounts as liking lots of different schizopostings and even being involved in posting their own versions. That is when the scariest things to me, Gabe, because I feel more and more we’re going to see people acting out violent fetishes and fantasies like this and it being attributed to people with schizophrenia to people saying, hey, I have schizophrenia because they think it’s like a cool, a cool thing to say and an excuse to do something gross and demented.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that we know as mental health advocates is that mass shootings and mass violence doesn’t come from people with serious and persistent mental illness. It’s not people with schizophrenia who are committing the violence. It’s largely white males who feel disenfranchised. And it sounds like so far, what you’re describing is a lot of people who feel disenfranchised that want to pretend that they have schizophrenia, and then it’s not a short leap to, okay, now I’m going to pretend that I have schizophrenia while carrying out this thing. It’s a way to disassociate from the violence so you can do the violence. But you didn’t do it. Your character did it again. We’re going to go back to that cause plain you are behaving as though you lived with schizophrenia, and that’s why you did this. And it’s a way to channel your own rage, your own disenfranchisement, your own violence, your own desperation, your own anger, your own rage, and then blame it on another group of people. What I’m very concerned about is we’ve seen these mass shooters, the people with mass violence, we’ve seen people participate in schizoposting. And yet even though it’s cosplaying somebody with schizophrenia, I’m making air quotes. We still blame that violence on people with schizophrenia, even though they’re not the ones schizoposting. Am I summing this up in a way, maybe for the listeners to really understand the damage that’s being done here?

Rachel Star Withers: Yes.

Gabe Howard: We’re still blaming people with schizophrenia for this outcome, even though they had nothing to do with it.

Rachel Star Withers: Yes. Whenever we have some type of horrible tragedy along these lines, the media immediately wants to figure out the reason. Why did this person do that? Unfortunately, we live in political times and you’ll see someone, oh, he was a far left or oh, he was a far right or a far this or far that. The truth is, a lot of the times, yes, there were components to that, but it’s also they were a really angry person and this was an excuse to be hateful. And that’s hard to wrap your, your mind around. And it’s easy to be like, oh, they called themselves schizophrenic, so they must have been. And that makes sense because that’s the only type of person who could do this is a crazy person. Emmy Conley, who is a researcher of extremist movements, digital propaganda and online subcultures, says what happens in a lot of these mass shootings is that people are determined to be mentally ill, schizophrenic young men. And that kind of becomes this label that you want. That, hey, let me show them just how crazy I am. As someone with schizophrenia. No, no, I don’t do that. No, I’ve never heard anyone say that people with schizophrenia are just demented. And I’ve been like, yeah, let me show you how demented I am. That’s like an angry kid. That’s. It’s not to me. That’s it’s not real mental illness. We’ve seen where the different mass shooters and serial killers, they’ll idolize other ones. And that’s a lot of times what happening. They’re idolizing like, wow, I want to be as sick and messed up as so-and-so was. I want to do worse damage than this person.

Gabe Howard: And again, nobody is saying that this is not abnormal behavior. There’s clearly something going on. There’s there’s something wrong with them. We’re just saying that that by and large, this isn’t the rational thought process of somebody who’s living with schizophrenia. This is the rational thought process of somebody with a personality disorder or narcissism or any number of things. I really think we get down to people want an easy answer. Normal people don’t behave this way. This horrible tragedy happened. How can we wrap our minds around it? Here we go. Schizophrenia and schizoposting is like the chum that chums that water to get us there. The actual causes of this violence are much, much, much, much more complex and much deeper. Here is the reality. And I want to make sure that everybody hears this, if nothing else, if every single person with schizophrenia was rounded up tomorrow, violence would still be an issue in American society. People with schizophrenia are not, in fact, responsible for 100% of the violence in society. And any rational person should understand this. But again, we’re inundated with this over and over again in our media, in our pop culture, and of course, online, which is what we’re talking about here.

Rachel Star Withers: Thankfully, I was able to find Dr. Jim Johansson, and he is one of the first medical researchers on schizoposting and how it is reflecting mental health concerns and signs of online radicalization.

Gabe Howard: Rachel, thank you so much for doing this interview. His research really focuses on the intersection of mental health and the criminal justice system. And that’s just not an area where we’re doing really a lot of comprehensive studies. This guest is really an expert on this in more ways than one. And Rachel will go into that. We’ll just go ahead and roll the interview.

Rachel Star Withers: I’m so excited today to be speaking with Doctor Jim Johansson, who is also a nursing clinical instructor in mental health. Thank you for joining us today. I was researching schizoposting, and you were actually a journal article that came up via forensic nursing journal. And I would say one of the only people researching this kind of phenomenon that’s been growing.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yes, absolutely. And it was it was quite challenging, actually, when I was doing working on this. I had essentially no academic journal articles that I could use to build off of this. I was, as far as I know, I am the only person to publish about schizoposting.

Rachel Star Withers: Mm-hmm and the article that you wrote was Making Sense of Schizoposting: A Schizoanalysis of Alt-Right Internet Platforms. What exactly is a schizopost or schizoposting on the internet?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah, so, what we see online, especially in a lot of these kind of alt-right internet forums, you know, 8chan, 4chan, Telegram, these kinds of things. And with schizoposting, what we’re seeing is people posting usually memes. And essentially what they’re trying to do is, is emulate what they think schizophrenia is or what they think psychosis is, or how somebody experiencing psychosis would post on the internet.

Sponsor Break

Gabe Howard: And we’re back discussing the disturbing internet trend of schizoposting.

Dr. Jim Johansson: So it often takes the form of these very bizarre, kind of seemingly meaningless posts. They don’t make sense. They’re often quite violent. And they kind of undo meaning within these, within these forums. They just give you this, this blast of kind of bizarre, strange, violent content that is quite disruptive. And having looked at a lot of this myself quite upsetting,

Rachel Star Withers: Yes.

Dr. Jim Johansson: I would say.

Rachel Star Withers: Having come across it more and more over the past few years, it can be extremely upsetting, even if you just Google

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: What it is and click on images.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: A lot of very violent drawings, even or other types of media that people have created. Do the people creating this actually have schizophrenia or a serious mental illness?

Dr. Jim Johansson: That’s kind of the million-dollar question is that given that nobody has actually studied this in depth from an academic perspective? You know, I hesitate to, to definitively say yes or no.

Rachel Star Withers: Yeah. And a lot of it’s anonymous.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Absolutely. Yeah. And I would love to in the future to study this. But based on a lot of what I’ve seen and, you know, what people have posted in these forums is that you know, you’ll see posts from people who say, hey, I lived with schizophrenia or I live with a psychotic disorder. And this is not this is not how I think this is. This is this kind of Hollywood idea of what schizophrenia is. And essentially what people are doing is, is emulating what they think psychosis or schizophrenia is to create these very bizarre and upsetting posts. But they don’t necessarily live with schizophrenia themselves. That being said you know, we don’t understand this world very well academically, but we do understand a lot of the kind of online radicalization that happens in these online forums and other populations. So if we think about incels or involuntary celibates, those types of folks, there has been a lot of research done on them in the last decade or so. And what a lot of those studies have found is that a lot of these, these individuals who engage in these alternate forms do live with mental health issues. There’s a lot of depression. There’s a lot of PTSD. You know, these are people who typically experienced a lot of bullying. There’s suggestion that there’s an overrepresentation of people living with autism spectrum disorder. And what happens is a lot of these folks have these mental health issues, and that leads to a lot of social isolation. And through that social isolation, they find communities online in which they can kind of vent, one which they can feel welcome in which they can essentially find people to blame for the lives that, that they have, you know, the unhappiness that they might have in their life, that kind of thing. So there’s definitely some mental health issues going on. However, schizophrenia is most likely not one of those mental health issues.

Rachel Star Withers: What is it about the alt-right internet platforms that is attracting this type of posting?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah. It’s you know, kind of building on, on these some of these kind of mental health issues I was talking about. There’s a model that was proposed that I cited in my paper. It’s the 3N model of kind of online engagement and online radicalization that happens. It’s the need narrative and network. So the need piece is, you know, these are individuals who are often unhappy. They have a lot of unmet needs. They have a lot of dissatisfaction in their lives. They feel as though their lives have not gone the way they would like them to. So they go into these online platforms and then they, they find a narrative. They find essentially somebody or groups of people to blame for that. They say, oh, do you know what? My life is not the way I want it to be because of women or immigrants or gay people or trans people or these kinds of things. And they develop this, this narrative of like, oh, this, this is who, who to blame. And then within that, they find a network of people who think the same way. And what they do is they essentially kind of they escalate that. They all kind of pile that on top of each other, and you build this world in this idea and this mentality of, you know, this is who is to blame for the things that are going not the way I want them to be. And that can push people into this kind of online radicalization where they become quite hateful. In, in, in how they see the world. And I think that’s what we’re seeing with schizoposting is, is it’s just constant barrage of bizarre and violent images and posts. And what it’s doing is, is it’s kind of shifting ideas of what is reality. You know, it’s undoing this idea of like, what is what is real? What is reality? And if and if you have people who are constantly exposed to this and if they have these tendencies towards online radicalization, it might affect the worldview in such a way that they don’t think that reality is real. So this, this idea of like, it’s kind of undoing meaning.  

Rachel Star Withers: What caused me to reach out to you and start researching schizoposting was actually Instagram. Because I have schizophrenia and I make content about schizophrenia, I would hashtag it schizophrenia. And as I’m typing it in, schizoposting kept popping

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: Up and I probably saw it like a year or two ago. And honestly, I really didn’t pay attention. And it wasn’t until  I clicked on one of them. And then, as you know, when you deal with these websites, there’s algorithms. It somehow changed my algorithm. And I started getting all

Dr. Jim Johansson: Oh, no.

Rachel Star Withers: Of these schizopostings. And

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: They were very violent, very disturbing. And it shocked me because this was Instagram.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: This was a very normal app that almost everybody uses. And that’s what shocked me was, oh, wow, this has escalated. This isn’t something just hiding out on the dark web that I’ve

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: Seen once or twice on accident. This is something that is now regularly popping up in my feed. How do you see this trend of schizoposting that’s been growing in recent years?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah. That’s sad, but not surprising that it’s made its way to Instagram. It sadly makes sense that it’s made its way more into these kind of mainstream platforms because it gets a lot of engagement. And if you think about, you know, what, what social media platforms want, they want things that that drive engagement. And this is definitely true on, you know, schizoposting within these ALT Right forums. You know, 8chan, 4chan, you know, the more bizarre, the more violent a schizopost is, the more engagement it gets. And if people are chasing that engagement, they’re just going to take it to new platforms.

Rachel Star Withers: What can be done about this? I know, I know, that’s a big question, but in your research, what did you find, like what could be done? Whether

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: We’re talking about the alt-right communities or more mainstream, like what? Is there a solution to this?

Dr. Jim Johansson: I mean, in some ways, you know, I think the work that’s being done by people who do live with schizophrenia, who do have these diagnoses, saying this is not. This is not schizophrenia. Like, and I’ve seen some I’ve seen some articles and I’ve seen people kind of putting out that message. And I think that’s an important one to, to look at. And I think for me thinking about kind of broader scale mental health issues. You know, oftentimes the people who engage in this type of posting, at the end of the day, they’re probably some sad, lonely humans who maybe don’t have a lot of happiness or meaning in their lives. And if we think about kind of the social lives of those individuals and thinking about what’s going on with them, I think that is the point at which we need to focus our energies. In the research that I did, there was a lot of like this taking of offline lives into the online world, essentially. And it’s and it’s a lot of the challenges that people face in the offline world that they live in that manifests in these online posts. I know that’s not a super specific.

Rachel Star Withers: Right.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Because honestly, I don’t know, like, like

Rachel Star Withers: Yeah, it’s a big question. Yeah.

Dr. Jim Johansson: And again, like in social media, if, if, you know, engagement is what’s driving kind of the pushing of these types of posts to the top of people’s algorithms. You know, I don’t know how you stop that. Like, it just, you know, obviously try not to engage with it yourself, but like, you know, that’s that’s a that’s a big ask to, to try to undo this.

Rachel Star Withers: Do we have any examples where schizoposting has kind of led into real world events?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah. A couple of years ago in Highland Park, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, there was a young man who on the 4th of July, actually, he open fire on a on an Independence Day parade. And he killed seven people and injured close to 50 people. And when they, you know, kind of looked at him and looked at his kind of online footprint, they saw with him a long history of schizoposting really quite disturbing and upsetting history of online engagement that that was focused on schizoposting. And I think what sets this individual apart from a lot of the mass shootings that we see these kind of like online radicalization, alt-right inspired mass shootings, you know, most of those people will leave behind a manifesto. They’ll say, this is why I did this, this act. However, this individual in Highland Park who would engage in schizoposting, he didn’t leave any manifesto behind. He just left behind this bizarre trail of disturbing images and posts. He didn’t. He never said, this is why I’ve done it. And I think this is kind of the scary piece of schizoposting is that it’s difficult to assign meaning to the acts that it inspires. Like trying to make sense of it is difficult, especially when it motivates people to take that violence outside of the online platform and into the real world.

Rachel Star Withers: So, Dr. Johansson, how big is the scale of this problem? Like, how worried should we be about schizoposting?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah. I think, you know, based on what I’ve seen and based on what we’ve seen in other kinds of like, alternate platforms, the vast majority of people who engage in these kinds of online postings and forums and that kind of thing they’re not violent. They don’t they actually specifically don’t want to be violent, but it is a small number of people within these platforms who kind of contribute to the most kind of violent and disturbing pieces. So, you know. Your everyday schizoposter is probably unlikely to take this out into the world in violent ways. That being said, one of the concerns about this phenomenon is that in these alternate forums, individuals who engage in a lot of schizoposting might be identified by other people in the forums as potentially vulnerable or potentially quite violent in their mindset. And they may say, oh, hey, they might encourage people to take it. like, why are you doing good with this online. Why don’t you take this out into the world? Thankfully there’s not a lot of instances of this moving from online into the actual world.

Rachel Star Withers: In your research you’ve had to look at, I can’t even imagine how many of these posts through different internet platforms. How has that affected you personally having to research this topic of schizoposting?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah, it’s quite upsetting. And I should note that, you know, my work clinically and research, you know, I’m. I’m a nurse. I’ve worked in, in inpatient mental health settings. I’ve also worked a lot in, in forensic settings. So I’ve worked with you know, all of the patients that I’ve worked with, with people who have, you know, committed crimes, have significant mental health issues. I would say that my tolerance for you know, kind of existing in this world was quite high. And I thought as I was going into this world as supposing I was like, I feel like I can handle this. I feel like I’ve got I’ve got like a good, a good base for understanding this world. And then I went in and I, and I saw some of these posts and I was, I was I found it quite upsetting. And I will admit I haven’t followed schizoposting much in the last year or so since I did the work on this, because I found it so upsetting and I

Rachel Star Withers: Yes.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Was like, I don’t, I don’t need to, I don’t need to exist in this world. I’ve kind of done the work. I’ve done this paper, it’s off, it’s getting edited and published and that kind of stuff. But when that was done, I had to stop. I had to take a break because I just found it too, too upsetting. You know, it certainly didn’t. In no way did it motivate me to go out and do bad things. But I could also see in that that the potential for it to do so with other people.

Rachel Star Withers: One schizoposter that I read an interview on. This person admittedly did not have schizophrenia, but they described it as art, which

Dr. Jim Johansson: Oh.

Rachel Star Withers: Is a very hard thing to argue against. You know, because what is art and what’s not? What is your take on that? I was using that as a justification.

Dr. Jim Johansson: I mean, you know, it is it is a way of thinking differently

Rachel Star Withers: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Jim Johansson: About the world. But if you think about what it’s doing, it’s terrifying.

Rachel Star Withers: Yes.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Like, you know, you know, one person may say, oh, this is this is me expressing myself. But if but if that goes into this pool of nonstop, overwhelming images and posts, and those posts go out into the world awful violent things, then, then. You know, what is what is your art doing? Is would be the question that I would ask.

Rachel Star Withers: I want to tell you personally, thank you very much for writing your article, Making Sense of Schizoposting: A Schizoanalysis of Alt-Right Internet Platforms. So thank you, because it is something that I’ve seen growing over the past few years that is largely being ignored. And I do hope that your article brings light to a very serious issue, and that other people who are able to do this research and have positions of authority, whether it’s in the medical field, whether it’s in law enforcement, even that

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah.

Rachel Star Withers: To start to know about this growing thing. And I hope that loved ones, friends, families also might notice this and see this as warning signs for people in their life. So

Dr. Jim Johansson: Absolutely.

Rachel Star Withers: Thank you very much for bringing awareness to this. How can our listeners learn more about you and your research into different topics?

Dr. Jim Johansson: Yeah. You can check out my website, which is JimJohanssonRN.com.

Rachel Star Withers: Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Johansson.

Dr. Jim Johansson: Thank you for having me.

Gabe Howard: Rachel, as always, you did an excellent job, and I have kind of a question for you, just kind of a broad view from your discussion with Dr. Johansson and everything that we’ve learned so far in this episode. In your opinion, how exactly does schizoposting affect people living with schizophrenia?

Rachel Star Withers: This just contributes to more stigma towards us, makes us look very bad and tying us to violence. We’re being used as a scapegoat for a lot of people’s violent desires, fetishes, and more and more, their acts in real life. Schizoposting and these communities that are using it prey on people who are lonely and may even be newly diagnosed into schizophrenia. They’re out there looking for community and friends and to know they’re not alone. And they might come across these different communities thinking, oh, hey, wow, I found other people like me. And that’s it’s just going to lead them down to a dark place.

Gabe Howard: One of the things that I was thinking about is all of our caregivers, family members, friends, loved ones who listen to this show and how when they’re online searching, if they think that they found a community of people who understand schizophrenia, if they believe that what they’re seeing has some basis in reality, they may think it’s an extreme basis. But if they believe that there’s any part of it that’s real, it’s really going to influence how they talk to and care for their loved ones. So I know we’re near the end of the show, but I just I really hope any family member, friend, loved one caregiver, member of the medical community, law enforcement understands that this isn’t based in any reality. It’s based on nothing but innuendo, stigma, discrimination, misunderstanding. It’s almost entirely made up.

Rachel Star Withers: From the viewpoint of a caregiver, a family member, someone who is working in mental health or even just a normal person. And they stumble across this content and they think that this represents schizophrenia even a little bit. I hope that they don’t think that about me, and I hope that they don’t think that about the next person they meet in real life, who takes a major step and opens up and tells them, hey, I’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia or another serious mental disorder, or I experience psychosis and suddenly they’re there. They’re afraid of that person. I don’t want to say I’m tough and I can handle it, but I have been diagnosed for a while and I’m very open about my schizophrenia. So I have met resistance and every time it has been difficult for me. I worry so much for the newly diagnosed or someone finding the courage to tell someone that they have schizophrenia. And unfortunately, this is the idea that they’ve seen across the internet or. They’ve even seen, like me just scrolling through Instagram or TikTok or whatever.

Gabe Howard: Rachel, obviously I don’t think of you this way. I know that your family doesn’t think of you this way, and I would venture to guess that the listeners don’t think of you this way, but I. I would remind our listeners that many people fall into this trap of believing that these things are true. And as advocates, we have to do our best to dispel that. So please recommend this particular episode to anybody you know who may hold these beliefs about people living with schizophrenia. It’s just going to be a very powerful thing for a community that that needs a hand up. And Rachel, of course, as, as, you know, as your as your friend, I, I love you very much and I’m sorry that this is happening. And hopefully this podcast does some small thing to help make it better. Thank you for all of your research on this episode. I know that in particular, this one was harder for you than other episodes that we’ve done.

Rachel Star Withers: On this show, we don’t shy away from topics. We’ve discussed how schizophrenia became connected to serial killers. We’ve talked about mass shootings and how many of the perpetrators had actually been diagnosed with schizophrenia. And earlier this year we had an episode on disturbing thoughts. And that has been the episode that I’ve gotten the most feedback on of any episode we’ve ever created. People with schizophrenia messaging me and admitting that, like me, they have struggled with horrible graphic, intrusive thoughts, delusions and hallucinations. People who every day have the urge to physically hurt themselves. And that it was a relief to know that they’re not alone, that they aren’t these freaks. None of the feedback that I got was joking. Most of it was begging me for help on how to make it stop. Everyone was like I was in that episode where I admitted some of the thoughts that I had had. And that I was incredibly ashamed of them and haunted by them. Schizophrenia isn’t a joke. This isn’t some meta ironic performance art. This isn’t some deep critique on societal norms. It’s scary as hell and can be a torturous place to be in. Yes, having schizophrenia sucks. That being said, you can still have an amazing kick ass life. That can’t happen, though, if you’re dwelling on hatred. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Inside Schizophrenia. Please like, share, subscribe and rate our podcast and we’ll see you next time here on Inside Schizophrenia, a Healthline Media podcast.