Is it realistic to make yourself go crazy?

There is such a funny thing as a tulpa. The bottom line is that in your brain you kind of create a virtual assistant for yourself, and then project it onto the real world. An assistant may be needed in order to discuss something, when there is just no one to discuss, or in order to remember something necessary, or for some other purpose. Moreover, it does not have to be a person or even a humanoid, it can be at least a small soft paper clip, at least a pot of geraniums. From the point of view of practitioners, this is not a mental disorder, since the process is in principle controlled, but from the point of view of psychiatry, this is slightly different from schizophrenia.

To answer this question, it is important to understand what is meant by "go crazy". Common sense can tell us that a person is either crazy, or everything is in order with his head, but in reality everything is more complicated and, as studies show, healthy people also show symptoms of psychosis - not all or less pronounced, but nothing not fundamentally different from those reported by patients with psychotic spectrum disorders (the most severe of which is schizophrenia).

Most people hear voices (especially when they read); many have conspiracy theories in anxiety; deceivers are afraid that people can read their thoughts (and we ourselves, in a sense, read the thoughts of other people). We hear false message alerts and see figures in the dark. In psychology, there is still no coherent model of how this normal behavior turns into a problem and, accordingly, it is impossible to say whether it is possible to artificially move a conditionally healthy person closer to schizophrenia, but I can assume that this is possible, this task just requires an individual approach .

Of course. It is not at all difficult to shatter your nerves to the point where a nervous breakdown is inevitable. Or you catch a hallucination or psychosis. There are tons of options.