People who are schizophrenic are stereotyped as being easy to identify fit the basic stereotype of someone with compromised mental health. They hear things that aren’t there. They have difficulty distinguishing what is real and what isn’t, to the point that even perceived sensory stimuli may not be real. Emotional responses are typically viewed as being askew, such as laughing when crying is more appropriate. True, these are all signs of someone having schizophrenia, but there is so much more to the disease than this. Not every schizophrenic is a stark-raving lunatic, even though a good amount of them actually are. The mental health damage that schizophrenia can bring can often be more subtle than that.
According to research, among the more subtle signs of developing schizophrenia (and possibly psychosis, as well) would be interpreting background noise as coded messages. These can include anything from the white noise that you get on a television to that odd buzzing noise that some radios make while scanning for an appropriate channel. Conspiracy theorists, by and large, have been adding interpretations to that sort of stuff for many years now. While some of...