Can schizophrenia be self-induced?

As I was walking back from the station today, I found myself mumbling to myself. This started a train of thought. I wondered if I could separate two distinct “R2B2” personalities, a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, and make them both converse with each other. This thought came suddenly, and I felt that I could do so, especially since my personal philosophy (like I assume most other peoples’) is complex, and aspects of it keep evolving. By this I mean that I can have two differing points of view on a certain matter, each becoming my primary point of view with changing moods and situations. As different fronts of my personality can be controlled by my mood, if I separate my thoughts that depend on my mood, would it be possible to come up with a separate person? Actually, this isn’t exactly what I was thinking, but to explain it is difficult and this is the closest I can get to right now.

Getting back to the point, I tried to separate two bits of my personality: first, what I call my ambitious driven side, and the second, laid-back, lazy, philosophical side. I then simulated a conversation between the two, which was going very well until the point I found myself getting some vague feedbacks about myself. A sort of self-discovery. At this point I got a little unnerved, especially since I found that it was possible for me to separate two aspects of my personality, which started diverging as the “conversation” went on. I thank God (or whatever powers may exist) that there was a third “rational observer” personality too¹. I decided to stop at that point because I got scared. I seriously thought that I could go mad. I did not want to delve into something about which I barely knew anything. How our minds work, how thoughts evolve may be the greatest enigmas today, and though I would love to know how they work, I am not willing to subject myself to another fright like that. But it did make me wonder: could schizophrenia be self-induced?

¹I’m pretty sure that I could have done away with the “rational observer” which would have probably revealed better results, but I did not want to do away with my safety net.