Mental Illness

[Shadow Wolf]

Hi,

I work in mental heath and I also work as a medium. In my experience spirit comunication and a mental illness are two very different things.

Although I do agree that some people who are hearing/seeing spirit are said to have a mental illness when they do not. However, with the people I work with I feel it is clear that something more then spirit comunication is going on.

Even if I am wrong about this there is still the fact that people in hospital for mental illness are in there because they are going through a crisis point in which they are very distressed by their experience and may do themselves harm because of it. At such times no matter what the source of the voices etc, it is doing them harm and so needs to be blocked.

Erato,

McKenna was a true visionary.

Our culture stigmatizes neurodivergence, which stigmatization then leads to mental illness -- itself stigmatized and exacerbated by the culture. (Although mental illness can also be a consequence of a profound confrontation with the higher powers, or simply the result of a poor diet and/or a pathologically broken culture, on a sensitive, or highly acute, nervous system; to say nothing of the effects of stigmatization.)

While many indigenous societies have learned how to provide for the healthy expression of neurodivergence, and the healing of mental illness, our culture just dismisses and drugs these gifted people; perhaps the only ones capable of providing insight into how far the culture has strayed from true spiritual values.

Mental illness is scarce in "primitive" societies, and in particular the ones McKenna has in mind, where a symbiotic partnership is maintained between the community and Nature, through the sacramental use of certain sacred plant medicines -- medicines which are outlawed and misunderstood here, and which, even in relatively spiritual communities, are often forbidden from being openly discussed.

This is "the path that dare not speak its name".

Originally Posted by Shadow Wolf

Hi,

I work in mental heath and I also work as a medium. In my experience spirit comunication and a mental illness are two very different things.

Although I do agree that some people who are hearing/seeing spirit are said to have a mental illness when they do not. However, with the people I work with I feel it is clear that something more then spirit comunication is going on.

Even if I am wrong about this there is still the fact that people in hospital for mental illness are in there because they are going through a crisis point in which they are very distressed by their experience and may do themselves harm because of it. At such times no matter what the source of the voices etc, it is doing them harm and so needs to be blocked.

That's a very good point, Shadow Wolf.
No matter the source, those people aren't ready to deal with it/ cannot deal with it on their own so it needs to be blocked for their own good.

Originally Posted by Valus

While many indigenous societies have learned
how to provide for the healthy expression of neurodivergence,
our culture just dismisses and drugs these gifted people;
perhaps the only ones capable of providing insight into
how far the culture has strayed from true spiritual values.

Great post, Valus.

I have one question: How do you discern between the gifted who can give something to the world by the means of their perceived mental illness and the ones who are truly disturbed and a threat to themselves and others?

The history of psychology, and then psychiatry, is particularly interesting. Prior to the theories of Freud and Jung, mental patients were dismissed and not listened to at all. All sorts of means were used to "silence the voices", and perhaps the most common was the method of completely ignoring the symptoms. For instance, when a patient would begin relating their delusions, the doctor would attempt to change the subject with something perfectly banal, like, "What nice weather we're having,".

Then came the explorers of the unconscious. In the 60's, R.D. Laing took a revolutionary position when he advocated meeting the patient half-way; actually entertaining the delusions of the patients, and discovering an inner logic to them (however removed from the logic of normal consciousness), and leading them out of the darkness by validating the illness as a genuine shamanic journey of purgation and (as Jung would say) individuation.

Laing was especially controversial in that he related the illness, not merely to the individual, but to the family, and to the culture. These sensitive individuals were merely the litmus tests, so to speak, indicating a much larger problem in the culture. Rather than turn them into scapegoats, he attempted to learn from them about the defects of the family unit, and the society as a whole.

These advances were overshadowed in the following decades, when doctors began turning more and more to drugs, and explaining (or, rather, explaining away) the illness as a mere "chemical imbalance". This was a reassertion of the dominator mentality which underlies Western Civilization; a mentality which was threatened by the spirit of the 1960's, when the culture had it's first major encounter with the shamanic medicines of the natural world.

The feeling now was to again suppress the symptoms, -- which may be delusions or visions, depending on a number of variables, including the doctor's perspective. The "one size fits all" mentality of the western mind is here evidenced in full effect. In order to get on with "business as usual", anyone who challenged the popular conceptions of reality was to be dealt with as sick, and the "cure" was to be a flooding of untested chemicals into the brains of these patients, with the effect that they would be, once again, rendered impressionable to the popular mores of the day, or (if this could not be achieved), rendered almost entirely unconscious. This is what we call treatment today.

So, how do we distinguish between mental illness and visionary health? This is perhaps the hardest question for any of us to answer, being, as we are, securely embedded in a culture which is itself rooted in delusions of conquest, competition, acquisition, hierarchy, and slavish devotion to the Protestant work-ethic. The words of Jesus apply here, "Physician, heal thyself!" We must heal our own psychic fragmentation before we can attempt to see clearly into the mind of another. Ultimately, the question is too subtle for an answer. It is something we will always be wrestling with, as long as we continue to incarnate here.

Anyone who challenges the basic, fundamental assumptions upon which their own culture rests, will automatically be seen as a threat, and probably as mentally ill. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as I've already indicated, anyone who challenges these assumptions is stigmatized, and subject to all sorts of pressures, which can result in mental illness. Then, separating the visions from the delusions becomes even more difficult. Furthermore, to challenge one's culture is also to challenge oneself, for we have internalized the views and expectations of our culture on such a deep level, and the division goes, not between the visionary and his community, but right through the heart of the visionary himself.

This split is a form of mental illness, but it is also a process in the journey to a higher synthesis. Unfortunately, because the culture is so backwards, it is at a loss as to how to treat the patient. His confusion is only increased, and he remains lost in the underworld of his fragmentation, unable to complete the shamanic journey. Or, the journey is aborted, and he is sequestered in a state of false security, where the great problems of the human condition do not occur to him -- often, this is the best we can do.

The rare exception is the person who is given permission to explore his visions and his madness; the two appear to go hand-in-hand (every vision is also a message alerting us to a corresponding madness). As in shamanic cultures, the individual is supported by the culture even as he cuts himself off from it. Shamans tend to live at the outskirts of their villages, and although they are positively instrumental in the governing of their communities, always remain somehow above, beyond, and outside of the nucleus of their communities. This "otherness" is not something to be "cured", or done away with, but honored and deeply respected.

I could say more,
but I don't want to press your patience,
and this seems to be enough for now.

Hope that clarifies my position somewhat.

Love to all,
Valus

Wow, Valus.
Thank you for this post. So much food for thought. I love it!

Any time. :)

From: "The Varieties Of Religious Experience" by William James
There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are 'geniuses' in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence.
If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed. No one can pretend for a moment that in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox's mind was unsound. Every one who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down to county magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or detraque of the deepest dye...
Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny's extraordinary conscientiousness is merely a matter of over-instigated nerves. William's melancholy about the universe is due to bad digestion- probably his liver is torpid. Eliza's delight in her church is a symptom of her hysterical constitution. Peter would be less troubled about his soul if he would take more exercise in the open air, etc... We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them 'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be made to hold its tongue.
Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.
And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined... But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their spiritual significance?... A good example of the impossibility of holding strictly to the medical tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable study, he inevitably falls into the morbid category.... And it is worthy of remark that, as a rule, the greater the genius, the greater the unsoundness."
Now, do these authors, after having succeeded in establishing to their own satisfaction that the works of genius are fruits of disease, consistently proceed thereupon to impugn the value of the fruits? Do they deduce a new spiritual judgment from their new doctrine of existential conditions? Do they frankly forbid us to admire the productions of genius from now onwards? and say outright that no neuropath can ever be a revealer of new truth? No! their immediate spiritual instincts are too strong for them here, and hold their own against inferences which, in mere love of logical consistency, medical materialism ought to be only too glad to draw...
In the natural sciences and industrial arts it never occurs to any one to try to refute opinions by showing up their author's neurotic constitution. Opinions here are invariably tested by logic and by experiment, no matter what may be their author's neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions... Immediate luminousness, in short, philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below...
The medical materialists are therefore only so many belated dogmatists, neatly turning the tables on their predecessors by using the criterion of origin in a destructive instead of an accreditive way... But the argument from origin has seldom been used alone, for it is too obviously insufficient. Dr. Maudsley is perhaps the cleverest of the rebutters of supernatural religion on grounds of origin. Yet he finds himself forced to write:-
"What right have we to believe Nature under any obligation to do her work by means of complete minds only? She may find an incomplete mind a more suitable instrument for a particular purpose. It is the work that is done, and the quality in the worker by which it was done, that is alone of moment; and it may be no great matter from a cosmical standpoint, if in other qualities of character he was singularly defective- if indeed he were hypocrite, adulterer, eccentric, or lunatic..." ...In the end it had to come to our empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.... Our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians...
[The] nature of genius has been illuminated by the attempts, of which I already made mention, to class it with psychopathical phenomena. Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance, psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which it has been called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined with a superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were less neurotic... The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He is liable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action; and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till he proclaims it, or in some way 'works it off.' "What shall I think of it?" a common person says to himself about a vexed question but in a 'cranky' mind "What must I do about it?" is the form the question tends to take.
In the autobiography of that high-souled woman, Mrs. Annie Besant, I read the following passage: "Plenty of people wish well to any good cause, but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support. 'Some one ought to do it, but why should I?' is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability. 'Some one ought to do it, so why not I?' is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty. Between these two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution." True enough! and between these two sentences lie also the different destinies of the ordinary sluggard and the psychopathic man. Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce- as in the endless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound to coalesce often enough- in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas possess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age...
To pass now to religious phenomena, take the melancholy which, as we shall see, constitutes an essential moment in every complete religious evolution... Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors? If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may let the matter of religion and neuroticism drop.

[BlueSky]

Originally Posted by Sindy

Some suggest to have an interest in magical beliefs can actually be associated to mental illness and schizophrenia? What do people think?

I'd be lying if I didn't wonder why everyone or at least most everyone has not been 'driven' to seek out spiritual matters like magical beliefs or any other spiritual searches.
What is it that drives "us" or that has driven "us" that others don't have.....is it a short circuit in the brain or possibly a life of hurt and issues that deeply affected "us" or maybe we are special or need to feel like we are or maybe it is truly spiritual progression.
The possibilities are endless and I really don't know but I do know that I was "driven" to seek and looking back, I am no longer sure why. Any of the reasons above could be true as well as none of them.
Just sharing.
James