be perhaps higher states of awareness of consciousness than 'normal' or
automoton consciousness.
If we were all apes the psychiatric apes would be the ones chaining down
those who tried to walk upright. I'd hope any human psychiatrist could
see that that's what the profession does. It says this is normal now and
anything else is an illness to be changed to be normal (except with
certain conditions).
I don't know what a normal conscious state is though this is not because
I've not experienced a 'normal' state of conscioussness for sometime.
It's because there isn't one. Only a definition of an unusual state of
consciousness, one which seems to be shared by many people.
Many people hear a voice in their head. Many. It's surprising just how
many. I wonder if this has changed since two hundred years ago when
psychiatrists dealing with lunatics in the early asylums found a
disproportionate number heard voices. Without the religious
understanding of what these were they pathologised it as part of
dementia praecox (what became renamed and reconceptualised as
schizophrenia) and so the stigma of a different state of consciousness
became formally pathologised.
The Thud experiment showed just how the experience of voice hearing was
treated as though it were a crime by psychiatrists in the US thirty or
forty years ago. The study was an experiment to show how normal people
and behaviours became pathologised when in the psychiatric ward, so one
of the subjects was a professional painter but was noted to exhibit
"painting behaviour" when observed in the ward. The subjects who were
not mentally ill (by the definitions of the day) were admitted to
psychiatric wards by telling a doctor/psychiatrist they heard a voice in
their head. This was all it took to get them admitted to a ward.
I'm fairly open about the voice in my head experience and the experience
of another consciousness in my life. They're not totally the same
concept. People often have a voice in their head. People don't often
experience their daily reality is shared with a non-corporeal force, a
force or entity which, had it been experienced in a religious context,
would be the definite proof of god's existence (though, of course, still
not available for proof by scientific methods, just the highest method
in truth seeking: personal experience.)
Though people don't talk about it many experience a voice in their head,
an inner conversation, a committee in their head or other descriptions
of an internal dualogue or dialogue. It's often a dualogue with most
people because there's usually just two consciousnesses involved: the
listener and the internal speaker. The voice and the I that hears it.
This to me is a state of awareness rather than a dysfunctional state. We
experience the same things as a 'normal' or unaware person might, the
same stream consciousness, but the difference is how it is experienced
or observed. There is a scale of perception of the difference of these
inner thoughts from our own by which I mean that some people percieve
their self as their stream of consciousness and in a sense this is true
but others at the other end perceive their self amongst the other voices
or thoughts within a person's stream of consciousness. To some the voice
is very much a voice within the inner consciousness while for others it
is spoken or has personality but is still a thought but these states are
closely aligned whereas the state at the other end of the scale, the
lack of awareness of the different consciousnesses and the self which
identifies itself as "I" considers in the internal conversation their I.
This sound obvious perhaps. Perhaps not. The inner conversation is
experienced differently by different people. Some of these experiences
are pathologised as psychosis or symptoms of schizophrenia. I'm not sure
this is necessarily a true thing and modern theories of schizotypy
consider the alternative consciousness can be a non-pathological state,
i.e. one which doesn't cause disability to the individual. I think many
people go through this experience without realising there's a name for
it. These might be the people who get mispathologised by the new early
intervention of psychosis diagnoses being proposed like psychosis risk
syndrome.
What's pathologised today is still more than what's genuinely an
illness. I consider that psychosis is the opposite of an ilness. It is a
valuable experience which can be life changing. If a person is told it
is an illness or that there is something wrong with them, by doctors and
by society's rules, then they feel worse, are less able to handle the
experience and end up with poorer life outcomes whereas in countries
where the experience isn't thought of the same way, developing world
countries with tiny mental healthcare systems, people do better
according to some very high quality studies by the World Health
Organisation.
I consider it a valuable though painful process. Some people are spared
the painful experience while others have had it worse than me. In can be
like an internal torment, a torture by an unseen entity. An evil god I
might say but iit is just god.
And here's the rub. I think. He's the think that's really bloody
interesting. Religion exists because of psychosis. There are many
assumptions and theories written by sane, rational people. It's why I
never believed got existed. Then I experienced psychosis. The first time
I got persuaded it was a pathological experience caused by a
malfunctioning brain. I accepted mental healthcare. The next time was
much worse. I didn't accept mental healthcare and suffered unendingly.
Real psychosis, the shit that I go through periodically, is frightening
but it also involved the experience of another consciousness in my life.
It was like being under the control of a force or power, like I was a
puppet. This unseen force or eneity is understood by other people as
god, spirits, aliens, government agencies controlling their thoughts,
the voices of our ancestors/the dead and all manner of other ways to
explain what the experience is other than a malfunctioning brain.
People assume people thought up god for whatever reason. They didn't.
Some people experienced god. Today they'd be called schizophrenics
except they wouldn't by some psychiatrists who make culturally sensitive
diagnoses and certainly in DSM-IV-TR a diagnosis of schizophrenia is not
made if there are cultural explanations for the experience.
Id din't have those explanations. I was an atheist but my beliefs
change. Now I'm an antitheist. It's complicated. I believe god exists
but I hate god. Sort of. It's a complicated faith especially for someone
who was an atheist for such a long time.
Part of my journey was to experience psychosis outside the dogma of
mental healthcare. I had no one telling me what I was experiencing was
an illness and that I was delusional. I knew the construct but I avoided
the system because they'd section me and forcibly drug me. I've had it
happen to me too many times before.
For me the experience abated after a few months. I took no medication
apart from a little alcohol and cannabis (not amounts large enough to
enduce in the symptoms but it helped relax me and cheer me up). The
first time it happened to me with the longevity and intensity to be
considered a psychiatric problem I was smoking an ounce of high grade
skunk a week. This is enough to blow anyone's mind. Work stress, moving
location, my own pressure on myself and large amounts of cannabis ended
up with me deluded, paranoid and manic. The next time I had similar
circumstances. I'd started a new job having been on benefits for a
while. I'd moved to a new area. I was hardly drinking and smoking tiny
amounts of cannabis - less than I smoke now. I was smoking about £5-10 a
week which is probably just over 1g of skunk. When I was first
hospitalised I was smoking 28g a week of skunk.
I managed to keep working the second time I went through intense
psychosis. It wasn't a pleasant experience like some parts had been the
first time. I was paranoid but still had a grip on what was real. For
example I would experience my thoughts and external reality such that to
me it seemed like people were reading my thoughts and knew things they
couldn't know about me. It couldn't be true that they could read my
thoughts though. It just couldn't be even though I was experiencing the
reality that this was true. Not the idea or the contemplation of the
possibility. The experience from my senses was my thoughts were being
read. I managed to survive by being dead to social contact of any kind
and was essentially a slab of meat walking around doing their job and
occassionally acting strangely. I had one blow out which was purely down
to paranoia but luckily I worked at a place where there was a small
amount of acceptance and understanding of the symptoms of mental ill health.
And then for no discernible reason it changed. The experience subsided
and within a week I was feeling better. My work performance improved. My
social life blossomed and I returned to being the person that people
like to have around. I became hypomanic and rode the wave pretty well
for a while.
During this time I met an amazing person who's helped me a little by
sending bits of important research my way. She sent me the Thud
experiement where people who didn't have a mental illness nor experience
voices told doctors they heard voices so they could show how normal
behaviour is pathologised once someone is given the label of mentally
ill. All they had to do to be hospitalised was tell a doctor they'd
starting hearing a voice in their head. All the doctors back then wanted
to do was drug them up with major tranquilisers.
I'm glad I went through the experience without the medication and I'm
not sure it would have helped. Being chilled out would have helped
perhaps but the drugs wouldn't have made the psychosis go away. I think
that's a fallacy and not based on evidence but I haven't looked into the
placebo controlled antipsychotic trials because there aren't many and I
have lots of other papers to read. By the by, the experience is hell and
if there was a way to make it easier for people then drugs make sense. I
still use cannabis and it helps a lot. Sadly I think nothing stops the
experience but perhaps stopping it shouldn't be the aim of treatment,
even if that's what most people experiencing psychosis want from mental
health care. All mental healthcare wants to do is sedate them using
chemicals.
What if it was important that people go through this awful negative
experience? A synonym for psychosis is ego death and the meaning I took
from it was the death of the old sense of "i" and what I had achieved. I
was only a small part of the individual who writes here as We. I came to
that knowledge not through reading books but by going through the
experience of ego death: feeling the other, not reading someone else's
experience retold.
And it changed me. This is perhaps what people might fear but I value so
much. Change. Most of all this is how I see psychosis: as a change
process. I wonder just how many people have gone through it and never
seen a psychiatrist. I think they'd all be able to recongise how it was
influential in changing them. Change, however, is often feared by what
psychiatry does and considers is appropriate for the human condition. A
famous psychiatrist in the 1970s is quoted as saying had Jesus been born
at the time of psychiatry he'd have been persuaded to go back to carpentry.
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