It was an young lad who was sitting on a wall at the side of the road. He stopped to talk to me. I had just bought some skunk and I smelled of it so he stopped me and started chatting.
We talked about all sorts of stuff. Girls. Clubs. Briefly sexuality I think. He was working the the hair dressers across the road. I took this all as true. Potentially I was being checked out as a copper or a big buyer by the people i'd just got the drugs of. A nice 20 of what is nowadays called an eighth of haze. Shit prices have changed. I have paranoia about paranoia from drug dealers. I think they think I'm either popo or a top dealer.
Anyway, we got chatting about drugs and mental illness. I explained my prolegalisation stance. Drugs are good. That's why people do them and go to great lengths to get them. That's why there's a multibillion pound industry.
The modern bugbear for my views is the problem of illicit drugs and mental illness. I didn't have a way to explain all my thinking so instead I listened. The guy told me about a friend of his. He'd done the drugs and he'd ended up in psychiatric care. I was told that they guy was alright now...but his eyes...his eyes were different...sort of mad looking....bug eyed.
I took a lot from that explanation and that moment. He'd hit on something. He's no trained psychiatrist. He had a diagnostic system though. "Sort of mad looking" and the state of this other geezers eyes.
I didn't quote the thud experiment but it seemed analogous to my criticisms had I voiced them. The pathologisation of normal which happens upon application of the label of mental illness. He wasn't stoned though and I think the idea may have escaped him.
But I'm going to assume that the person was more bug eyed by whatever measure this lad used. It leads me to something else I've been thinking about in relation to cannabis and schizophrenia.
First of all I disagree that there's a definitive causal link but there is an association between cannabis use and mental illness. It may be a symptom rather than a cause, for example hebral cannabis is strong in antipsychotic components which people would naturally find if they self medicate. Cannabis, after all, chills people out usually just like antipsychotics are designed to do. So people puff the ganga to medicate as a learned thing. No medical textbook recommends any kind of the components found in cannabis for treatment...yet...but studies do show potential and for other ailments even the demonised delta-9-thc is now licensed as a medical treatment in the us.
But that's not the thinking point. It's about this thing which people call schizophrenia or the schizophrenic to be precise.
Several studies have shown there are different types of humans with different patterns of behaviour. These types are identifiable and there's lots of research to prove the strict use of psychiatric diagnostic rules can identify people and reasonably well estimate a negatuve prognosis in life.
In my opinion psychiatry's mistake is calling differences deficits and difference types of people iill because they're different. The prognosis isn't real. Often its the constructs of society and expectations of norms which create the disabgility and clinical outcomes. Fuck. There's no contextualisation given other than braindysfunction. Never that the person may just be different in a time and place where human difference is called an illness and the reason is because society is fucked up and the structures to understand human difference, in the consensus reality, are handed to a profession which has as much wisdom as my left testicle.
I didn't pressure they guy to tell me more about what he thought mental illness mean other than looking a bit mental. Why was looking mental an illness was perhaps too complex a question for our brief encounter.
But again I return to the thought process about what if he were right. What if schizophrenics look a bit bug eyed.
I suppose we need to know what he meant by bug eyed. Here's what I think. I think its about his eyes not focusing and holding attention as he'd expect an automoton's to. It may actually be a physical change from malnourishment which makes the cheeks under the eyes sallow but I think he meant what I think he meant.
This is a guess. The guess is based on recent ruminations about Jung and what he thought about schizophrenia. It's just something I remember from tryying to get round one of his early papers, the one which he wrote the book Psychological Types off of.
He spoke of schizophrenics having an inwardly focused mental state. I can't remember if this is the same as an introverted personality type. I think it is different.
Today we have a very different written understanding of schizophrenia. The definition has significantly changed and no where does it mention this inwardly focused state of consciousness.
By inwardly I mean sitting more with our own thoughts than taking in or living external reality. Perhaps I mean sitting in a park drinking wine alone and writing this piece around lunchtime. I'm lost in.a world of thought focused on expressing it onto this blog rather than consciously observing the world around me. I'm in a park now. I can focus on the organic surroundings. Instead I focus on my thoughts and what I'm thinking about.
I'm also stoned.
This idea of states of presence on a continuum between totally inward and totally out focusing was this tiny bit in Jungs paper at the turn of the last century. I hope I remember it right.
On the other end of the scale from schizophrenia he put another type. The hysteric. People forget the hysteria epidemic. This mental illness was the scourge of America and probably the UK. Jung, freud, kraeplin and all the rest had to deal with tons of hysterics.
Academics could argue how this illness became healed but the relevance here is the previous pathologisation of a different illness, now covered by conversion disorders and perhaps some of the diagnoses around sexual function, as the opposite extreme of the schizophrenic.
The hysteric would be overly concerned by worldly matters whereas the schizophrenic would be dealing with the internal and individual world.
The schizophrenic might look bug eyed because often they are inside their minds more than other people. Our eyes are primary senses but the systems may be partially disengaged as a person spends more time in a more inward state. They mind may not be fully focused on the external world and social reality or whatever. It is an internal focused experience the mind gets used to.
Anyone who's smoked cannabis on their own will know the pleasure of the relaxing bliss of thought.
I am a long term stoner. I know it well. I assume many schizophrenics know it too. At least those who are off medication.
There is a simple, solitary pleasure which is unique in its beauty and intensity. I am not disturbed by negative vibes. I am in a park and from my knowledge this is the best way to take these drugs.
I find pleasure in this semi dream like state. I still cogitate and can type fluidly. This is deeply pleasureable and I think it might be lest so with company. This is a moment where the best company is my company.
This is a state of mind which is different. We all have our internal time and if we don't we find it. Perhaps on the underground to work. Perhaps those last moments before slumber. Our internal life and the full experience of our internal life is vital.
Taken too far it might make a person look a buit bug eyed.
It may also do other things. I'm talking about an inward state of self. I'm talking about people who end up in religious settings.
Actually I'm wondering about loads of stuff. This post was meant to end on the positive but unknown of schizophrenics.
Steven fry has popularised some of what used to be pathologised about schizophrenics. I use the term as a very broad one related to dementia praecox. I don't really bother to differentiate between bipolar and schizophrenia.
This whole long ramble was meant to sort of go in to how inward people relfect and think and have an important function. So much of the world demands a different psychological type. People who can live with quick decisions or satiate the pain of pragmatism.
Schizophrenics are also often the people who make significant idealistic contributions to society and civilisations in small and big ways.
But its because they're bug eyed.
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