Lay On, MacDuff

 

Writers and poets are the true psychologists, the authorities on the psyche. It takes a deep empathy, a deep understanding of how the human psyche works, to make a believable fictional character, or to write a poem that resonates with many souls, not just your own. This is what Keats called “negative capability.” Their fruits—the beauty of their writings—certifies their wisdom and expertise. We are mad that we do not turn to them first when in mental turmoil.

By contrast, we have no way of knowing if a scientific psychologist or analyst knows what they are talking about; and can generally assume they don’t. Because the psyche cannot be studied “scientifically.”

As the greatest of writers, this makes Shakespeare the greatest of authorities on the human mind. His characters always have authentic motivations.

He has much to say on the matter of madness.

MacBeth is one example. Both MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go mad in the play. Both have what psychologists these days call “psychotic breaks”: they hallucinate. Lady MacBeth commits suicide.

And Shakespeare makes the cause clear: guilt. People are commonly driven mad, psychotic, by their own guilty conscience. A concept familiar too in classical mythology: one is hounded to madness by the Erinyes.

Modern psychiatry/psychology rules this out altogether. Moral considerations are not allowed in modern psychiatry. Meaning that in such cases modern psychiatry is useless, or worse than useless.

No wonder that, in modern times, “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder,” the psychotic forms of madness, are considered incurable. Psychiatry only dulls the symptoms with drugs.

By contrast, in Shakespeare’s play, while Lady MacBeth kills herself, MacBeth seems to recover lucidity by the end of the play—seemingly because he accepts that he is about to be killed, and accepts it as his proper fate. He has ended his rebellion against God, and returned to an appreciation and acceptance of divine justice.

Once, abroad, needing something to read, I picked up a paperback on Florida’s Death Row. And the author claimed the prisoners on Death Row were invariably barking mad.

Yet they cannot have been mad when they committed their murders: some were mob hit men, professional murderers. They did it for money, and had to plan for the killings. You can’t do that if you are out of touch with the physical world around you.

They too seem, then, to have been driven mad by guilt.

This is not the cause for all mental illness; Shakespeare makes this, too, clear.

Lady MacBeth’s Doctor remarks: “yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.”

“More needs she the divine than the physician.”

Implying that others will, to the contrary, need a physician. Some madness is caused by physical illness. Some is caused by bad upbringing: Plato and the New Testament agree on this.

But when, as is often the case, the problem is moral, no “physic” can work.

MacBeth:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:

Therein the patient Must minister to himself.

The cure is confession, repentance, and restitution.

However, the sufferer also has an obvious vested interest in avoiding confession. This conflict is what drives them mad. On the one hand, fearing discovery, they become paranoid, and will add sin to sin in defiance of their conscience, now an enemy.

“I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

Himmler said more or less the same thing in justifying the Nazi Holocaust.

“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”

Sin hardens into vice. 

This is why it is up to the patient to minister to themselves. If their only help is confession, they will try to destroy anyone who tries to help.

On the other hand, the desire to confess, to “make a clean breast of it,” also becomes overwhelming. This causes them often to, as if inadvertently, let their guilt slip out. As MacBeth does before a table full of prominent nobles. As Lady MacBeth feigns doing with her nighttime notes.

“I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”

The cure for such mental illness is obvious. And you will never get it from a psychiatrist.

The Madness of King Lear

 

A correspondent’s son suffers schizophrenia, and is also prone to taking drugs, notably LSD. She laments it all as an “escape from reality.” 

The truth may be more subtle. 

To begin with, is an escape from reality, defined as our daily routine, always a bad thing? We are actually morally obliged to take regular escapes from this “reality. “This is the reason for Sabbath observance, for example. And there is a certain symbolism in the consecration of the wine.

Is taking a vacation an escape from reality? Is watching a movie? In a sense, yes. Both draw us out of our everyday surroundings; this allows us to relax. Simply by “getting away from it all,” we can often evaluate our problems from a new perspective, and perhaps even solve them. Trapped in the daily struggle, we cannot.

Yet to see taking a vacation to Rome, say, or watching a Shakespeare play, or attending mass, as escapism is also perverse: it sees only what we are leaving, not where we are going. It is like walking backwards on our pilgrimage.

It may be fairly common for people to drink alcohol for pure “escapism.” Alcohol dulls the senses, and slows reactions. We are probably less able to deal with our problems intelligently on alcohol. But experimenting with LSD is a different matter. People often think they have learned new things about reality from taking LSD.

I am not advocating LSD use. It is a blunt tool, and dangerous. But psychosis may be similar. The fact that this person, my friend’s son, when he is not experiencing schizophrenic symptoms, wants to take LSD, suggests that the psychosis is giving him some benefit. He is learning something from it, or at least escaping some intolerable daily situation.

Shakespeare, who must be considered one of the greatest psychologists who ever lived, suggests as much in King Lear:

Our foster-nurse of nature is repose,

The which he lacks; that to provoke in him,

Are many simples operative, whose power

Will close the eye of anguish.

…

The king is mad: how stiff is my vile sense,

That I stand up, and have ingenious feeling

Of my huge sorrows! Better I were distract:

So should my thoughts be sever'd from my griefs,

And woes by wrong imaginations lose

The knowledge of themselves.

In either case, simply trying to block the symptoms of schizophrenia, as we currently do, will be harmful. Schizophrenia looks like the working out of some problem.

The Spider and the Fly

A fascinating interview with Mary Margaret O’Hara, who has rightly been called a national treasure. I think if she walked into any psychiatrist’s office, she would be diagnosed as schizo-affective. She would certainly be considered psychotic. She reminds me of others I have known.

But that is not a helpful way to see it.

Listening to her, it ought to be clear that she is in contact with the spiritual world. It is obvious that she is highly intelligent, as psychotics usually are; her mind is working too quickly. She is seeing things the rest of us cannot see. Her consciousness is shamanic.

While most psychotics are silenced, either drugged or cowed into silence, O’Hara is able to channel her inspiration in her music.

Which is wonderful, and which I recommend, if you have not heard it.

She also radiates the moral purity, the sincerity, the lack of a filter or mask, and the vulnerability I have seen in others with such diagnoses. As well as the constant self-doubt of one who has been systematically abused or profoundly emotionally betrayed in childhood. Which is usually their story.

That is worth observing closely. But something else is worth observing, and is disturbing.

It is disturbing to watch the interaction with Jian Ghomeshi.

We know enough about Ghomeshi to know that, while his conduct may never have been criminal, he is a sexual predator and a narcissist. And he is charming her like a snake hypnotizing his prey. He is feigning understanding her in some special way, and feigning sympathizing with her entirely. She is not used to being able to have a serious conversation with someone. Most people just don’t want to talk about real things; they probably ignore most of what she says.

You can see she is drawn to him.

And he is, I fear, expressing covert malice by choosing to coax her into that particular duet: "Baby, It's Cold Outside," with its hint of less than fully-consensual sex.

It feels like the narcissist asserting his feelings of superiority and demanding dominance. And testing how much he can get away with before she realizes what is going on.

It is an illustration of how the abused remain eternally vulnerable to narcissistic predators. It is terrifying to think of how she might have been hurt if Ghomeshi drew her in.

St. Dympna's Solution to Mass Murder

St. Dymphna of Ireland. patron of the "mentally ill."

The recent US Navy Yard shooting seems to be giving people the idea that there is something wrong, not with the gun control laws, but with the mental health system. That, after all, is the common thread among seemingly all recent shooting rampages: that the perps were psychotic.

But it is not simply a matter of putting more money into the system; since we don't really know of any cure for “mental illness” anyway. Is it, then, a matter of reversing “deinstitutionalization,” the closing down of mental health beds? Seems logical on the face of it: as Anne Coulter has pointed out, the spike in mass murder corresponds closely to the releasing of more psychotics onto the streets.

But the problem with this is that a mental hospital looks and operates very much like a prison; and the people forcibly interred there have done nothing to deserve this. To lock them up on the presumption that they might commit a crime is Minority Report territory. And wide open to political abuse. Since we do not know what “mental illness” is, dissent from the majority opinion too easily becomes “mental illness.”

The essential need is simple, though: quarantine the psychotic. Keep them apart from any potential shooting victims. And this in itself is not repressive, since in general this is what the psychotic most want: a chance to get away from it all and grapple with their voices. Indeed, this is very likely to also be the shortest route to a cure.

But why make this a prison? Why not instead a remote townsite, a no-frills resort? Heaven knows, we have a lot of space for such a thing, at least in Canada. Good use for one of those abandoned mining towns, perhaps.

There is, as it happens, a model for this. The town of Gheel, in Belgium, has for centuries taken in the insane and placed them with local families, under the patronage of St. Dymphna. The system seems to be successful, and popular in the town, since it brings economic benefits.

No doubt there are risks to the townspeople; just as there are risks to the doctors and nurses in a psychiatric hospital. But in this non-coercive atmosphere, I suspect that confrontations are far less likely. And, in the atmosphere of a small town, it is easier to unobtrusively detect incipient trouble.

And as overseers and providers, rural families are a lot cheaper than doctors and nurses.