The Tell-Tale Heart

 

I am not a fan of Edgar Allen Poe. To me, his writing is over the top—fear-jerking, cheap thrills.

But I just went through “The Tell-Tale Heart” with a student, and I think Poe may have a lead here on the true nature and cause of what modern psychiatry calls “paranoid schizophrenia.” 

In the story, the narrator is driven to psychosis by a guilty conscience. And not only guilt over murdering an old; he murders the old man in the first place out of guilt. A bad conscience made him imagine the old man saw into his soul and was judging him.

Poe does not tell us what he feels guilty about in the first place; but the clue is his insistence throughout the tale that he is not mad. He is more concerned about this than about being convicted of murder—he is resisting the obvious insanity defense. Why?

Out of pride. It is literally vitally important to him to convince the reader that his version of reality is the correct one. He must have the ability to impose his will on reality, and not concede to it.

In other words, a schizophrenic is a narcissist overwhelmed by his guilty conscience.

This is consistent with a mystery I read of a long time ago, in a book about Florida’s “death row.” It claimed that virtually everyone on death row seemed fully insane, delusional. Even though they were all judged sane and able to stand trial when they were convicted. And this included contract killers, mob killers—people who did it professionally, as a job. It seems implausible that such people were psychotic at the time they committed their crimes; a psychotic cannot plan well enough for a mob hit. 

Possibly the fear of death drove them mad; but most of us see death coming at the end of our lives, and do not go mad expecting it. It seems more likely the psychosis was provoked by having the chance to meditate over their former deeds.

M. Scott Peck, and Robert Fleiss, have both observed that narcissists when challenged can become psychotic. After all, their everyday assumptions, if examined closely, are already delusional. They all secretly think they are better than everyone, a Napoleon, or the god Siva, or the virgin Mary, or the promised Messiah. They will delude themselves with ideas of their own exceptional talents: like Poe’s narrator boasting of his extremely sensitive hearing, and of how clever he was in how he committed the murder and hid the body. This is how narcissists talk.

Shake them up enough, and the mask they wear to hide these assumptions from others slips. They openly declare themselves Napoleon, or Siva, or the Virgin Mary.

Paranoia comes with schizophrenia. Paranoia is itself a clear expression of egotism. It is the belief that everything is about you. Someone on the television is speaking directly to you. The CIA is trying to control you—obviously, they consider you that important. Everything is a message for you personally.

This is all the opposite of depression, which is caused by a sense of inferiority.

But in either case, the obvious and necessary cure is the same: to bring God and submission to God into the mix. 

Those Crazy Indians

 

Friend Xerxes writes that his father’s doctoral dissertation was almost rejected. His father was using the standard Rorschach test on Indian (as in India) subjects. The problem was, his study showed that most of India’s population was schizophrenic.

There are several possibilities here. One is that Xerxes senior was not properly applying the test. The thesis examiners, however, could not find and flaw here, and so had to approve his thesis.

The second, and the conclusion Xerxes draws, is that the Rorschach test is culturally biased. 

But this implies a further conclusion: that our understanding of schizophrenia is culturally biased. It is primarily a cultural prejudice, not an illness. This has grave implications. It means people might actually be drugged up or put in mental hospitals because of their cultural background. And it has been suggested that this has happened, often, to Native Americans/First Nations shamans.

And there is actually a third possibility, currently not permitted to be mentioned: maybe schizophrenia is a real mental disorder, and the majority of Indians are indeed schizophrenic. Maybe an entire culture can be mad, out of touch with objective reality.

We cannot entertain this last possibility, because we currently falsely identify culture with race; and then with the concept of human equality. So we cannot admit that one culture can be better than another.

This is obviously false. A culture is a tool for living, a technology, and one tool can always be better than another.

I will go further. Our present Western culture, which asserts that a man can become a woman, and vice versa, is objectively mad. It is leading to rising rates of depression and suicide. 

It is always possible that the schizophrenics, and the Indians, are sane, and psychology and the psychologists and modern secular scientistic “Western” culture, are mad.

If this sounds shocking, this is actually the foundational assumption of Christianity, or Buddhism, or Hinduism: that an entire culture, indeed “the world,” can have it wrong. 

Depresssion and Its Cure

 

It seems plausible that the reason for the rapid rise in depression and other mental illness has been the growing use of seed oils. 

But this relies on the premise that depression is a “chemical imbalance in the brain.” That looks like a categorization error, mistaking something spiritual for something physical, the menu for the meal. It is like supposing that doing a dance wearing a false face will scare away cancer. It actually can work—witness the placebo effect—because mind and body do interact. But it is going about it the long way around.

What is depression really? It is not particularly related to feeling sad. “Depression” is a misleading term. The older word, “melancholia,” is better. Often more like an emotional numbness, and as often anxiety.

It is best described, perhaps, to those who have not experienced it, as like being in a maze. And in that maze, there is a minotaur. Any way you turn is probably wrong. But staying put is also wrong.

The obvious way to understand that, is that you have lost your moral compass. You have lost your sense of right and wrong.

Not in the way psychopaths are supposed to. Psychopaths seem to have the opposite experience, that nothing is wrong, and you are free to do what you want. The depressed feel instead that nothing is right; which paralyses them.

Most likely either is the result of an immoral upbringing, an upbringing by a parent who themselves had no moral sense; a parent who is either a psychopath, or chronically depressed.

The more dramatic experience we call schizophrenia seems adjacent in kind. Here the problem is not just what is right or wrong, but what is real. Probably produced most often by a parent who chronically “gaslit,” to use the currently popular term. And here, too, there are logically two opposite forms: either anything I want to be real is probably real; or anything I don’t want to be real is probably real. The former produces what we call narcissism. The latter produces what we call schizophrenia. 

So what is the proper or probable cure?

Where do we go to discover what is genuinely right and wrong, and what is genuinely real? Where do we go to reprogram our minds out of this trap?

Obviously, to philosophy and to religion.

Madness and MacBeth

 

Erinyes

Going through MacBeth with a student—the play that made me first love Shakespeare. And it occurred to me this time through that Shakespeare’s theory of madness is quite different from that of modern psychiatry. 

They treat it as if a physical illness. He thinks it is a spiritual, a moral, problem.

“Unnatural deeds

Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds

To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

More needs she the divine than the physician.”

“Consider it not so deeply….These deeds must not be thought

After these ways; so, it will make us mad.”

Shakespeare must be listened to, because he is the greatest psychiatrist who ever lived. His greatest accomplishment as a writer is how he gets into the minds of all his characters, even the darkest villains, and expresses so clearly and sympathetically how they think. He knows the human soul.

MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go schizophrenic in classic fashion. MacBeth starts hallucinating as soon as he contemplates the crime. Lady MacBeth eventually sleepwalks and talks to herself. I once stayed in a schizophrenic’s apartment. He did too.

Not to say all schizophrenics go mad due to a guilty conscience. Shakespeare himself suggests not all. “Yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep, who have died holily in their beds.” 

The reason this particular sort of schizophrenic goes “schizophrenic” is from a guilty conscience. They have committed a sin so serious their conscience will not leave them alone. This conforms too with the Ancient Greek idea of the Erinyes. They will track you down for vengeance no matter where you go and what you do.

Of course, in a Christian world, there is no sin as such so serious. Lady MacBeth, or MacBeth,  are Christian, and presumably know this. The problem is that they have so committed their very fate to the sin; they cannot accept the consequences of repentance. It would mean, in their case, by law, losing the crown, and losing their lives.

That is perhaps how narcissists feel. This particular type of “schizophrenia” comes from narcissism. Whether or not literally so, the typical narcissist cannot admit fault, for in their own mind it would mean losing their imaginary crown, having crowned themselves, and losing their life, their settled self-identity.

What modern psychiatry calls narcissism is really vice. Formulaically pride, the chief of all the vices, but it could also be any of the others. This is how vice works. The perp gets so committed to the sin they decide there is no way out. Then they start to hear footsteps, Erinyes, behind them.

“Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”

“No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.”

There is fear in that statement.

MacBeth when he hears Fleance, Banquo’s son, has escaped his assassin:

“Then comes my fit again: I had else been perfect;

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock,

As broad and general as the casing air:

But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in

To saucy doubts and fears.”

And he promptly begins to hallucinate the ghost of Banquo. Fear and doubt are the triggers.

The same thing happens to King Lear. Lear is obviously a “narcissist,” in modern psychiatric terms. When his self-image as king is rocked, he goes mad. Here too there is, or ought to be, a guilty conscience. He has grossly played favourites among his children.

That too is perhaps, in cosmic terms, so great a sin it commonly cannot be admitted.

How to End Homelessness

 

Moby Grape. Bob Mosley, bottom centre.

The cost of housing in Canada and across the developed world has grown unrealistically high. Tent cities are sprouting up. 

However, the main cause of homelessness is not poverty, but mental illness.

The mentally ill cannot get organized enough to go through the proper channels to get aid. But that is not the only problem. Tim Poole recently observed that he has worked with the homeless, and he found that most often, they will refuse shelter if offered. Toronto mayor John Tory has recently made the same observation. He asked the police to clear the local parks. He thought that arranging for accommodations for everyone would fix the problem. He has been blindsided by this all becoming controversial, because the tent-sitters refuse to move.

I read long ago about the bassist for Moby Grape, Bob Mosley. He went schizophrenic, and was found years later sleeping under a bridge. He refused to rejoin for a band reunion or to come indoors. “He felt he’d earned this.”

"We went to find Bob, and there he was, living in this cardboard box. He had these friends, the squirrels and the lizards that he had. And I brought this guitar, cost me a hundred bucks, you know, and I left that with him and a tape of Moby Grape songs and a tape recorder with batteries in it and some extra batteries. So the next weekend, I came back, and there was no guitar, but the cassette case... He had tried to tear all the tape out of it and had left it, you know, down there in the bushes.”

Generally speaking, the “mentally ill” are people who have seen the madness of the people around them, and, one way or another, want nothing to do with it. They are doing what they can to escape the matrix.

My own brother suffered chronic depression. He owned a house in the city, but preferred to live out in the woods in a cabin without running water or, I believe, year-round road access. He felt calmer there.

This explains the stigma of mental illness. They are heretics. Their views are potentially contagious. They might make sense.

The solution to homelessness is simple, and cheaper than what we are doing now. Set these people up in cabins in the woods. 

Or revive the monasteries.

The Lady's a Vamp

 

Waterhouse, "Lamia"; an image of the narcissist type

Over the last few weeks, I have been in email correspondence with the mother of a man diagnosed as schizophrenic. She declared that she had cured him. The cure consisted of playing music through headphones into just one ear. She claimed to have helped hundreds in the same way.

Oddly, however, she also spoke of her son as still schizophrenic, of having cured him repeatedly, and of his sometimes cursing her or her husband. It sounds as though the “cure” was temporary and symptomatic. “Cure” may have been an exaggeration.

I’m not sure she has actually demonstrated anything beyond the traditional wisdom that music has charms that calm the savage breast. An observation at least as old as Orpheus and the Bible.

But I think I may have seen here something of the family dynamic that leads to schizophrenia.

Seemingly unaware of the ancient observation about music, the lady was certain she had made a scientific breakthrough on the order of Harvey discovering the circulation of blood—she literally used this comparison. She had demonstrated that schizophrenia, and mental illness generally, was actually a hearing problem. It was caused by a physiological defect in the right ear. As a result of this, the brain becomes unbalanced, out of sync. The right brain becomes dominant over the left. By playing music in only one ear, she had rebalanced the two hemispheres.

This sounded odd; beginning with what looked like a naively literal interpretation of mental illness as being “mentally unbalanced.” I pointed out to her that other than handedness, there was no demonstrated scientific basis for the left-brain, right-brain distinction. She promptly responded that she was not concluding this from anyone else’s work, this is something she had personally discovered.

As we engaged in further discussion, I realized that she conceived no distinction between “mind” and “brain.” When I suggested that the one thing was a physical entity you could hold in your hand, and the other was not, she seemed to simply ignore the point, and went right back to identifying them, without explanation. It was as though she were mentally blocking any contrary suggestion. 

We had a parallel discussion of the distinction between “behavior” and “experience” or “thought.” She consistently referred to all as “behavior.” When I argued the difference, using a computer analogy, it did not seem to register. She did not respond, and continued calling it all behavior. I could not get her to acknowledge the difference between “mental” or “metaphysical” and “physical” either. Nor could she recognize a possible distinction between “physical” and “real.” After being queried on this, with reference to Berkeley, she used the terms interchangeably, as if in defiance: where I had written “physical,” she quoted me as writing “real.” 

This looked semi-intentional. At some level, she understood the distinction, but she refused to acknowledge it.

This seemed to make her a total materialist. Yet, surprisingly, she claimed to be an unchurched Christian, who believed in a soul and an afterlife. 

Then, in another context, she lamented that her husband was currently so depressed he thought he was going to die.

(Odd—why hadn’t she used her listening therapy to cure him? Or had it failed?)

I pointed out, hoping to ease her presumed concern over her husband, that death is not necessarily a bad thing for a Christian. She responded that in his case, he was also expecting “the worst possible outcome”—nonexistence. 

Very odd—claiming to believe in an afterlife, and a Christian afterlife, yet even in the context of a Christian afterlife, the concept of hell does not come to her mind as conceivable. For surely that is worse than nonexistence.

She was superficially perfectly lucid, and congenial, indeed, conspicuously socially skilled. Charming--or, more accurately, manipulative. She could probably have given a casual acquaintance a good impression of herself at a cocktail party.

But whether or not her son was mad, it was clear if one listened carefully, and probed, that in literal terms, she was as mad as a hatter. 

She was an example of what Fleiss called “ambulatory psychosis,” or M. Scott Peck called “ambulatory schizophrenia.” Both are alternate terms for what we call narcissism. And both Fleiss and Peck maintain that this character type in a parent leads to mental illness in a child. As it seems to have done here.

These are people who seem at least reasonably sane to the world around, and respectable, while actually holding delusional views about themselves and the world. They think of themselves as godlike, and will fabricate imaginary narratives to reinforce this impression, both to themselves and others. Yet it is their children, rather than themselves, who turn up at the psychiatrist’s office. They will never go to see a psychiatrist because, of course, they cannot be mentally ill. It must be everyone else. If and as their child, growing up, sees inconsistencies in their claims about themselves and the world, the child is forced into the role of mental illness, of mental problem. For being too sane.

In her own mind, this woman was convinced she was a scientist as great as Harvey. Descartes and Berkeley were obvious idiots compared to her. It emerged, as each of these subjects came up in discussion, that she had significant academic background in English literature, psychology, and philosophy. When the Iowa Writing Workshop came up, it turned out that her husband was a graduate, and her daughter worked for that university. Possibly true, but a pileup of coincidences.

My speculative observations:

The narcissist type—I prefer the term “hubristic,” but as exemplified here--is an absolute materialist, but also believes in an immortal soul. How is this possible? Because they believe that THEY have an immortal soul; but actually, nobody else does. Everyone else is a bundle of unconscious behaviours. 

They must believe they are immortal, being their own gods; but will not accept the possibility of divine punishment. There can be no question of them ever having acted immorally. Others do, of course, but since they are automatons, it is not their fault.

If they cannot plausibly make a boast about themselves, they may boast of association with someone else who is great. Otherwise, everyone else is worthy of scorn. This is the genesis of the co-dependent Echo type of narcissist. While describing all her close relatives as insane, this woman also claimed her father was a great scientist who designed essential parts of the first Canadian nuclear reactor. 

Her first instinct was to run anyone else down, but she would flip to the exact opposite when it seemed useful. This has often been commented on in narcissists: their reaction to everyone is either adulation or devaluation, and most often, in relationships, first the one, in order to entrap, then the other.

I deeply pity her son. She is, as are narcissists generally, a vampire feeding on his substance.

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.

Jung and the Mandala

Mandala drawn by Jung himself.

“I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder ... I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief. Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon me. I wept for happiness and gratitude.” - Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Carl Jung claimed to be able to heal the mentally ill largely by having them draw “mandalas.” He borrowed the term from Buddhism, specifically Tibetan Buddhism, which has a tradition of drawing elaborate, mostly geometric, patterns radiating outward from a central point.

The real thing: a Tantric Buddhist mandala.

According to Jung, “it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder of the psychic state– namely through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements.” Elsewhere, he observes “the mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the path to the centre, to individuation.”

Church ceiling, Bucharest.

Jung's understanding of just what a mandala is about, and what it is showing, actually differs from that of his source, Tantric Buddhism. To Jung, the mandala shows the psyche, and the central point represents the self: "Their basic motif is the premonition of a centre of personality, a kind of central point within the psyche, to which everything is related, by which everything is arranged, and which is itself a source of energy." To Buddhists, it shows the universe, and to place one's self at the centre would be the worst sort of heresy. The core Buddhist doctrine is “anatman”--the non-existence of any continuous self.

Church ceiling, Santo Domingo.

It is also a bit surprising that Jung reached for a Buddhist model in classifying this sort of image, of a variety of things radiating from a central core—for it is at least as common in Christianity. The reason may well be that, had he cited the Christian examples, it would have been too evident to his readers and his patients that he was reinterpreting its significance in a profane way. For in Christian models, and to Christians, it is achingly clear that the subject is the cosmos, not the soul, and that the central point of the motif the divine, is God, not the self.

Rose window, Paris.

As to Jung's idea that the mandala shows “contradictory and irreconcilable elements,” that too seems debatable, both in its eastern and its western forms. It is, of course, an image of symmetry. Symmetry implies the balance of opposites, as in left and right, up and down. Opposites are not, however, in themselves either contradictory or irreconcilable. Quite the reverse: men and women are opposites, sexually speaking, but in the natural order of things they reconcile rather well. So do left and right. If they did not, there would in fact be no possibility of balance.

Church ceiling, St. Petersburg.

Here Jung seems to have his own little Gnostic axe to grind, primarily because this idea of a “reconciliation of contradictory elements” was an opportunity for an end run around conventional morality. After all, if good and evil are opposites which could and should be balanced, that gives one a perfect excuse for behaving badly when it seems to be in one's self-interest. And why not, indeed, if one's self, as Jung sees it, is the centre of the universe?

Labyrinth, Amiens. A "labyrinth,"in this usage, is the opposite of a maze. There is only one path; one cannot go astray.

Might it be too unkind to suggest that Jung's interpretation of the mandala is that of a perfect narcissist; the view of an evil man? The self is the centre of everything, and anything that seems good for the self is not just permitted but divinely ordained.

Bad medicine. Although no doubt it played well in the German-speaking world during a certain period...

Labyrinth, Boxgrove.

Still, I submit that Jung is perfectly right in claiming that the mandala, at least in its proper significance as an image of cosmic order, is indeed an image of mental health. It might even be true that drawing one is a useful form of therapy, as Jung found it.

Rose window, Durham.

Begin with the premise that mental “illness” generally is mental confusion. This naturally springs most commonly from having been emotionally abused: that is, having been put consistently in a situation in which any conceivable choice is represented as wrong; R.D. Lang's “double-bind.” Take this for a few years, and it gets hard to see which way is up. Take this throughout a childhood, and you are left with very little solid ground on which to grow. Hence the lack of motivation commonly seen in depression: if any move is the wrong move, it is terribly hard to get out of bed in the first place.

Rose window, Strasbourg.

On top of this, as M. Scott Peck observes, because of the demands of conscience, any abusive situation, any evil regime, is founded on and sustained by a web of lies. Peck calls the evil or narcissistic “people of the lie”; Jesus calls them “hypocrites,” meaning, roughly, “actors.”

Labyrinth, San Francisco.

Accordingly, the experience of depression is very much like being trapped in a maze, but one for which there is no exit. It is the proverbial “rat race.”

Schizophrenia, in which people see or hear hallucinations, may really be no different. As Oliver Sacks points out in his recent book on the subject, hallucinations are in fact fairly common, and in most cases unrelated to schizophrenia. The problem, therefore, may not be with seeing things, but with not being able to meaningfully interpret them, to fit them into one's existing world-view. One therefore becomes confused by them, frightened by them; and this is the “schizophrenia.”

Labyrinth, Lucca.

So: if the essence of mental illness is mental confusion, the essential medicine is a new or restored vision of cosmic order. One that can accommodate all of one's real experiences, one that restores meaning to life, one that restores a path that one can take.

This is religion; this is what religion is all about. Religion is the antidote to mental illness. QED.

Image of New Jerusalem, church ceiling, St. Petersburg. Holy Spirit at centre.

The mandala is simply the image of this. But icons, as an aid to meditation, can no doubt have healing power. The mandala is an anti-maze, a cosmos in which all the ways have been made straight for the Lord, in which the plain truth is plainly visible.

So religion is the antidote to mental “illness.” Among other things.

Rose window, Chartres.

This explains Jesus's call to the depressed and abused in the Beatitudes. They are those most in need of true religion.

Jesus even introduces a mandala immediately after calling for their attention. He says, of the abused, "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden." (Matthew 5:14). The image of a city is an image of order; being set upon a hill for all to see, and radiating light to all the world—that is a mandala. The city he mentions is, of course, the New Jerusalem, the Christian heaven. At its centre is the Lamb of God, the divine.

The New Jerusalem, French. According to Revelations, it is a perfect cube, symmetrical in three dimensions, made of precious stones, radiating light.

But the very next thing Jesus says is the opposite of Jung. Jung declares, the heck with conventional morality. You should do what's best for your self. Jesus says conventional morality is not really strong or straight enough; it is a compromise. You should tear out your own eye if it leads you to sin; you should cut off your own hand. You should be perfect, as God is perfect.

The New Jerusalem. German.

Jesus's demands here are commonly taken to be hyperbolic—nobody, perhaps, has ever followed them literally. Jesus himself doesn't. But to the abused and depressed, they were and are probably what the doctor ordered. The last thing the depressed want or need is a fudge: they hunger for truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This Jesus gives them; no compromise, no minced words, no softening of blows, but what moral perfection looks like.

Labyrinth, St. Lambertus.

I recall a talk by an Australian priest who, for whatever reason, once had a psychotic break and ended up raving in an asylum. He believes that his cure began—for he is now perfectly well--when a fellow priest came to visit, grabbed him by his shoulders, looked him in the eyes, and, in the true spirit of Aussie mateship, said “You've gone crazy, you bugger.”

Rose window, St. Dunstan's.

That was the first sane word he had heard since he had been in there. Certainly, he had gotten no truth from the doctors.

Yet it is the Truth that sets you free.

Whatever Happened to Moby Grape?

Rear, l to r: Lewis, Spence. Front: Miller, Stevenson, Mosley.

Once upon a time, and a time some of us may even remember, there was a rock band named Moby Grape. They came out with an introductory album back in 1967, and it was really, really good. My brother and I played the grooves off of it. If you listen to the music today, it is still really good. Then they put out a second album, which was clever, but no longer that good, straight up rock and roll. Too academic for my tastes. Too Sergeant Peppery. Then they just kind of disappeared.

So what happened to them? Specifically, how could a group of musicians who seemed to be so good, and a group of songwriters who seemed so good, just seem to disappear without a trace? Jerry Miller, their first guitar, was called by Eric Clapton “the best guitarist in the world.” Even if the group broke up, as so many groups have done, why didn’t the individual members at least resurface in other groups? It just seems weird.

And weird, it turns out, it really was. Uncanny, in fact. Part of the problem was a really bad, really rapacious manager. He managed to get full rights to the group’s name, and somehow took or lost them all the royalties. So the members of the group got nothing for their work, and could not even perform as Moby Grape in order to earn any more.

Still, that shouldn’t have been enough to stop them, should it? Just regroup under another name, and soon word would get around? They might have been tight for cash for a while, but they were surely prominent enough to at least make a living at clubs until the mojo jelled.

Except that, in the middle of recording that second album, Skip Spence, the real leader of the group and their best-known member, went completely schizophrenic and tried to kill the drummer. He was locked up for six months, shop up with thorazine, and was never fit to perform again. He ended up homeless, living on the streets, and died in 1999.

Skip Spence in middle age.

So the full band never really could re-form, and they had lost their most important member. But they still could have managed something, right? After all, the Stones replaced Brian Jones.

And this they indeed tried to do. But not long after that, their bassist, Bob Mosley, arguably the second-most-important member, also went schizophrenic. He too ended up homeless, and is apparently living on the street as of this writing.

The other three still seem to be more or less functional, and really do still perform. They have even managed, in the last few years, to even win the rights to their name back. But it is necessarily a shadow of what was Moby Grape. Jerry Miller has done best. But Peter Lewis, second guitar, seems to have had his own problems. He has said he was only able to stay with the band because he was under psychiatric care, taking librium.

What the heck was going on here?

The obvious thought is that this was caused by recreational drug use. Lots of folks say taking LSD can cause madness. But that doesn’t really fit, to my mind. All the bands in those days were taking recreational drugs; there was nothing special about Moby Grape in that way. So why, if it was drugs, did it hit one band so hard—and such a good band?

Peter Lewis himself seems to have a different idea, and it makes some sense to me at least. Being rather aware, as a survivor himself, of psychiatric issues, he because convinced that his bandmate, Skip Spence, was not really schizophrenic. He thought, in fact, that it might be demonic possession, and took him to a monastery to be exorcised.

From his account, it sounds very much as though he was right. That night, they took adjacent cells in the monastery:

“I started dreaming there was an angel who pulled back the curtain, and I could hear this terrible cracking and flashes of light and screaming from the next cell, and the sound of somebody being thrown up against the wall. It was like something out of The Exorcist, and I got real scared. I'd been scared of Skippy anyway since they locked him up in the Tombs. …. The next morning I went out in the courtyard, and Skippy was the same guy I'd first met in San Francisco - absolutely lucid, nothing wrong with him at all. We went and had lunch at this place at the bottom of the hill. But as the night came he began to slip back.

That's when they told us we had to leave because they'd heard what went on the night before. ‘You'll have to go,’ one of the monks told us. ‘Don't touch him, don't stop the car and don't give in to your fear. I'll be praying for you.’ So we started driving away, and I was scared to death. Halfway down the hill he started to snarl like a dog and he came across the front seat and tried to strangle me. His hands were around my neck, while I'm trying to drive on this winding little road. But I controlled my fear and wouldn't let him have power over me. Soon as my fear started to subside I got angry, and then he'd get afraid and start whimpering. The more afraid he got the angrier I got. All of a sudden I heard voices telling me to stop the car and kill him. And I recognized that as the voice of Satan. So now I'm turning into him. Then I get afraid again, and he starts getting angry and coming across the car at me. It goes on like that for as long as it takes you to drive from Lucia to San Jose (about two hours). It was the most insane thing I've ever been through. By the time we got back to San Jose I was talking normal to him, just like that morning. And that was the end of Skippy's demonic phase.”

Though he never recovered his sanity.

Interestingly, according to the standard account, and in the words of Lewis, Spence originally went psychotic after running out of the band’s recording session with “some black witch.” Next time he appeared, he was both psychotic and murderous. Before that time, Lewis says he gave no indication at all of being mentally unstable.

So, given that we accept that there is a Devil, might he have been ultimately behind the destruction of Moby Grape?

An intriguing thought, if not one that most people these days would care to entertain. Perhaps coincidentally, I can think of two other major figures from the 1960s with a reputation for getting involved with real Satanism--as opposed to just toying with the idea of witchcraft or magic.

Brian Jones, and Jim Morrison.

Schizophrenia from the Inside

A marvelous description of what it feels like to be schizophrenic, in particular from the first writer.

I get the general impression that schizophrenics are in fact more aware, more conscious, than the rest of. us: as one writer puts it, they are watching five TV channels while we are receiving only one.

It is also not obviously a "disease": i.e., it is not unpleasant. Rather, it has extreme highs and extreme lows. On the whole, a schizophrenic certainly seems to have more meaning in his life than the rest of us.

Of course, he cannot work or function in society. Nevertheless, this could be a problem with society rather than schizophrenia. I suspect that in hunter-gatherer societies, schizophrenics find ready employment: as shamans. And this is a useful function: their sensitivity to patterns and symbols should, as the first writer suggests, make them able to see underlying problems and solutions.

One writer suggests he is better able to handle his schizophrenia because of his spiritual nature. I suspect that is true. Materialists are caught in a false alternative: either the voices are real in the physical sense or should be ignored as hallucinations. Anyone who believes in the reality of the spiritual world can understand, and deal with, these experiences as real, but on the spiritual plane, and deal with them accordingly, without letting them interfere with their understanding of what is going on in the physical world. For example, a movement in the Netherlands has found that schizophrenics can do very well if they learn to actually negotiate with the voices, find out what they want and cut deals.

Exactly as a shaman does...

Most web sites defining schizophrenia begin with the usual historical approach, remarking that in the old days we ignorantly saw schizophrenia as a case of demonic possession; whereas now we know it is a biochemical illness.

In fact, there is no evidence that it is a biochemical illness, and lots of evidence that it is demonic possession. The only problem is that the dominant religion, scientism, will not permit this--one reason why the insane are persona non grata in modern life.

Perhaps more importantly, with the latter thesis, people actually get better.

The New Schizophrenia

A schizophrenic concept of house decoration.

In the social sciences, it is certain that whatever was taught as true thirty years ago is now taught as error. This demonstrates that the social sciences have produced no useful knowledge; any more than a dog chasing his tail has produced a useful meal. We can be sure that whatever we “know” now will be known to be false within the next thirty years.

So with psychiatry/psychology; as illustrated by a recent article in the Wilson Quarterly. In 1960, all the learned doctors knew schizophrenia was caused by your mother being cold and distant. In 1990, this suggestion was horribly unjust to parents. Schizophrenia was caused by genetics, nothing else. Best thing for them was to send them back to their families, if possible. Today, it again comes mainly from childhood adversity: “being beaten, bullied, or sexually abused.” But now the father is to be blamed. More politically correct that way. Too bad for all those schizophrenics hustled back into the bosom of their loving family.

Inmate in a lunatic asylum, circa 1854.

This might be funny if it were not human lives we are playing with. Lacking any real knowledge, it seems to me that psychiatry and psychology, along with all the social sciences, do more harm than good. This is because, in order to justify their existence, they are more or less obliged to violate common sense; and common sense almost always knows better than they do. They should not be the basis of any recognized professions, and should not receive one penny of public money. That's the very least we should do; perhaps it would be better if they were banned outright. They are, as the late, lamented, Thomas Szasz put it, in the same field as astrology and witchcraft.

Thanks to the biochemical-genetic model most popular in the nineties, the article points out, schizophrenics were treated over the last thirty years with the drug Clorazil. Besides not working, in most cases, and severely limiting quality of life with its fierce side effects, it killed them in large numbers, by inducing diabetes. Oh well—back to the drawing board. How about a revival of good old-fashioned lobotomies with an ice pick?

Wain's cats, supposedly showing the progress of his schizophrenia. I like the bottom left best.

Recent studies show, the article goes on, that “schizophrenia has a more benign course and outcome in the developing world.” Which is to say, to put it plainly, you are more likely to recover from schizophrenia if you avoid seeing a psychiatrist. That is the most obvious difference here: the developing world cannot afford as many psychiatrists and psychiatric visits. As noted previously in this space, most mental illness is understood in most cultures as temporary; bring in psychiatry, and suddenly everything is incurable.

The worst thing that psychiatry does is to try to muscle out and replace religion and religious explanations. For what, after all, is this “psyche,” the thing both “psychiatry” and “psychology,” as their names assert, seeks to understand and to treat? It is the soul. What is the real soul therapy, and the real soul knowledge? Religion. By contrast, psychology and psychiatry are thoroughly materialist. Their fundamental premise is that the soul can be prodded with a scalpel. That is, roughly, as sensible as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But, by muscling in, they are likely to distract the patient from religious explanations and religious treatments for his spiritual suffering.

Goya, sketch of a lunatic.

Keeping him in distress indefinitely.

A case in point, in the article: the Hearing Voices movement, a patient self-help group, has come up with an interesting technique for those who think they are, as the saying goes, “hearing voices.” They treat the voices “as if they were people,” negotiate with them, and ask them to stop.

It turns out that they do.

Psychiatry of course never thought of this, because for psychiatry the voices were “hallucinations” and they certainly did not want to encourage the delusion. Why are the voices hallucinations? Because psychiatry, being thoroughly materialistic, holds that spiritual beings—psyches—do not exist. Before psychiatry, or without psychiatry, people would most naturally have understood the voices as spiritual entities, angels or demons. What would have been simpler than to try to talk to them? It's called prayer. And it would have worked; they could have moved on.

"Admiral" Ashihara, virtually famous Japanese schizophrenic.

Although psychiatry would immediately label you “insane” for saying or thinking so, as a matter of proper philosophy, proper reason, it is perfectly plausible and sensible, in fact, to assume these voices are the voices of real spiritual entities. It is without any kind of philosophical justification that psychiatry and psychology are completely materialistic; it is a matter of faith, or dogma. In fact, it is contrary to human experience and to most of the best of philosophy. In fact, it is quite possible that the dissonance between this materialist view, so common in the modern “developed” world, and the spiritual reality of much human experience that produces “mental illness” as we know it in the first place. In other words, “mental illness” may be an artifact of the materialist world view. Psychiatry and psychology then act as the gate-keepers, the holy inquisition, seeking to prevent those with sufficient insight from going beyond the accepted dogma.

And so it is telling that it took schizophrenics themselves, bucking the medical establishment, to come up with the “Hearing Voices” treatment. This suggests that those experiencing “mental illness” have better insights as to its nature and their needs than do the doctors supposedly “treating” them. But, of course, the doctors will not listen to their patients, other than to “diagnose” a problem. After all, they are “mad,” aren't they? Their thinking is disordered.

Your brain on schizophrenia: terminally silly illustration of exactly where the angels dance.

Psychiatry is full of such double binds. If you sink and drown, you are not a witch. If you float, you are a witch, and must be burned at the stake.