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.