The brain, it's a strange tool. So much possibilities, so great an achievement.
But the wiring can get mixed up. We're all mixed up in some ways, with nature and nurture mutually conditioning us from even before birth.The one affecting the other, our self not always, nor even often, under our own control.
Sometimes we can create a self that makes the mixed up into a new normal. Sometimes, though, we're confronted by the fact that our normal isn't shared by anyone else.
The world doesn't match up with what we know to be real and we are confronted with a crisis of our own perceptions and assumptions.
This is true for everyone, I think. For most of us, though, our misconception stays within an acceptable range.
We might live out wrong assumptions, pursue wrong paths, vote for clearly unqualified candidates, then when confronted by the obvious evidence just point to the next clearly unqualified candidate as the answer, simply because they have parts or colors that we think we need in order to fill out all the bubbles in our chart.
What chart? We don't have a chart. They're qualified!
That's crazy. But it's functional and socially acceptable.
Then there's folks who are dealing with a real physiological crisis in their brain. The pulses that are our everything for determining the self, life, relationships, reality are mucked up. It's not objective reality but it's reality to the people experiencing it.
How do they live with a real that's not the real of everyone around them?
Some folks with schizophrenia answered what is like for them.
62 comments:
This might be a harder question to comment on than the question I'm posting later this afternoon/tonight.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I'm schozophrenic
And so am I.
Sounds a lot like Alzheimer's in some ways, although some of what Paddy puts forth helps explain the '08 election.
The world doesn't match up with what we know to be real and we are confronted with a crisis of our own perceptions and assumptions.
This is true for everyone, I think. For most of us, though, our misconception stays within an acceptable range.
The clown with an Obama mask is the latest head scratcher for me.
WTF?
I should say, the overreaction to the clown is my head scratcher.
A clown... A clown.
Did I get transplanted to an earth looking planet where everything looks like earth, but its not.
Gotta suggest that our brains are the last frontier--the human genome project has done a lot of good work. But we really don't know how our brains work. Why do we dream and what stimulates dreams? Why do we like what we do? Why do we fall in love in love? Here's the thing for me: do we really want to know?
PaddyO--great post--made me think. That's what a good post does--well done sir.
What role does entropy play in all this?
I'm intimately familiar with schizophrenia. I have family members who are schizophrenic, including my father. I no longer have contact with him, but it's not especially revealing to say that extreme, untreated schizophrenia isn't conducive to healthy interpersonal relationships.
Even though human understanding of the neuro-chemical and genetic nature of schizophrenia has advanced greatly in the past 50 years, it's also interesting to read older, more existential writings about the condition. In that category, my favorite writer on schizophrenia, and mental "illness" in general, is R.D. Laing. Laing also wrote poetry, most famously his book Knots, which uses an artistic rather than strictly scientific method to illustrate the patterns of the schizophrenic mind.
RogerJ, Absolutely. We know jackshit about the brain. If I ruled the world we would spend much more on brain research.
I had a dear favorite aunt who suffered from schizophrenia. My mom and our family basically raised her 4 kids for ~5 years. Finally, my mom got Aunt Ruth into the Institute For Living in Hartford. It is a top notch psych hospital. Jonathan Winters received treatment there. Aunt Ruth always had bad spells, but the Institute and meds saved her life. As w/ many schizophrenics, Aunt Ruth was a chain smoker. That's what killed her. I gave her eulogy. She was one of the bravest people I've ever known.
Also of interest is this simulation of schizophrenic auditory hallucinations that was done by a pharmaceutical company in consultation with patients and researchers. I can attest that, while extreme, it's pretty accurate to what affected family has described to me.
My father's schizophrenia began as isolated, infrequent whispers, usually saying his name, and visual hallucinations, like thinking he saw his picture in magazines and newspapers.
At his worst, when he was unmedicated and living in a house alone, he mapped the walls and drilled hundreds of holes, following instructions from a voice that gave him information about where to find hidden microphones and electronic devices.
He also started moving random objects into the yard and marking them "CURSED" or "BAD" or "POSSIBLE BAD", until half of the contents of the house were outside.
He let the electricity get turned off because he was also convinced that the negative voices came into his life through the electrical wires.
His brother tried to help him by getting him an apartment in an assisted living facility, but he's now in an institution.
The company paper, given to supporting every cause possible, reported on the beginning of the manic depressive march across America.
They all seemed very upbeat.
I'm sorry to read/hear that Palladian. It must be difficult for you to talk about something so personal like that.
R. D. Laing believed that schizophrenics were more sane than the rest of us, and his influence had the unfortunate effect of romanticizing mental illness.
He was also one royal shit of a human being.
"A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch. Lenz's stroll for example ... Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines - all of them connected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. "He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon." To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the coordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-mathines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all species of life : the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.
Deleuze and Guattari _Anti-Oedipus_ p.2
I didn't get far in it, long ago.
touchtyped
it seems to me we ultimately do not know who we are, how we think and how we exist. That's a powerful statement--but we muddle through without knowing. I guess we are just adaptable. So when I am dead and gone, my tombstone will say: he adapted.
Not really, Lem. My father was absent for most of my life, and was/is a dreadful human being. It was parents and his brother, all now dead, who raised me in my biological father's absence. They, collectively, were my "father", not that husk of a man.
Good.
I should say, the overreaction to the clown is my head scratcher.
Heard the latest? The NAACP wants the clowns and the rodeo management to get fucked in the ass by the Secret Service and the FBI.
He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production.
The China man making his man made mountain, atop his building, thought to be crazy.
We're all mixed up in some ways, with nature and nurture mutually conditioning us from even before birth.
Not only that, with epigenetics, it looks like Lamarck might not have been so far off the mark after all.
After the gonads/sex organs and lymph, brain is the organ with the most actively expressed genes - more than 70% of them. A pretty rich target for evolutionary activity.
The image you included is apt. Physicians are obsessed with visualization and I'll comfortably predict that substantive advances made in the treatment of psychiatric disorders will coincide neatly with the improved and increased clinical use of better brain imaging techniques.
Mental illness is no bucket of ice cream, but there's not a great deal to be said in favor of sanity.....I've read that there's a variant of Alzheimer's called bliss dementia. In bliss dementia, you forget all the painful memories and just stare fondly into middle distance. What a graceful way to live out one's last days.
If there truly is such a thing as "bliss dementia", it must be exceedingly rare. Almost every dementia and Alzheimer patient I ever had contact with was anxious, angry, combative or hyperactive and most certainly not blissful.
I sometimes think some folks who have never stepped foot on an Alzheimer/Dementia unit have a idealized view of it's inhabitants. There are alarms on every doorthat leads to the outside or elevator, or other unit, low beds because they continuously forget they no longer can walk, soft lighting, limited activities, very few if any outings as they confuse and agitate for hours afterward. It's heartbreaking to see a husband or wife hear of their spouses death of 20 years ago as if it happened yesterday. No reality orientation, that was cruel. Distraction works better.
And that is in the middle stages, the late stages are even more devastating.
I should clarify that they were not in a continuous state of agitation, but were often agitated by different external and internal sources. Most were on antipsychotic and anti anxiety meds and given extra meds PRN ( as needed). Nursing home regulations strictly limited use of restraints, chemical and physical and often staffing wasn't sufficient to care for their needs properly and safely. I understand the need for placement in a facility, however. Those who take care of their loved ones at home are saints.
I also took care of many schizophrenics over the years of my nursing career, that was equally difficult and equally devastating to witness, maybe moreso, as they were a younger population.
Sorry to go on at length, but a great deal of my career was spent working on such units.
One of my hopes of this blog was that the commenters would get a chance to share their experiences and backgrounds and expertise.
So I really appreciate the comments here.
I don't know anyone with schizophrenia. But I've had to deal with clinical depression almost my whole life, which distorts reality in a different way. I've never had medication though there were times I probably should have.
My mom's aunt had serious depression and anger (often two sides to the same coin) in the 1940s or so, after a love affair went really wrong. She was put in an institution and had a One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest experience. My mom remembers her as a sharp and beautiful woman, who slowly got turned into a vegetable through electroshock.
My dad's father suffered from dementia in his later years, and so that's a worry of mine too.
The brain is a wonderful and terrible thing. I have a very creative approach but also get almost entirely undermined at the same time. Today for instance, hitting a wall. I've learned how to process it so it doesn't get in the way of life, and I have enough learned and latent faith that I can intellectualize my way forward, but it does feel at times, like today, like slogging through four feet deep mud just to get the simplest thing done.
I think that's why I'm so curious about things like this, and the experiences shared here. It has a devastating effect, but also can lead to creative genius. I can't help but think of the spiritual and theological questions that come with mental illness, how our brains sometimes don't leave us space to make rational or peace-bringing decisions.
There's grace still for just that reason, I suppose. And as has been shared, sometimes there's just not enough grace in us to handle that messed up reality in others. It's too much to ask. Which is probably a big reason why I still have faith, there must be grace that covers it all at a level beyond me. That's the only way I can keep hoping with and for others, with and for myself.
One of the saddest things is these YouTube videos you can find on a girl named January (Jani) Schofield, who as far as anyone can tell, was born with schizophrenia. Her delusions involved animals and numbers and was so obviously debilitating for two parents with other children to work with, as well. Children from whom she had to be kept for their own safety.
Inpatient admissions, lack of really any sleep (from birth), interesting friendships with other schizophrenic children... (one of whom was lucky enough to know a professional songwriter that could help his artistic talents). Wow. What a burden. The most interesting thing is figuring out how normal childhood development can take place given the need to discover a boundary between imagination and reality in someone for whom imagination is so aggressive and involuntary.
What a fragile thing the mind can be.
What's even sadder is comments on YouTube videos by sympathetic fellow schizophrenics who believe that the diagnosis itself is a fantasy on the part of normal people, and advocate alternative causes and cures - not bad things in themselves, but taken to a level of rationalization that is so delusional that its purpose as nothing other wishful comfort is obvious. Mostly they remain unengaged by the other commenters. Talk about a reverse mindfuck, but one so simultaneously sad and ubiquitous as to challenge conscious perception as even an ideal, let alone something we take for granted.
Inga said "Those who take care of their loved ones at home are saints."
I'd say the same of those like you who do it professionally. My hat's off to you.
I can't help but think of the spiritual and theological questions that come with mental illness, how our brains sometimes don't leave us space to make rational or peace-bringing decisions.
Paddy, I would be very interested in reading further thoughts on this.
Malcolm Muggeridge said the only thing that sometimes gave him pause in his faith was the existence of mental illness in the world.
PaddyO, I agree w/ C Stanley, keep us apprised. When I gave the eulogy for my Aunt Ruth I mentioned some great, heroic people who have suffered from different psychological problems. As you probably know, Churchill suffered from clinical depression, he called it his "Black dog." All he did was help save he world.
I hope this isn't too OT, because it's actually an interesting (if intuitive) video, or inappropriate, given the title. Well, for whatever reason this night of studying schizophrenia led me to it and I found the title a little funny - but hope it doesn't detract from the seriousness of the topic.
C Stanley, so would I.
One of the very regrettable realities of a lot of theology or religious or spirituality studies is a broad dismissal of both psychology or other mental issues. It was all spiritualized. That's changing, to be sure, but there's a pretty big gap in the topic. I know at least a couple theology folks who are looking into this, though, so hopefully there's an increasing conversation.
As far as what I think at this point, it really gets to my thought how there's a mixture of grace and responsibility in everyone. We're not starting at the same place, so we're not expected to live out the same way. We see this in how Jesus responded to people, giving a lot more grace to those who were in really bad situations and not as much to those who seemingly had it all together. Everyone has a zone of responsibility, I suggest, in which we can make choices about who we are.
Someone with mental illnesses have a much more restricted zone, but we do have quite a bit of evidence how some make the push and become functional while others give into it and refuse any help. So, there's a dynamic approach to people that I think relates to a dynamic assumption of spirituality.
A responsibility within our frame of reference, and grace that makes up for how far that is lacking from being entirely whole and in tune with reality as God created it (to use Christian terms).
That gives us, I think, the ability to gauge people too. Just because someone is in horrible circumstances doesn't mean they're given a free pass. But we should also, like Jesus, have more grace for those who are battling with more evils.
Rhythm, the great thing about this place is there's no "off-topic". Just following the conversation where it goes.
spinelli, one of the key helps in my life was when I discovered how many historical people suffered from depression.
Almost all the greats, really, in Christian history. Maybe it's a sense of the darkness of the world that creates the pressure to dig deeper for more substantive answers.
Joan of Arc is another curious case. Was she schizophrenic? Maybe. Or something like it. But somehow she became a pretty amazing leader who helped her country out of a rather dark time.
There's a fair amount of suggestion that at least some of the demonic possessions mentioned in the Bible may have been epileptic seizures. It would have distracted from the main point to discuss them in more enlightened terms, with the healings being the key.
Far too often, people want to make an either/or situation out of spirituality and mental illness. I think it's often an interplay of both.
My understanding is that Laing was in part responsible for the movement to stop the warehousing of the mentally ill. Some of the video of mental institutions years ago was horrific. But the living conditions of the homeless mentally ill is equally vile. Is there a middle ground (perhaps Inga can speak to that).
I've seen the Jani Schofield documentary and am watching the update documentary now on YouTube. It appears that the younger brother Bodie also may have schizophrenia, how devastating that must be for them. It is very familial, but two kids in the same family? I hope this couple, as great of parents as they appear to be don't attempt to have any more children.
I graduated from nursing school in 1976 after the Movement to release the mentally ill into the community and mostly empty the institutions had been in effect for several years already. We had old patients who lived on the streets that would come back to the hospital at night begging to come in or would try to get themselves re admitted during the winter months by committing some act while out on the streets. It was a mistake to empty these units.
I worked in the old Milwaukee County Psych hospital right out of nursing school. It wasn't perfect by any stretch ofhe imagination, but safer and more humane than the streets. They didn't take their meds and relapsed, were then kicked out of ran away from the apartments and halfway houses they had been released to from the Pysch facility. Years later I saw many of my old patients in various nursing home settings, which they weren't really appropriate for. It was a mess.
My understanding is that Laing was in part responsible for the movement to stop the warehousing of the mentally ill. Some of the video of mental institutions years ago was horrific.
Even if Ronnie Laing was as much of a flawed person as Mamie's linked article makes him out to be (though it seems mostly based on the opinions of only one of his children, Adrian Laing; that's a red flag to take what it says skeptically), Laing's work in the late 50s-70s did a lot to drastically change the abhorrent nature of psychiatry and treatment of mental "illnesses". A lot of personal problems can be forgiven for that.
Paddy, thanks for this post and for your further comments.
Although I have been quite open with personal information, there are some things that I don't like to discuss on a public forum.
But as someone who has been treated for severe depression (on medications since 1994) and who deals with it every day, I can say confidently: we're not alone.
Overcoming a challenge makes one stronger, so I am not surprised by the number of great leaders in history who have also been found to suffer from serious ailments (physical or psychological/depression related). Often times those people, with the mental clarity that comes from introspection and self assessment) are also better judges of character (not always) than others.
Cream floats to the top.
PaddyO, "A kite soars highest against the wind."
Winston Churchill
For Many Self-Conscious Reasons I am Very Proud of the Comments Seen Here. Thank You to Those Who See That -- For Some -- the 'Normal' is a Quicksilver Thing at Best.
I'm intimately familiar with schizophrenia. I have family members who are schizophrenic, including my father.
Palladian: Likewise, though in my family it's hard to separate the mental illness from the LSD and amphetamines.
There really are people with broken brains.
I recommend the memoirs of Mark Vonnegut (son of Kurt) -- "Eden Express" and "Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So" as some of the best interior accounts of schizophrenia.
Once I came home from college and found an industrial-strength air purifier rattling away on my mother's bed.
I asked her, "What's that?"
She told me the apartment complex manager was putting LSD into the air she was breathing and she was trying to defend herself.
I didn't have much to say. Not much later I signed a paper authorizing electroshock.
Fascinating link & thread; thanks, Paddy.
I suffer from depression too. I relate.
I don't have experience with schizophrenia, but a very close (immediate) family member, someone I know & love very well, has BPD. And that is... don't have the words right now.
Streaks of mental illness (though not, as far as I know, schizophrenia) in the extended family. Along with lots of brilliance.
One of my great-grandparents had 3 siblings commit suicide, and commmited suicide "themself," which makes 4 out of 10 siblings suicided (sorry for the grammar, want to leave this vague). Like something out of "The Virgin Suicides," or the Wittgenstein family. Thank you grace, or whatever the proper word might be, I have never felt truly suicidal myself, though I know the black black forest. But my BPD kin has been, and was institutionalized for it, for a while.
I might delete this later.
I agree with Palladian and Paddy that it's... illuminating? meaningful? vital? to read philosophical (existential or phenomenological or theological) examinations of what we (modern contemporaries) categorize as "mental illness."
Don't get me wrong: very pro-science, pro-neuroscience here. (But not blindly so. There are scientific studies so philosophically confused that they cannot be good science; just as there are philosophical studies so scientifically confused they cannot be good philosophy.)
I don't want to romanticize mental illness (as various philosophers have, and do): serious mental illness is an AWFUL thing.
But. I do believe there is something about the extremities of mental illness which allows us profound insight into the human condition (and even more than that-- at least, the limits against which humanity bumps). And I mean human condition in the most existential, metaphysical, or theological sense.
It's not that the mentally ill are "superior" or have some "superior" insight, some privileged access to "truth" or "reality" or "being."
It's just a basic fact about the human (or philosophical) condition. It's the reason why the scientific study of consciousness and self-consciousness will always and eternally be among the last scientific frontiers (an ever-receding horizon).
Science is a miraculous thing. But ultimately, metaphysically, we have no access to reality "outside" human subjectivity. Including the "reality" of our own subjectivity.
We are fish in water. But the thing about human beings is, we're fish with intermittent awareness of the weirdness of our relationship to the water and therefore the weirdness of our fishness, always to some extent alienated from it (like this, thanks Chip for the link to this site). "Normal" subjectivity, sanity, logic, reason-- there's a relatively comfortable, comforting rapport, adaptation to the water. But the sick fish-- they're the ones who see (suffer), and get the other fish to realize, the strangeness of the (otherwise given, taken for granted) fish-water relationship.
Or more specifically: the strangeness of our fishness.
That's why, whether it's medieval theologians on acedia, Kierkegaard on despair, Heidegger on angst, Lacan on schizophrenia, etc. (and there are many more)-- though I have issues with all those theorizations-- I love reading them, I derive meaning from them, and they show some "respect" which the purely clinical pill-pushing psychiatrist lacks.
I remember, as a kid (pre-teen), I never got into any of the popular preteen literature. But I did have a fascination/ predilection for a strain of "schizophrenic/ insane" teen lit. Couldn't tell you now (don't remember) any of the titles or authors. But for some reason I was drawn to narratives about mentally ill (often schizophrenic) youth.
I am not at all schizophrenic. But eventually, I would major in philosophy.
Seriously, I mean-- human language? IS insanity. Being-in-the-world? IS alienation. I'm not even making any claims about any relation to anything we might call "reality" or "truth."
But, compared to non-human animals? I'm a firm believer that what distinguishes us from them, is--
we are all cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo.
Paddy wrote:
That gives us, I think, the ability to gauge people too. Just because someone is in horrible circumstances doesn't mean they're given a free pass. But we should also, like Jesus, have more grace for those who are battling with more evils.
And:
Far too often, people want to make an either/or situation out of spirituality and mental illness. I think it's often an interplay of both.
Yes. My situation requires me to deal with mental illness in a particular way, one which presents challenges I never would have imagined. It affects my life on many levels, but the spiritual challenge has perhaps been the hardest of all. This is good stuff, and I thank you.
More on topic with the linked piece in the post:
Reading the personal accounts reminded me of the film A Beautiful Mind where Nash finally challenges his internal perception of a little girl companion when he realizes that she never ages.
yashu: It's curious how many mentally gifted families have high rates of mental illness. I wonder if there is not some evolutionary trade-off at work.
Have you ever read "Operators and Things" by Barbara O'Brien? It's the eeriest schizophrenia memoir I've read. A woman working for a large corporation goes crazy. Her insanity takes the form that there are two kinds of people: "operators" who mentally control other people, and "things" who are the people being controlled. She wakes up one morning and discover her operators are visible and talking to her as part of an experiment. They lead her to take a six-month cross-country bus trip filled with bizarre adventures.
It's such a tight story that I always wondered if it were fiction. In fact I wondered why it had not been made into a Hollywood movie.
For years the book was out of print and commanded absurd used prices. Just now I discovered it was reissued two years ago with additional commentary.
Anyway it's definitely up your alley if you haven't got there already.
You can download "Operators and Things" here.
No answer in the newer version on how factual the book is.
"Operators and Things" looks fascinating, creeley. Never read it (or heard of it before); just ordered it, thanks.
Let me know if you think it's a true story. I love the story and want to believe it but it seems a bit too pat.
But who knows...
Will do, creeley.
By the way, you inspired me to get the Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara.
(I had the little book of Lunch Poems & Meditations in an Emergency, both of which I dearly love, but nothing further.)
What a delight! Ever since I got it, keep immersing myself and/ or dipping into it, every day. I might have to get "Poems Retrieved," too.
Being "gifted" and mentally ill may very well be related. Rarely is an evolutionary advantage in some context not disadvantageous in others. And as we're talking about traits that are - given the extraordinarily interactive complexity of human societies and human mental capacities - incredibly context-dependent, it's to be expected that evolution's recent stabs at greater success in this species might have highly variable failure rates.
yashu: So glad you enjoy the O'Hara! Wonderful stuff and even the really dense experiments (Second Avenue) have their appeal. So much modern poetry looks like O'Hara's but lacks his ability to connect with the reader.
"Poems Retrieved" is good, but thinner material, as would be expected. You might do better with "Standing Still and Walking in New York," a book of his essays plus one interview -- especially if you are interested in American art of the 50s and 60s.
Being "gifted" and mentally ill may very well be related. Rarely is an evolutionary advantage in some context not disadvantageous in others.
R&B: Precisely so.
We don't know the mechanism as we do with blacks, sickle-cell anemia and malaria, and the relationship between mental gifts and mental illness may be too complex to track down, but I'm pretty sure that's the case.
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