Someone asked me the other day: but what has changed in terms of psychiatric treatment in twenty years?
I can reflect on this question because I have been dealing with the psychiatric system for a long time. I got my first psychosis twenty years ago, and they came back every couple of years until two and a half years ago, when I finally met a brilliant psychiatrist who found me a medication that seems to keep me stable, without any side-effects. I am on a cocktail of ‘drugs’, especially designed for me. Not because I am terrified of psychoses, but because I have a son who needs me. I can’t continue being in and out of the psychiatric hospitals while I raise him, and, unfortunately, with a psychosis, going to the hospital is the only choice, at least where I have been living, in Belgium, the Netherlands and England.
No, my psychoses have been beautiful experiences in their majority. It’s in them, in the state of ‘psychosis’ that I experience what can be described as magic or simply reaching for God. It’s in them that I rejoice in my faith (Christianity), and hear angels and the voice of God. I also hear from the devil (and see him), which confirmed for me that what is written in my religion is true. It’s all real.
‘Psychoses’ are also a real thing in terms of needing a safe place to be able to process them, whatever might be your individual experience with it. My psychoses have been beautiful, but I hear from many others, that it has been terrible. Lots of other patients/survivors/people with lived experience have told me about absolute horror in a ‘psychosis’, accusing me of trying to romanticize severe mental illness.
It isn’t what I am trying to do. I am just trying to find some meaning. My psychoses have had meaning for me. Apart from seeing and experiencing very unusual things, they also healed me from terrible stomach pain and trauma from my adolescence. When you hear a voice of God, you feel validated. When you have powerful visions, you feel enlightened, on top of the world. When you encounter the domain of magic, it enriches your life.
It was in 2008 that I tried to enter the Abbey in Brussels, in order to get help. I lived right across the Abbey, that stands magnificently on top of the ‘Les Etangs d’Ixelles’ (the lakes of Ixelles) in Brussels. I could admire it from my balcony. It was a minute’s walk away from my apartment.
I ran one evening towards it, because I felt that another ‘psychosis’ was coming. I can’t really describe the feeling, as it has no equivalent in our modern society. Maybe the term ‘enlightenment’ comes the closest to it, but in my case, I would multiply it by ten. It is the feeling of absolute deep connection with the universe and God.
Instead of calling mental health services, I decided to try the Abbey. I ran towards the church on the Abbey’s grounds. I wanted to be there, to ask for help and to stay, in order to process my psychosis. It’s a weird experience, the ‘psychosis’, one needs protection and a safe place in that state.
There was an angry man in front of the church, throwing pieces of bread at a dog. He was blocking the entrance for me, shouting at me that I was a ‘dirty woman’. I remember standing there, feeling totally miserable and upset, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was no one else in the proximity to help me to enter the church. At some point even the birds stopped singing, when the main shouted at me again: ‘Go away, you! Go away!’ And I walked away, crying and eventually reached my apartment, and the next day, my mother arrived from the UK, put on me on the plane and brought me to Sheffield, where we called emergency services and I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Sheffield.
As for all other mental services in the Western hemisphere, they weren’t interested in my experience in a psychosis. They were only interested in symptoms of an illness, the fact that I could hear things and see visions. For them they were delusions.
But for me they had meaning. I have been thinking about it for a long time. I do accept the fact that I have vulnerability to psychoses, and the fact that I need to take psychiatric medication probably for the rest of my life, but I can’t accept that what I see and hear in my ‘psychosis’ are things that are purely due to my brain activity. Yes, there was an angry man in front of the church in Brussels, and he could have been the devil. Why not, especially when you happen to be a Christian (like me) and believe in God and what is written in the Bible? It clearly says that devil is real, and I saw him several times in my life. What if my psychoses are just deeply religious experiences on my part?
But psychiatry, twenty years ago or now, denies me the possibility to find some meaning. Their reasoning is based purely in a bio-medical model, and while I agree that in some cases, medication is really needed (I do need it), I don’t agree with diagnoses and I don’t agree that it’s a chronic mental illness. I am not ill in between my psychoses. I lead a very active life. I moved between countries, I work almost full-time, I raise a son, take care of my home and my cat.
Last time I was in a psychosis, I felt I was Jesus Christ. It’s considered, of course, as delusion of grandeur by psychiatry, but when I dug deeper into my own understanding of it and analysed as to why I had felt that way, I discovered that when one believes in Jesus, one can become one, by embracing what he stands for and represents. I want to do something good for the world when I am in such as state (psychosis). I want to do some nice things for humanity. But the psychiatrists, then (twenty years ago) and now, remain totally inflexible in terms of what a patient tells them. They simply prescribe me some more medication, and look at it as an illness.
For me, such an approach is damaging. It takes away my agency. I don’t feel schizophrenic, or bipolar, or suffering from schizo-affective disorder (I received all these labels during the twenty years that I have dealt with psychiatry). I don’t feel that I am sick. I feel that I have access to some parallel reality, where God is present, and so is the devil, and where I sometimes hear the voice. I hear the voice of God.
I heard some voices, and they were magnificent. It isn’t an illness, but a spiritual gift.
Hello Ekaterina,
I always enjoy reading your articles. I’m glad you find your psychoses beautiful, but I am sorry you don’t have anyone to keep you safe while you are in them. Maybe some day more family members would be interested in learning how to be that safe person for their loved one.
Sam
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Dear Sam,
thank you for your comment.
Well, I hope that I am done with ‘psychoses’ for now!
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A lot of people seem to have had spiritual journeys misdiagnosed as “psychosis,” and experienced that one with the universe serendipity or “magic.” Certainly, I for one, can relate to what you’re saying, Ekaterina, since my so called “psychosis” was completely about my spiritual journey. Thank you for sharing your story.
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Thank you for reading it!
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Psychosis can be beautiful and horrible all in one weeks time if you are bipolar. The manic phase can be enlightening and beautiful or scary and the down time can be full of tears and remorse. I was t put on the right medication until 2018 after 6 months of bipolar cycling. I’m lucky to be alive. Thank you for your article.
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Dear Jennifer,
yes, I also found what works for me. I am aiming at a stable life from now on.
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Hi there E
What a beautiful feeling it is when so close to God and our thoughts are filled with Him.
My last psychosis was Aug 23. I was experiencing the feeling that I was the Holy Spirit and was telling my employees and friends being it.
i felt calmness once again….but also embarrassed after being treated as I realised the impact I had on my work and family. see this was my 5th episode and all the times I had done rational things, saying hurtful things Which I have thought that honesty is the way to be…not thinking of the consequences .
Today I am without work and my siblings and there offspring has blocked me for quite a few years now.
I consider myself kind, caring and very hardworking…but people thats never experienced the manic feeling will never or seldom understand.
In my mind I would say that I could easily live in a manic moment, but somewhere maybe on an island with others that is also manic.
Imagine the time we will have. Carefree and happy…and not judged.
But ja, in a psychiatric ward I dont ever want to live the rest of my life. So now hopefully I am on the right meds….after not taking them or the last episode the clinic has run out of the one meds and replaced it with another that over 10 months period ended up me being admitted again.
So what we must keep doing is to treasure our memories ..as we remember all clearly in our manic period. That God loves us so and excepts us and that there is hope and support groups likes these, that we must reach out to, when we feel it coming on. It happens so quick, but we must educate ourselves to control our actions.
Much luv to all of us.
A
South Africa
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Thank you!
A special place where we could all share our experiences, would it be amazing!
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Yeah, I also had a while of being Jesus. I had a direct line to God. I felt super well for the first several years of being “out of this world” on enlightenment. I did not think I was ill and I refuse medication for many years. I felt chosen and special and selected for an amazing global mission. But over some years all of that burden began to destroy me. I had no rest. I felt responsible for helping eight billion earthlings to feel happier.
Which is WHY I ended up unable to shower or cook or converse on a phone or watch television or paint or draw or eat or clean my room or meet any needs of my family or even write in a comment section without horrendous suffering.
Powerlessness to stop ones own suffering is therefore an experience I know with every fibre of my being. But THIS then became my authentic mission, to speak of helplessness, uselessness, brokenness, despair, ridicule, loss of life purpose, rage, impotence, stockholm syndrome, blankness, intolerance, tolerance, surrender, mercy, freedom.
The trouble can be that I then hook that back up to God. As if God has chosen me to experience unending torment because I will emerge compassionate.
But here’s more. Any God who allows his creatures to suffer FOR ANY REASON is not a God but a sickness. A traitor! An abusive Warlord who can only deliver messages of love through death.
Truly, I am glad there is a pill for that!
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yes, medication helps in some cases.
I am definitely enjoying my life more now, when I am stable and on medication.
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Thank you immensely for your article. I have had the blessing of 2 manic episodes that included psychoses and the curse of one transitional episode of rapid cycling that also included psychosis. I’ve always known that the deep spiritual nature of my psychoses was real but never been validated until reading about your experience! I am also on meds now for 20 years bc I choose to live without the imminent threat of disability, especially from insidiously severe depression. My faith has grown immeasurably through my bipolar extremes, especially during psychosis. It is so very unfortunate, though, that we, ultimately have to go through these without others to provide safety & understanding unless there is a rare, available peer. Neither church people or mainstream mental health practitioners have the knowledge or experience to walk with us during these monumental, less traveled side roads along our mental/spiritual journeys.
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I agree with you.
The current society is not equipped well enough to understand such a phenomenon as ‘psychosis’. Looking at it as purely an illness, isn’t enough.
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I’m fortunate enough to have been allowed to experience “psychosis,” for years actually, and never ended up being forced on medications. In fact I’ve never been on psychiatric medications, not this incarnation.
I did have to learn not to be scared of it, because the stuff that goes on that one would want to get rid of that is because of fear, not because of “psychosis,” it’s the fear of it, just as society responds with fear, discrimination and alarmist excuses, only making it worse. It’s society’s problem, their fear. And they try to give us complexes as if who knows what is going to happen, while we know the whole time THEY are being paranoid, and we’d even want to avoid that reaction, but haven’t learned about what’s going on enough to be able to avoid their alarmist response. Again, despite that we know it’s their paranoia much more than anything horrible is going on with us.
I’m also fortunate I got the spiritual help I needed, and that’s NOT from formalistic religion, or even from “Jesus.” although he himself helped. The help comes from stuff that’s not at all that much part of formalistic thinking.
I was involved with spiritualism, before I was diagnosed, and that actually helped to give me a different look on what hearing voices are, or seeing things that others say aren’t real, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend getting involved with spiritualism, because what they say is hearing voices so often is their ego dictating programmed ego states that also involve discrimination, stereotyping and their own insecurities regarding how they compromised themselves. “spirit says blah blah blah” from them could really mean that you look too much like a hippy, and they start talking with others about it, as if you have bad spirits around you. I had to get away from that big time, and actually went to legit healers, but they also could be seen as crazy. This man, who helped me shed a physical ailment talks about how he was put in an asylum as a child and given shock therapy, because the church decided that the miracles happening around him were from the devil, exactly what the Pharisees said of Jesus being supposedly in league with Beelzebub (or the boogy man, or who knows what they come up with) https://youtu.be/g9edB02jWP0?si=R9i54wd8gOGG0ky7&t=712 And then another healer that’s helped me recently shed again a physical ailment, she also was asked about hearing voices, but fortunately got out of it without trouble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfKQJClFjDA&t=285s The first healer I went to from the Phillipines, he then has to have you sign a piece of paper saying it’s entertainment purposes only, because they are being harassed by the medical establishment, he then simply introduced me to something that was natural to the planet earth itself, and so I knew it was there. After seeing him, I had the thought that it added 20 years to my life, but didn’t really know at that time that that was the amount of time that’s taken out of your life by psychiatric medications for “schizophrenia” statistically. I think simply knowing this “crazy” stuff was OK, and part of the natural environment of the planet, that this spared me from being targeted by the mental health system.
I think that if you want to understand what’s really going on with psychosis, you have to go beyond all of society’s thinking. As many rewards as you’re going to get, whether it’s degrees, raises, making your way up in a heirarchy, money what have you, to understand the liberated attempt at thought regarding “psychosis,” you have to be willing to let go of all of that, in fact the annoying part of psychosis is how when one is disinhibited you start displaying your own programming along with another part of yourself that’s beyond it. The idea is you let go of the ego states, although society is so built on them, it’s hard to actually see what’s going on. Fear gets involved and discernment goes out the door for programming to rule. Neither the church nor society, or the governments really acknowledge these healers, for example. They just exist without needing an excuse, a diploma, being accredited, backed up by who knows what that sounds like it’s something, but really is empty image.
I do a lot of feldenkrais now, because it slows me down, I start deep breathing, I’m getting rid of tension built up from all these years; and then I meditate a lot. When I wake up, I have to eventually meditate for at least 20 minutes, so my mind stops racing. There’s just too much stuff to feel agitated about, stuff one can’t just bypass anymore when you’re part of the crowd targeted for not being “sane.” I can’t but help seeing society’s programming regarding their alarmist ideas regarding mental illness mirrored in many other places. The “evil” or mental illness becomes any evil they use to manipulate people into feeling they are under attack, and thus make you programmable to their “solutions.”
There is a whole degree of childhood trauma going on, where my parents both being psychologists didn’t seem to understand at all the importance of listening to a child’s emotions, their viewpoints, their experiences, to have patience, to spend time just listening to the child and getting to know it rather than all sorts of analyses regarding their “personality,” along with all sorts of advice like you hear too often with therapists when they’ve concocted a way that will “change” you for the better. All of that could never create what nature, God, the Universe or the essence of being human and unique put there to begin with. Consequently, when push came to shove, and I had to listen to my own inner voice, having so often been confronted with my parents inability listen, and often to shut that down, my father even playing quite nasty mind control games when I had my own viewpoints, it’s taken me years to get away from the anxiety provoked when my inner voice needs to speak: an anxiety which for years caused me to disassociate from my own inner wisdom. Typical stuff also of a consumer oriented society, instead of listening to my own thoughts, I might start drinking way too much coffee, because I substituted that for the warmth one would get from someone actually listening to you, and being there. Strangely enough that would disinhibit my brain from completely blocking off my inner thoughts, and they might come out in the jumble of acted out ego states (in order to get in touch with them being exposed), and spiritual stuff that society wouldn’t even believe in. Stuff that if I started going on about it would make me a laughing stock and people would say that’s crazy, like they respond to miracles, simple miracles, not those from a certified church. But, it was the “psychosis,” that gave me the space to let go of such programming. I could have suppressed all of it, and been a good wind up doll, not questioning so much of what is deemed to be functional for survival. THAT I could have never attained with all of wanting to be normal, and feel safe, and not have the aching feeling of yet again having done something people are going to be alarmist about, as if that ruined my life. There of course was a lot of feeling terribly abandoned by society, disenfranchised, and then the paranoia from the feeling as if something was cutting into my very soul trying to terrorize me into being something I couldn’t be. Terribly feeling of being exploited for who knows what and the consequent paranoia. I’m fortunate again, that I didn’t have a family that would just call up NAMI and have me institutionalized, although I did have friends with such family, and saw what it did to them. I might go through these challenging periods about once a year for 2 or 3 months, but always came out of them. Once, when stopped smoking, they didn’t happen for two years, but then came back again. At first, when I was diagnosed I wasn’t having these episodes, diagnosed only because stuff was going on that my parents wouldn’t believe, although all they’d have to have done is ask the neighbor lady, but they were to mental and “objective.” Then from the abandonment I would to go into psychotic episodes, but it was to give room to express the feeling of abandonment, the latent programming I needed to get rid of, stuff that although it works for the majority of society, just wouldn’t work for me anymore, part of me had gone beyond that and couldn’t return; and then the spiritual stuff that wouldn’t have happened without the dis-inhibition. It really was just a natural way the soul expressed itself through the brain itself, even eventually seeing what too much coffee was doing to me, or before that cigarettes. And, if you want to really ground yourself, you need to stay away from cigarettes, coffee, drinking, too much sugar, and I wonder how much of these psychiatric drugs someone feels are necessary are just counter acting all of that. Cigarettes and coffee both increase dopamine, psychiatric drugs for “schizophrenia” suppress it from working. You get into a terrible bind. The dopamine suppressing medications already block the dopamine from finding a receptor, so the brain starts making more of it, cigarettes and coffee then provoke even more dopamine, which still is being prevented from being functional. THERE you have this whole erroneous story regarding schizophrenia being from too much dopamine. When you try to get off of the dopamine suppressants, then the habit the brain has taken of making more dopamine suddenly does find working receptors, that before that were blocked. Beyond that is the nicotine or coffee effect. You’re creating a whole whirlwind….. Better to let the thoughts be there that otherwise would be blocked, then you can start to sort them out, see what they are representing, or what really comes from the habits of coffee, nicotine, other legal stuff, or illegal, or how the dopamine suppressing agents effect your thoughts, but you have to give room to experience them first, not just be made to feel highly anxious that they even exist from alarmist responses.
One story regarding spiritual things, of which this is just one of them, which happened last time I was psychotic, although again I escaped having to deal with the mental health system. I even had a therapist that would simply allow me to be in such a state. Numerous things happened that wouldn’t have happened had I been dowsed with sanity. I might know something about a person’s past lifetime, and could mention this, or other stuff I wasn’t supposed to know; sort of like Islands within the whole breaking down of what society isn’t allowing. Some of it gels to have meaning, other stuff just floats away. And then I had talked many many times, just before being diagnosed, with Mozart’s mother Anna through a spiritualist medium. Again something I wouldn’t recommend, because you have to deal with the medium, and they often have their own problems. He then said and I was told was blown away by the love between us. After a year that was enough, but I did talk with her through another medium, where she spontaneously started recalling a past lifetime memory we had in the Renaissance, where she was my wife, and we had two children. I was a composer that had a choir, and recently, in my last “psychosis,” quite a few from the choir have seem to appeared, which I won’t go into, other than I of course run into them, and knew other stuff about different incarnations they had and helped what art is there to do, what it naturally does for the human condition, and YES for mental health. I won’t be getting psychotic anymore, because I don’t have a problem with it, and I’ve now become aware enough of how the trauma from my youth was causing me to disassociate from the stuff my parents or society had too much difficulty with, and I work it out gently on my own, giving it time to speak without me getting in the way or trying to make anything else out of it. Not doing anything but allowing it.
One of the most bizarre things for society, that others would call crazy, was actually a whole matrix of things but what I’ll detail is how a cadenza for a Mozart concerto formed. I had been working on this Cadenza for quite a time, and the concerto has all of the elements of life, and its seeming contradictions: how what seems like tragedy can bring out a vibrant change in the end. And it was that vibrant change that brought out the spiritual, giving legroom to what otherwise might be called manic to express itself. This “manic” or vibrant theme from the concerto already was in the cadenza, with quite a few variations, but apparently that wasn’t enough legroom. I had had another idea for a sort of variation of it, but what I recall is that when that started to form, as anything does out of a nebula, even the whole Universe, I thought it was too much. I kind of sighed, and didn’t work it out. For the Universe, or art itself, that apparently wasn’t going to be left to rot without attention, because as I was going to a farmer’s market one Saturday around that time, I came upon what my crazy subconscious told me was an angel among us. He said something to me I won’t get into, because that gets too complicated, but it evoked non linear time interactions enough (and angels among us come from non linear time, these supposed fragments of incoherent “schizophrenic” phrases might be the letting go of linear time that they relate to).I started talking the whole day about what he’d said, and mentioned he was an angel among us, materialized out of Heaven then, which also then society would easily find crazy, or “manic” even. And then when I went home, I integrated this one more variation spontaneously. I wasn’t used to this though, and didn’t know to slow down from it. It did make me feel really tired, in a way, also because I had to actually play the cadenza at the piano, and I still had a lot of tension to let go of, thus the Feldenkrais I do now, which really helped, but then it was quite exhausting trying to work through the tension built up over years. I also started drinking decaf coffee quite a bit, about 5 cups a day, and although that’s really still about 15% or 25% of one cup of coffee that was enough to facilitate the “psychosis,” or dis-inhibition allowing me to even think such crazy things: a whole cascade of stuff way out of bounds from what society thinks is “appropriate,” that went on for a few months. Now I would meditate, and I’ve learned to catch my mind when it starts racing from anxiety that can come out of nowhere because of how I was treated my youth simply trying to express my own thoughts. I have to slow down almost as if nothing is going to happen, since that’s the fear from all of the intimidation, that if I actually quietly, gently follow my own thoughts I get chastised, and made to think it will lead to nothing, which I find now isn’t at all the case. Still learning to trust this beyond the idea that nothing is happening….
But really, you have to step outside of “society,” rather than feeling there’s a loss in being part of what will never accept that aspect of being human. And even, when you think that such and such is far enough away from society’s statistical based norms, it’s consensual reality deportment, it’s status quo, it’s modes of conduct and the rest, when you think such is far enough; then you have to go at least one step further. You don’t know how far reality really is from the programming it’s made out to be. To begin with, such programming could never have made reality, you have to instead experience it beyond that….. And it’s a real gentle quiet step, actually…… not some hefty: “look here, I’ve done THAT!”
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What a fascinating narrative, Nijinsky,
thank you for sharing it.
Yes, I agree, one should explore what is happening in ‘psychoses’ in general, and it is such an individual experience. I am glad to hear you have managed it without the medication. In my case, I accepted the fact that I do need them. I have big family responsibilities. I can’t let them down, my family, and I have been stable for long enough now, to see the benefits of being on medication. But what works for some, might not work for others.
Yes, coffee and nicotine compensate the dopamine deficiency, provoked by anti-psychotics. It’s a fact.
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Ekaterina: when Dopamine antagonists are preventing dopamine from connecting to a receptor, and your body starts making more dopamine to compensate, there then isn’t a dopamine deficiency at all, there’s more dopamine, but only a fraction of it is allowed to do its natural function. When you add coffee and nicotine to this, you compound the problem with even more dopamine, when there wasn’t a deficiency, it was blocked from working. There may then be a bit more dopamine that connects up to receptors that aren’t blocked, but in the meantime you have a whole added addiction beyond just that to the dopamine blocking psychiatric drugs. And would you want to get off of the dopamine blocking agents in order to improve your chances of recovery, as per the data that Robert Whitaker has shared for years and got an investigative journalist reward for, not only would you have to deal with TOO MUCH dopamine which the body has been manufacturing the whole time to compensate for the amount of receptors being blocked and that then that access isn’t blocked anymore, but then more of the same with the added nicotine and caffeine. As I wrote, this is a whirlwind, that’s hardly a simple compensation, and THAT is the truth of it.
I’m happy for you that you’ve found something that works, but you might want to consider that just because you have a degree you can advertise, and a functional job, and enough money, this doesn’t necessarily mean you are stable. Psychiatrists also would be seen as being stable, the same ones that put forth the unproven chemical imbalance theory, while implementing methods that CAUSE chemical imbalance that wasn’t there before. The business tycoons and CEOs that make money out of what legitimately can be called an epidemic, if not a pandemic of mental illness (one in maybe 2000 might be seen as “schizophrenic” before when now it’s one in 100, and then there are the other diagnosis) they ALSO are seen as having a stable position in society. The advertising agents that go around promoting the catch phrases such as “could be seen as a chemical imbalance,” while not sharing that what is implemented as treatment DOES scientifically cause a chemical imbalance rather than “could be” or the rest of the “making headway,” or “compelling evidence,” which is more misleading narrative; those agents ALSO are seen as being stable. The majority of people statistically, when put on these medications, not only lose 20 to 25 years off of their life expectancy, after the initial interim period of symptoms being suppressed things get worse, more recycling, more added on diagnosis and more of a drug cocktail, more disability, more paranoia caused often by what the psychiatric drugs do in the long term rather than what, given alternative methods, would have been dealt with in an organic way. They then are seen as unstable because they can not fit into this idea of being “stable” although what their life expresses is simple cause an effect and isn’t clouded over by ideology. You say: “But what works for some, might not work for others.” Which in ways is another catch phrase, because statistically “what works for some” causes more problems in general for others.
Having acquired an addiction for something, whether it’s over the counter, prescribed or from nicotine, caffeine or anything else (sugar, money, shopping etc.) this doesn’t mean you needed it to begin with. Is letting someone down compromising oneself to such a system, or is it not compromising oneself to such a system letting someone down? There are people forced on these medications, and consequently their ability to understand their psychosis when totally non violent in contrast to those forcing treatment on them is harshly hindered, and they end up stuck in a complete limbo. They are also made terrified of their normal reaction to abnormal situations, are treated as if they have a chemical imbalance or a genetic deficiency, quite the same as the alarmist racist behavior towards the natives that lived in the “US” before it was invaded, or the blacks that were shipped over as slaves, and so this isn’t just: “What works for some doesn’t work for others,” because those people were never given a choice, were never properly informed, were in fact forced to make out they believed what statistically has correlated with a spike in the problem as the treatment they need to follow and when showing any sign of disbelief can be forced treated some more.
I don’t mean to insult the difficulties you’ve had in your life, and what you’ve done to not be confronted with more behavior you yourself say is highly discriminatory against you regarding what they call “psychosis,” but blocking the receptors for dopamine, when there’s really simply stuff that the brain needs to work out, to navigate through to understand what’s going on although that’s called “psychosis,” this could be like lessening the amount of secretaries there are in an office so that it can decline articulate work that needs to be done when that work challenges the assumptions of the office or causes problems when that work uncovers stuff that the society around the office doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want to deal with, and dismisses. Giving the secretaries that are left added rewards for not looking at what then is deemed as “too much” akin to adding nicotine and caffeine as an artificial stimulant this doesn’t disqualify what hasn’t been looked at. A whole economy that rewards such doesn’t make if truly functional either, as much as it might seem stable because it gets rewards from the society and its ideology and limitations.
You have to go outside of these boundaries, not compromise yourself to them and advertise how you’re stable. And that isn’t fair to the majority of people for whom the system does not work. Along with the spike in mental illness, society in general has become more consumer oriented, globalization is rampant, people are treated more and more as commodities and anyone not being able to adapt to such harshness can be dismissed; adding the amount of brain disabling agents that psychiatric drugs statistically are to this equation in order to block off feeling or expressing dissent from such a society and call this survival in the end makes everything worse for all of humanity. And in “developing” countries that aren’t part of this consumer oriented mania, because they don’t have the money for such “medications” there’s more recovery. How many of those people wouldn’t be considered “stable” in our “society” because they can’t disable their feeling or their experience enough to make the calculations that add up to being “stable” or “functional” in our society?
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Nijinsky,
I agree with most of that you are saying.
No, you don’t know about my struggles. I seem to have a stable life at this moment but you have no idea at which price. Let’s say that I am glad I am alive.
You have less negotiating power with the system when you are raising a child, who you want to see doing well in the society.
A mother will do anything for her son.
Thankfully from the time I experienced my first psychosis twenty years have passed, and science did progress meanwhile.
The medication I get now is a miracle in comparison to what was offered to me years ago.
I have friends damaged in the psychiatric system and I understand perfectly well what you mean. I have been almost there.
Maybe my medication will lead to complications later in life. No one knows!
But it works at this moment and when you have a psychosis, there is no availability of ‘organic’ treatment. There is only one choice which is a psychiatric hospital. And once there you have to comply to be in the here and now for your child.
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Sorry, but I’ve heard this so much from people: “You don’t know about my struggles” or “you don’t know what it’s like” or then “you don’t know at what price.” Anyone can say that when challenged with counterpoint. I wasn’t at all saying that you haven’t struggled, I was simply offering COUNTERPOINT that there ARE other ways, ways that statistically pan out better in general. This site also is to inform people regarding what’s going on in the mental health system.
What I was sharing was simple scientific information regarding statistically how the medications affect people, and also regarding a dopamine “deficiency,” and what’s truly going on when in reality it’s the opposite of a deficiency because dopamine is blocked so the body is already producing more of it, and nicotine and caffeine COMPOUND that. I think that’s important for people to know when someone says that caffeine or nicotine help with a dopamine “deficiency.” They actually do the opposite, and create barriers for anyone wanting to get off of the psychiatric drugs. That’s for anyone to read, in case someone shows up here and has to be reminded what statistically the medications do, and that caffeine or nicotine isn’t really a clever fix for it when in reality it messes around even more with natural brain functions, which the “medications” already are doing. If that insults you as if that’s denying your struggle, I think you need to look at what happens to the majority of people, and no that hasn’t changed “recently,” the past 20 years there’s only MORE people having to deal with what psychiatry does to them when it disabled their life. Read Robert Whitaker’s books, it’s all in there. I think more women have lost their children because of how the “medications” and the mental health system have affected them than those who were helped. I was also stating what’s going on at a sociological level regarding countries that aren’t considered “developed” because there’s more recovery there directly related to the fact that they don’t have money or “resources” for such “medications.” “Our” society then would say that if their society was more functional, or more “stable” they would have such money for “treatment”, which is more than contradictory, it’s simply not true given the statistics, how the “medications” work, what that does to a country’s economy, and recovery rates for what those “medications” are said to heal. What are listed as psychiatric diseases are more valid seen as sociological constructs similar to what happens when someone lives in a war zone, is a minority, suffers from poverty, has suffered abuse etc. And so you hear phrases such as “statistical based norms,” “consensual reality deportment” that actually are discriminatory against someone not fitting into the norm. This was very clearly brought out more than 20 years ago when Mindfreedom International had a hunger strike challenging the drug companies to come up with proof of the chemical imbalance claims: https://mindfreedom.org/kb/2003/ “The APA confirms in paragraph six that, in the absence of biological markers, mental disorders are defined by “a variety of concepts”: “distress experienced and reported,” “level of disability,” “patterns of behavior,” and “statistical deviation from population-based norms.” Precisely. The APA should therefore explain how such sociological concepts — which easily define conditions such as poverty, discrimination, or war — substantiate the existence of “neurobiological disorders.”” here https://mindfreedom.org/kb/act/2003/mf-hunger-strike/scientific-panel-replies-to-apa-statement/
You state again this contradiction regarding “when you have a psychosis” and say that the psychiatric hospital is the only choice, and yet in your article you say: “No, my psychoses have been beautiful experiences in their majority. It’s in them, in the state of ‘psychosis’ that I experience what can be described as magic or simply reaching for God. It’s in them that I rejoice in my faith (Christianity), and hear angels and the voice of God.”
There are people that can help with that. In my first post I gave links to two people, BOTH have been conduits to heal many people, something that is a gift, do you know how THOSE PEOPLE have struggled? Gene Egidio went to Russia before the Iron Curtain fell, was on television there, and actually got the Russian Cosmonaut medal, which you can read about in his book “Whose hands are these,” available used online. And if you listen to his talk in the video I already shared, you’ll hear how he healed a high army official who for the first time said he believed in God; but Gene was put in an asylum and given shock therapy as a child, because such things happened that the church was discriminatory about, actual miracles. The other healer ALSO was asked about hearing voices, as if this was a concern to begin with. Both could be harassed mercilessly as if they are fake, despite a whole array of healing that happen around them; or are told by fundamentalists that they are working with the devil.
Stuff that went on 15 years ago (and I could say more regarding what came down from “Heaven” 15 year ago but won’t here) when a social worker tried to make out I was a dangerous psychotic, misinterpreted anything I did because of her fixated obsessive paranoia, thanks to Carol Everett and her healing sanctuary, or simply meditating, slowing down, not thinking I “need” something, or need to “do something,” the more quiet voices could explain what was made out to be psychotic, and I could understand what that had to do with non linear time, and also explained what non linear time had to do with a miracle healing that happened.
There ARE people that can help with that, but you’re not going to get help like that in an asylum. And it’s fundamentalist “religion,” that also can be quite discriminatory against such phenomenon, as were the pharisees…..
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“But really, you have to step outside of “society,” rather than feeling there’s a loss in being part of what will never accept that aspect of being human. ” Was supposed to read “But really, you have to step outside of “society,” rather than feeling there’s a loss in NOT being part of what will never accept that aspect of being human.”
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Tell that to all those who died young by heart attacks strokes, suicide and complications of neuroleptics when not a danger to self or others so glad to see are a posterchild for enforced psychiatric treatment and the crimes and victimization that ensues in discrimination and prejudice.instead of an enlightened society of inclusion rather than bigots and paranoid intolerance….they walk among us in physical form I’m not sure what apparitions are involved here.
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My lived experience was much shorter and less traumatic however the insights have been enlightening.
Few people realize that modern medications were developed, and approved, to facilitate treatment not as a treatment.
Spread the word.
With you in spirit
Eric
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Thank you, Eric!
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