Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Mad in the UK. It was written by Peter Brown, a Hearing Voices group facilitator in Belfast for 20 years.
I have a friend who once said – having met him in a mental health unit – that everyone there had “schizophrenia” but he didn’t. He was the first person I talked to in the unit, we’d both used drugs, and he went to the same school as my cousins. We became lifelong friends, 24 years.
My view was that everyone there had got into spiritual difficulties and none were “schizophrenic” and I had escaped the imposed psychic dictatorship of my parents even if the place was rock bottom. I should explain some more: before this time, I had had to hide the voices from my parents. Of course they saw through this, and could tell I had been in a “trance”, which they discouraged. To them channelling the voices was “bad.” In my eyes I thought I would now be free to live with my voices and I was willing to make do in some crap flat somewhere. Unfortunately, I didn’t, instead they put me on meds and so I concentrated on friendships and spirituality.
But when I first ran into spiritual difficulties myself, I had never met anyone with this supposed “schizophrenia.” And I wasn’t alone. I was being initiated into the secret sub-community of voice hearers. Of course it wouldn’t be such a secret if there was education in schools!! One in a hundred people in Ireland hear voices. Why wasn’t I told how common it is? Why hadn’t I talked to one of these so called “schizophrenics?” Why are they kept away from people, not mixing and not accepted?
People who are given the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” are the last social group not to be accepted by the public. It’s a crime to call someone a racist word or show hatred of a person’s sexuality but if you google “schizophrenia hate” the only result you will find is that people so labelled are described as hostile!! People can’t legally be nasty to us because disability abuse is a hate crime too but that doesn’t appear to stop them; there doesn’t seem to be any legal precedents, cases or arrests when people who are exhibiting bizarre behaviour, are subjected to abuse and called names. Or maybe these people act completely normally but are ostracized by the neighbourhood they live in. Is it because we voice hearers agree with the stereotype, and maybe think we are the ones in the wrong? Did we harass voice hearers before we heard them? Yes, probably.
Maybe you’ve seen the sports presenter David Icke going on Terry Wogan’s show saying he was Jesus or Shelley Duvall going on Dr Phil’s talk show saying aliens were talking to her, or have a relative you don’t talk about. I think living with voices and visions and recovery should be more widely exposed so that we don’t have to live in secret; it would be good someday to find we are no longer an object of curiosity or hate.
Yes, there have been a minority of cases when voice hearers have hurt others but it’s rare. If they had been sufficiently prepared or helped by education on how to handle their “schizophrenia”, would it still have happened? Surely there should be proper education of the general public starting at a young age, though I can see that the educational material still needs to be carefully created. But talking about experiences like hearing voices before it happens to you, is better than talking about it after, is it not?
And so I entered psychiatry alone, clueless and ignorant. I expected upon entering the psychiatrist’s office to see a couch like the psychoanalysts I had seen on the television. I expected low lighting and an inviting environment. Instead, I was brought into an office that was no different from a civil servant’s. The psychiatrist looked and behaved like a stockbroker.
He had no interest in voices, or in who I had met or who I suspected had caused the voices. He had no interest in who they were, whether they followed me home, and whether I was scared. He scrawled something down on a notepad, something. I believe I have the legal right to read my own notes, and maybe I should. I saw him for over 15 years, and he did look after my welfare, helping to get me housing and benefits.
A lot of psychiatric patients don’t see the same psychiatrist at each visit, I am lucky in that respect, everywhere is different. How can people’s health be treated so flippantly by psychiatry which demonstrates that our views of our experiences are irrelevant? We get that psychiatrists see the “schizophrenia” diagnosis as permanent. Yet the reasons we experience these symptoms are complex and the response from the psychiatric profession seems practically uniform!!
I have been a hearing voices group facilitator for 20 years and have seen this happen repeatedly. The stories are all so similar. A psychiatrist must surely see the same events played out in his patients’ lives that I do – he knows the way it happens so why doesn’t he use this clinical gift? Why doesn’t he chat about the person’s thresholds, their worries, what he has seen works for people? Potentially he has so much to offer. He has seen hundreds of people, he must know the pitfalls and advantages to decisions we make. If a person decides psychiatric drugs aren’t for them, they are deserted by psychiatry. Why not bring the person in to talk over their journey? Sometimes we hear on the news of people who have done bad things mistakenly when off their psychiatric drugs. Maybe supervision could work. Knowing how common voice hearing is, why not attempt to normalise the experience and I say it again – give relevant, intensive education? Reassurance from the psychiatrist that what you are experiencing is common, would be nice, would be amazing.
Give me some love. Please.
Information & support for those who hear voices can be found at hearing-voices.org.
This ‘schizophrenia’ needs a ‘disorder’ make over crew on the job, a bit like ‘adhd’ and ‘asd’ have had – get the celebs involved, get some cooler drugs that people don’t mind taking and others not labelled quite like to snort.
Then pepper the entire culture with questionnaires, blogs and other ‘influencers’ to get into people heads, ensure the criteria is so loose and broad that pretty much anyone can see themselves, encourage self diagnosis and reframe it as a ‘super power’.
I can see a TV series with make up artists, set designs and sharp looking ‘professionals’ in white coats – maybe call it Neuro Island or the great British Neuro off. Got to get away from the poor marketing strategy of ‘disorder’ and find a more appealing, desirable, marketing plan and sell sell sell.
Soon, everyone and their dog will completely jettison any pesky life contexts, histories and political and economic systems and come to embrace their ‘true’ ‘adhd’ ‘asd’ ‘shizzlephreniababy’ selves and shed their ‘masking’ and start rising up against all those silly neuro typicals with their vanilla, easy lives, just gliding through life as if invisible butterfly wings carry them above and beyond the ‘masking’ they always seem to force our hidden super neuro hero’s to wear – no more!!!
I will show them all! I too can self diagnose, get me some cool drugs and fly into our neurobabbling, brain shrinkage, heart attack, ‘reasonable adjustments’ psychotic, drug addled future freeeeeeedom!!! lube me up I’m going in.
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Babe, get ye to an open mic and do a stand up routine!
Obvs psychiatry now has three functions;
1 distract from the causes of distress
2 sell drugs for Big Pharma
And the new one
3 promote Big Psyche brands such as ADHD, Bi-Polar 2, Autism and the less popular ones of schizophrenia, Bipolar 2 and personality disorder.
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A legion of stressed out grey faced office workers are stressed, with gas in their digestive tracts, and when they get depressed we blame it on their brains. Isn’t that on the face of it insane? We don’t need to invoke any explanation besides being a grey faced officer worker stressed out in a miserable and meaningless social reality that gives them constant gas in their digestive tracts, all hard labour in a life which has nothing to do with anything any actual life form would want. And because you are unhappy with it you blame yourself, which creates this fiction of a self with a low self esteem. Obviously that self with a low self-esteme is 100% fictional because it’s our whole human reality which is shit besides the piggy treats and illusions which destract.
And the expert who explains to you that it’s a malfunctioning in your brain is the guardian of social order, is the sane one, is the good and correct one he pushes you into buying chemical interventions into your infinitely complex brain functioning as a means of adjusting you your meaningless and manifestly unsatisfactory social and psychological existence which is all stress and striving without ever having or arriving, which is all conflict and no love, which is all really, if we’re honest, manipulative vampires pillaging us for everything we’ve got, all activity which has absolutely no relation to the truth whatsoever.
So what actually is the truth? What is meant by the term ‘what is’? With words we can argue about this forever, but in perception we can actually answer this question simply and decisively. There is only qualities in awareness, isn’t there? Or to put it another way, there is only awareness and the various happenings in awareness which we give various words. There are various happenings, or qualities, taking place in awareness. That’s all there ever is and this is reality. But within this there is a counterfeit reality. What is it? when the brain labels the qualities, this labelling is socially conditioned activity converting what actually is into a linguistic, i.e. socially conditioned conceptualization and representation of what is, so these qualities become the world – people, society, politics, nations, rights, responsibilities etc – completely socially historically constructed non-facts producing a counterfeit social reality or social consciousness composed entirely of words and the sensuous association we make to those words. But the words produce an illusory sense of reality through ‘knowledge’, which is socially conditioned conversions of what actually is into a false socially conditioned sense of reality. To me this is like being a factory farm animal, for reality without words is what nature knows. Reality without words is what the Buddha knows. Beauty and love is reality without words. Where thought is, beauty is not. And you, being words, when you exist, beauty and love is not. When there is love there is only THAT and the moment you label it it is not.
Anyway, I have finger-like projections on my arms and blinking marbles in my head. They assure us that we are alive. If this is life I’d dread to see death. As humans life would seem to mean ‘to die’. For nature life means life and death is a happening within life, not the other way around. Nature is the garden that provided all. Our world is full of garbage and yet everything starves. Life here is the uncomfortable waiting for death. But in nature life is living and avoiding death, naturally. But awareness is birthless and deathless. It doesn’t come and go. It just is. And whether there are heavenly realms composed of characters from the A-team and the Golden Girls is anyone’s guess really. If there is it’s probably another mad dream like this one so who cares.
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Dear Peter,
I send you my love, as requested. I just wish I could give you a real hug. I have known that I am a schizophrenic since 1963. We schizophrenics, and all mentally ill people, should show solidarity with each other. We must never be ashamed of what we are. Just think of what great people certain schizophrenics have been and how they have changed the world. The Bible is full of people hearing voices and seeing visions. Thank you for sharing your story.
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There is a big problem with the psych “professionals” misdiagnosing spiritual queries as “psychotic.” I had a dream about being moved by the Holy Spirit misdiagnosed as “psychosis.” No, it was just a dream that means one is moved by the Holy Spirit. But if all dreams are “psychosis,” since we all dream … well, that rather means everyone is “psychotic,” which renders the term “psychosis” to be “irrelevant to reality.”
And, yes, you are right that lots of drugs, both legal and illegal, can cause “psychosis,” but so too can sleep deprivation, etc. But included among the drugs that can create “psychosis” are the so called “antidepressants” and “antipsychotics” / neuroleptics, themselves.
The antidepressants and “antipsychotics” can create “psychosis,” via anticholinergic toxidrome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome
And what’s sad is every doctor is taught about anticholinergic toxidrome in med school, including the psychiatrists … so I cannot say “they know not what they do.” A more truthful statement is what a family friend said, just after graduating from med school – “I know enough to be dangerous.”
God bless, Peter.
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