१७ मे, २०२२

"The voice who had been with her longest warned of catastrophes coming for her family in Zionsville, a town north of Indianapolis, calamities tied in some unspecified way to..."

"... TV images from the gulf war: fighter planes, flashes in the sky, explosions on the ground, luminous and all-consuming. A woman’s voice castigated her at school, telling her that her clothes smelled and that she had better keep her hand down, no matter that she knew the answers to the teacher’s questions. Another voice tracked her every move, its tone faintly mocking. 'She’s getting out of bed now; oh, she’s walking down the hall now.'..."

From "Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live With Her Voices. A new movement wants to shift mainstream thinking away from medication and toward greater acceptance" Daniel Bergner (NYT)(adapted from the book "The Mind and the Moon: My Brother’s Story, the Science of Our Brains, and the Search for Our Psyches"). 

[Caroline Mazel-Carlton] began leading Hearing Voices Network support groups — which are somewhat akin to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — for people with auditory and visual hallucinations. The groups, with no clinicians in the room, gathered on secondhand chairs and sofas in humble spaces rented by the alliance. What psychiatry terms psychosis, the Hearing Voices Movement refers to as nonconsensus realities, and a bedrock faith of the movement is that filling a room with talk of phantasms will not infuse them with more vivid life or grant them more unshakable power. Instead, partly by lifting the pressure of secrecy and diminishing the feeling of deviance, the talk will loosen the hold of hallucinations and, crucially, the grip of isolation.... 

At the outset, Mazel-Carlton invited everyone to open up by reminding: “This is where I can go if I have direct experiences of the divine. It’s a place I can go, if I’m someone with a psychiatric label, to talk about spirituality without having my experience pathologized. We validate one another here.” 

A man described being rocked and comforted by “an upside-down angel” when he was growing up. Mazel-Carlton modeled an H.V.N. principle that prizes curiosity about other realities by asking the man for more about his experience. In reply to another participant, she said, “I’m so sorry that people are refusing to honor your soul’s identity.” 

Then a woman talked about visiting her grandmother in a nursing home during Covid and seeing her grandmother’s “glowing pink orb rising from her chest” and everything as “sparkling and glowing and timeless.” The woman said, “Everything was connected; there was this pulse, this flow” — and there was a fight with a nurse when the woman, feeling that she was God, took off her mask. A psychiatrist labeled her psychotic, “so I couldn’t keep telling him my experiences, because he was telling me I’m sick, and I’m not sick.” 

In this, according to the mainstream view, she was confirming her illness; denial of one’s diagnosis, termed anosognosia, is seen as a glaring symptom of psychotic disorder.

Much more at the NYT article (or, alternatively, the book).

४३ टिप्पण्या:

Roger Sweeny म्हणाले...

Learning to live with your voices and visions seems like a positive step, and if it can keep you off of anti-psychotic drugs (which have all sorts of side effects) even better. But calling them realities is just dishonest. They are real the way a movie is real, i.e., not.

gilbar म्हणाले...

nonconsensus realities

I thought we'd decided, that nonconsensus realities, were hysteria; that is: caused by sex organs?
Won't a (forced) application of chemical castration agents ("puberty blockers") along with top and bottom surgery; shut these people up? I THOUGHT that was The New Plan? Someone acts weird, you mutilate them?

Rocketeer म्हणाले...

Spoiler: they’re sick.

All of the problems we are experiencing as a society can be laid at the feet of denying, coddling, validating, and mainstreaming mental illnesses.

tim maguire म्हणाले...

As I understand it, most anti-psychotic medications have unpleasant side effects, so I can't blame people for seeking out alternatives, but if they stigmatize medical treatment--the way other "differently abled" activist groups sometimes do--then we have a problem.

MikeR म्हणाले...

This is literally the textbook definition of psychosis, as opposed to neurosis: inability to tell one's imaginations from reality.
As to whether this is a helpful treatment, time will tell.

Jeff Vader म्हणाले...

Totally agreed, unmedicated people who hear voices do much better without meds, just ask every homeless person, they will tell you

Bob Boyd म्हणाले...

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Wince म्हणाले...

Reminds me of George Costanza's doll mother.

Tom T. म्हणाले...

It seems terribly cruel to allow these people to suffer in this way.

Caroline म्हणाले...

Charles Manson heard voices, too.

Lurker21 म्हणाले...

Did she really "decide," or is she just doing what the voices told her to do?

J L Oliver म्हणाले...

Having just finished The Quiet Room written by a person with Schizo-Affective Disorder, I say this nonsense is dangerous. So it is a religious experience to fly out third story windows? To punch through windows? To obey the orders of voices to kill another?

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

The best analysis of this problem would be in the works of Rupert Sheldrake. He is hidden away from us but can be found.

Robert Marshall म्हणाले...

Get another tent or two ready to be pitched on LA's Skid Row or San Fran's Tenderloin, two of the ultimate urban-camping destinations for untreated psychotics.

Just because you or your friends amuse yourselves with your hallucinations doesn't mean the rest of us have to give you license to live on our streets. If you can keep it together without your mental illness spilling out into the public, okay; otherwise, society should reserve the right to keep you off the streets.

ccscientist म्हणाले...

Untreated psychosis is dangerous to the sick person. Suicide, self-harm, self-neglect, harming others, raging, inability to handle daily life like work and bills and cooking. It isn't just a joke. I've known people who had to care for a psychotic grown child and it was barely possible.

Gahrie म्हणाले...

Where are the ones whose voices tell them to kill and commit crimes? What happens when that happens to one of these poor souls?

Is it really kindness to indulge their illnesses? Is it safe, for them or us?

Gahrie म्हणाले...

I've said it before, the historians will call this the Age of Indulgence.

Mike (MJB Wolf) म्हणाले...

I’m glad I “clicked to see more” because the support group HVN is fascinating and reminds me of a statement from a forensic psychiatrist I saw analyzing psychopaths in a criminal format who said, and I’m paraphrasing here, that hearing voices is not necessarily dangerous. We all have inner voices. Some are sensitive to other stimuli that many are not. I am fascinated by psychedelic effects of LSD or psilocybin that mimic or enhance the experiences described by people diagnosed with “psychosis” and wish I could take time right now to follow up and read more about the HVN. The people helping people part is at least uplifting.

farmgirl म्हणाले...

I have so much I want to say, but so little of it makes sense.

I will say: it sounds dangerous.

Sebastian म्हणाले...

"people are refusing to honor your soul’s identity”

Abetting insanity was always the prog terminus ad quem. But as the trans pushback shows, the reality-based community still has a fighting chance.

"I’m not sick"

Good. So we don't need to pay for her medications and she is not entitled to accommodations at work.

Carol म्हणाले...

"antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, an antidepressant, a benzodiazepine for anxiety, a stimulant for attention deficit..."

That's the thing, when people tell you to "get help" they really mean "there's a pill for that."

And GoodThinkers like to ascribe violence and drug addiction to "mental illness" but how many perps have already been through this therapy rigmarole and are only worse for it?

MadTownGuy म्हणाले...

Emphasizing the Abnormal in "Brave New Abnormal."

Critter म्हणाले...

Just another byproduct of post modernism. There is no objective reality so schizophrenics experience their reality which is just as valid as our reality. The acid test is when hallucinatory collide with objective reality and the hallucinator is injured or killed, or those around him/her is.

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

It is all fun and games until one of the participants shows up with a gun and shoots the others because he thought they were dragons, or Ultra MAGAS.

Joe Smith म्हणाले...

It all depends on what the voices are saying.

Kai Akker म्हणाले...

a new movement

Not this one. One day medicine will have better tools to deal with mental illnesses; but this bit is R. D. Laing all over again. Check that '60s onetime medical and psychiatric practitioner and do not ignore the details of his own life (and, sadly, his family members' lives) for possible guidance on how this "alternative approach" is likely to work out. He was too convincingly a salesman for anti-psychiatry at a time when experimentation was rife; and people fell for his writings on his ideas. But writings that sound exciting are no substitute for much traditional care, therapy, and treatment even with their limitations and errors. Laing is one -- just one, but that was one too many -- of the causes of the closing of asylums and the "mainstreaming" of mental patients, now often longterm campers in cities around America. To honor their freedom, including the freedom to live wretched and diseased lives in awful conditions, while also making anyone around them at least somewhat miserable too.

BobJustBob म्हणाले...

Heinlein’s Crazy Years.

Deirdre Mundy म्हणाले...

A friend told me about a schizophrenic woman she knows-- the voices tell her to knit socks and mittens for the homeless and help her pick out yarns and patterns. Then then tell her who to present her crafts to.

Mentally Ill? Yes. But also harmless. So, yes, if someone's psychosis is 'create and give away knitted items" do we really care if it's "the voices" telling her to do it versus just... being a church lady who likes knitting?

It makes sense, I think, for us to treat behaviors rather than internal thought processes, unless the person is BOTHERED by the voices.

Bill R म्हणाले...

Lily Tomlin had an observation from the days when mental hospitals first began the mass release of patients - "deinstitutionalization" they called it.

She was talking about all the people you saw walking around the streets talking to themselves. Ms. Tomlin suggested a program that paired them up so it at least appeared they were having a conversation.

My other Tomlin favorite. "No matter how cynical you get, you can't keep up."

And y'know, that whole business where the mention of something like schizophrenia brings up a semi-related topic like Lily Tomlin and the thought of Lily Tomlin brings up a series of related jokes and topics? That kind of thing is said to be an early symptom of schizophrenia.

Uh-Oh.

veni vidi vici म्हणाले...

"I will say: it sounds dangerous."

This stuff, like the attempted mainstreaming of pedophilia as "minor-attracted persons", is some seriously "Late empire" ideation.

Camille Paglia didn't call this one out but she's spoken in detail about the sorts of ideas that gain mainstream currency when empires are approaching or in their twilight. This is increasingly looking and feeling like our moment, isn't it?

farmgirl म्हणाले...

I wish there was actual honesty in the word today.

Drs pushing pills to get kickbacks or not taking enough time for proper diagnosis… I know many people who suffer in varying levels of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia. And let’s not forget those who self-medicate.

In a perfect world, money would truly be treated as the root of all evil(I’d typed route: which is also applicable). In a perfect world, those w/more balance would have patience &a helping hand for those who struggle. Yet, if the least of these(the most vulnerable, helpless &voiceless)are seen only as non-persons to be exterminated if such is the whim/wish/fancy; then, what chance does anyone else who’s a bit of a bubble off plumb- have? Not even safe mental health facilities to escape and have the quiet and professional help to sort things out. Jail and the pavement have to suffice.

1 Corinthians 3:10
10 According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it.

The foundation of our society is eroding. Willfully. The hierarchy of value is crumbling. The dignity of intrinsic humanhood is being erased. Of course. Of course we’re headed to hell in a handbasket.

People are so busy gazing into their own souls- they aren’t even aware of the direction they are going, anymore.

Kai Akker म्हणाले...

---I am fascinated by psychedelic effects of LSD or psilocybin that mimic or enhance the experiences described by people diagnosed with “psychosis”

Mike, I would scrutinize those claims. These same assertions were made in the '60s but IIRC there was zero basis for the comparisons. The claims were a tantalizing bit of the propaganda case for psychedelics. (Plus Huxley's "Doors of Perception.") But it was just an intellectual rationalization for other more hedonistic desires.

Michael K म्हणाले...

I suggest you read "My Brother Ron."

There is a lot of crap circulating about mental illness. I see some here.

Howard म्हणाले...

This reminds me of the Nobel prize winner John Nash has played by Russell Crowe in " A Beautiful Mind"

realestateacct म्हणाले...

Many people hear voices and see visions, auras, ghosts, sometimes under stress or sometimes as part of their life. Some people take drugs to induce this. Whether this is a pathology that must be medicated or requires external constraint depends on the behavior as well as the feelings of the individual and on their ability to navigate the consensus world without support or suppression. Behavioral therapy or support groups that allow people to separate hallucination from reality and eliminate fear, violence or inappropriate behavior (like taking off your mask because you are God) is certainly worth trying to avoid drugs which have so many side effects. However people who are endangering themselves or others do need to be restrained.

I think we as a society have become dangerously tolerant of deviant and dangerous behavior in public spaces and the idea of allowing or even subsidizing people to live on the streets instead of providing institutions for their care is abhorrent. It's not what anyone would want for their loved ones.

Aggie म्हणाले...

Why not take a little trip to San Francisco? They've moved past trials and are conducting the experiment on a grand scale now. All the normies are thrilled, you'll see.

gadfly म्हणाले...

". . . Hearing Voices Network support groups . . . are somewhat akin to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — for people with auditory and visual hallucinations."

Unfortunately, Donald Trump would never attend such meetings, since his psychosis is not treatable with medication, and the severity of his character disorder means he would never be capable of engaging in introspection.

According to Harvard psychiatrist Lance Dodes, [TFG] "has been delusional for years, from the start of his presidency, when he claimed he had large crowds at his inauguration. But it's important to add that besides being delusional, Trump's behavior also reflects his deeply severe character disorder, his sociopathy. . . . [b]ut the fact that Trump is a sociopath, a person without a conscience who is incapable of recognizing the inherent worth of other human beings, makes him the enormous danger he is. Trump has the worst of all worlds, . . . psychotically grandiose and utterly uncaring about the harm he causes others."

Quaestor म्हणाले...

An interesting use of the Althouse religion tag by our hostess. It puts me in mind of one of the most remarkable books I have ever read, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

farmgirl म्हणाले...

https://youtu.be/Sk9mR3zjrkk

Patch Adams

Greg The Class Traitor म्हणाले...

A new movement wants to shift mainstream thinking away from medication and toward greater acceptance

Wait, you mean a "new movement" wants us to embrace people's insanity, rather than pointing out how non-functional it is?

I'm shocked (trans) shocked!

Lurker21 म्हणाले...

When every other hierarchy and privilege system is being questioned and dismantled wasn't it only a matter of time before they came after the authoritarian hegemony of reason and the idea that the rational ego should hold the reins? It's not that you have voices or visions, it's that you can't distinguish them from reality. When reason and the sense of reality go, things can bet very scary.

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.

Gospace म्हणाले...

gadfly said...
...
According to Harvard psychiatrist Lance Dodes, .... But it's important to add that besides being delusional, Trump's behavior also reflects his deeply severe character disorder, his sociopathy. . . . [b]ut the fact that Trump is a sociopath, a person without a conscience who is incapable of recognizing the inherent worth of other human beings, makes him the enormous danger he is. Trump has the worst of all worlds, ....


Harvard psychiatrist lance Does is delusional, along with you.

I was at a a union meeting where Hillary made a surprise appearance. Staff at the hotel were instructed to not ever make eye contact with her, and to turn away from her if she was walking towards them. None of the staff, AKA as common people, had anything good to say about her.

The staff of any hotel Trump has stayed at or owns rarely has anything bad to say about Trump. He interacts with them, asks personal questions, wants to know about them. He recognizes that they are all instrumental in his success.

But Trump is the uncaring sociopath? Yeah, uh-huh. Secret Service agents are assigned to Hillary. And according to stories all request transfer as soon as eligible. For all other ex-presidents and first ladies, the secret service agents are long term and volunteers. It's a cushy job working for pleasant people who don't treat you like dirt. I don't actually know if Trump's secret service contingent is as large as that of other former presidents. The secret service and Trump's personal security had to learn how to co-exist during his presidency. I suspect he gets along well with agents assigned/volunteered to his detail and they're not waiting for the day they can request transfer to another assignment.

Greg The Class Traitor म्हणाले...

gadfly said...
Unfortunately, Donald Trump would never attend such meetings, since his psychosis is not treatable with medication, and the severity of his character disorder means he would never be capable of engaging in introspection.

According to Harvard psychiatrist Lance Dodes, [TFG


So, Gadfly the nut quotes a "psychiatrist" who has decided to violate all professional ethics by "diagnosing" a "patient" he's never met.

Could we please get some lefty trolls who at least TRY to make an intelligent argument?