Are Schizophrenics the Canary in the Civilizational Coal Mine?

In which I announce my intention to develop a cure for schizophrenia

Hey Folks,

I have a dream. I want to learn to cure schizophrenia. I’m pretty sure I can do it. Pretty much positive, in fact.

I was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was 17, and from the ages of 17 to 23, I spent a lot of time on psych wards. I was court ordered to take anti-psychotic medication for years.

That’s all behind me, though. I’ve been medication-free for over 10 years and haven’t been institutionalized in almost 15. Some people might think I’m crazy, but I’m able to live an independent existence. I’m not bragging, but I’ve been able to accomplish quite a bit in my life. I think that I am at least as healthy and happy as your average person, and I’m probably more satisfied with my life than most people are. I’ve got my problems, and I’m far from perfect, but I’m not mentally ill. Medically speaking, I’m both normal and healthy.

Sometimes I wish that I could make a living by curing people of schizophrenia, because I don’t have the slightest doubt that I could be more helpful than most psychiatrists are. But it seems like it would be difficult to convince people that being a diagnosed schizophrenic makes me uniquely qualified to assist schizophrenics.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to start blogging more about schizophrenia, madness, mental illness, and mental health. My hope is to one day write a book about schizophrenia that helps people understand what causes psychosis, and why psychotic illness is so poorly understood by science.

In it, I will proclaim from the rooftops can anti-psychotic medication can cause psychotic symptoms. This is a well-known fact amongst people who have studied the matter, but it seems not to occur to psychiatrists that if medications cause madness, maybe they should stop prescribing them.

Because the theories of crazy people are usually disregarded, most psychiatrists refuse to believe that schizophrenics might actually have something useful to contribute to discussions about schizophrenia. I certainly feel like the history of psychiatry proves that most psychiatrists lack empathy for psychotics, who they tend to see as

Anyway, as I continue my research into schizophrenia I will share some of my notes in blog posts. Eventually, I hope to compile different theories about schizophrenia together into a book so that people can understand what schizophrenia is, which will require examining the complex relationship between belief, the social construction of reality in different cultures, and the nature of reality itself. I don’t have a specific thesis for the book, but it will likely involve an exploration of the relationship between schizophrenia and shamanism.

It is my hope that I will be able to convince people that schizophrenics have a vital role to play in society, and that shamanic techniques are necessary to interpret non-ordinary states of consciousness that some people experience under certain conditions.

I hope that I will be able to convince people that the key to curing schizophrenia is understanding that it is not merely an illness afflicting individuals, but occurs within a complex web of social relationships. The cure to schizophrenia is a rejection of solipsism and the creation of “right relationships” with other people.

Personally, I believe psychotics are like the canaries that used to be used in coal mines. Canaries were brought in the mine in order to see how toxic the air was. If canaries died from breathing bad air, the environment was assumed to be unsafe for humans over the long term as well.

Psychotics have something to tell the world, but people aren’t getting it. The medium is the message. Crazy people in cities are telling us that our society is crazy. If you ask me, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of the world or to justify the course that it’s on. This is important, because all hopes for a healthy society depend on the health of our mythos, our relationship to meaning, which is mediated socially through culture, which in turn is created through language.

Somewhere between the relationship between the individual and the collective is a balanced state of harmony, and there is where we should look if we are interested in mental health.

It’s not a measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. Schizophrenics may not well-adjusted, but they may actually grasp as well as anyone the true madness of the modern world, a madness born from the insane delusion that science has proven that reality is meaningless.

In reality, meaning is what reality is made of. People need to wrap their minds around the idea that hallucinations, like dreams, can be meaningfully interpreted. Once this paradigm shift occurs, schizophrenia will no longer be seen as an incurable disease.

The following passage is taken from Christopher Ryan’s Civilized To Death. If you don’t know who Christopher Ryan is, he’s the author of Sex At Dawn, which Dan Savage called "the single most important book about human sexuality since Alfred Kinsey unleashed Sexual Behavior in the Human Male on the American public in 1948."

Civilized To Death continues the work of Jacques Ellul, Terrence McKenna, Ted Kaczynski, Wolfi Landstreicher, Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, Frank Lopez, Ronald Wright, Chris Hedges, Darren Allen, Mary Harrington, and others, who argue that the central myth of modernity, the Myth of Progress, is fundamentally a lie.

In order words, civilization is not bringing us towards a brighter future. Rather, we are in the midst of a planetary crisis seemingly worsened by our insistence that everything is fine.

Like the aforementioned writers, Ryan believes that we should study traditional societies from the past in order to learn how to be human again. As the saying goes, the solutions to the problems of the present can be found in the traditions of the past.

Civilized To Death is an amazing book, and I’ll probably write more about it at some point. For now, I’ll just say: if you liked Sex At Dawn, don’t miss Civilized To Death!

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH HEARING VOICES

by Christopher Ryan, excerpted from Civilized To Death

Not all forms of mental illness can be blamed on loneliness, chronic anxiety, too little exposure to nature, and so on. Schizophrenia, for example, is thought to be highly related to genetics, and to occur at roughly the same rate around the world, independent of culture. But even if the origins of the disorder are not cultural, the likelihood of recovery may be.

In the 1970s, the World Health Organization conducted a large-scale study comparing outcomes of people diagnosed with schizophrenia in developing nations with those in the United States and other “advanced” nations. After following patients for five years, the WHO reported that 64 percent of patients in poor countries have “good” outcomes, while less than a third as many (18 percent) in rich countries did as well. The WHO concluded that living in a developed nation was a “strong predictor” that a patient would never fully recover.

In response to the predictable uproar these results provoked in the medical community, the WHO followed up with a larger study in the 1980s that attempted to address methodological weaknesses that had been pointed out in the first study (how the patients had been identified, the “developing countries” chosen, what sorts of medications had been used, and so on). The authors of this follow-up study came to similar conclusions: 63 percent of patients recovered in the poorer countries compared to 37 percent in the “advanced” settings. In the face of further outrage from the medical community, they wrote: “A strong case can be made for a real pervasive influence of a powerful factor which can be referred to as ‘culture,’ as the context in which gene-environment interactions shape the clinical picture of human disease.”

Responding to critics of their WHO study, Assen Jablensky and Norman Sartorius noted that “the erosion of social support systems [in developing countries], likely to be associated with the processes of globalization, should be a matter of grave concern. The sobering experience of high rates of chronic disability and dependency associated with schizophrenia in high-income countries, despite access to costly biomedical treatment, suggests that something essential to recovery is missing in the social fabric.” It’s pretty clear that what we’re missing is meaning and one another.

Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given to us by divine gift.

-Socrates

Statistically, you’re more likely to hear voices in your head than to be a vegetarian or left-handed. If you do hear voices, before submitting yourself to psychiatric care, you might want to check in with your local chapter of the Hearing Voices Network.

An international community of people who experience auditory hallucinations, the HVN was founded in 1988 by the Dutch social psychiatrist Marius Romme, who had a hunch that far more people were hearing voices than generally thought—and that for most of them, it wasn’t a problem. There is a subset, of course, for whom the voices are intrusive and deeply disturbing, and Romme noticed that these people had often suffered some form of severe emotional trauma or abuse as children. Romme’s insight has been confirmed by massive epidemiological studies such as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, which looked into eight types of difficult experiences faced by children, ranging from various kinds of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse to having a parent with a mental illness. Having experienced just one of these types of abuse as a child made it 2.5 times more likely that an individual would experience hallucinations later in life. Those unfortunate children who’d experienced seven or all of the different types of trauma were five times more likely to experience disturbing auditory hallucinations than kids who hadn’t.

But not all the voices are saying the same things. When Luhrmann compared the reports of voice-hearers in Ghana, the United States, and India, she discovered that while most Americans felt “bombarded” by unfamiliar, hostile voices urging them to harm themselves or others, the Indians and Ghanaians generally believed the voices to be family members or divine figures, who often made helpful suggestions, such as “you should comb your hair” or “it’s time to clean up the house.”

Luhrmann and her colleagues interviewed sixty adults who’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia: twenty each in San Mateo, California; Chennai, India; and Accra, Ghana. While many of the African and Indian subjects felt that most of their interactions with the voices were positive and even “entertaining,” none of the Americans experienced their hallucinations as welcome in any sense. Instead, they tended to view their experiences as evidence of their hopeless sickness. Luhrmann believes her research demonstrates that the harsh, violent voices so common in the West are not an inevitable feature of schizophrenia. If cultural expectations shape the quality and content of auditory hallucinations, “the way people think about thinking changes the way they pay attention to the unusual experiences associated with sleep and awareness, and as a result, people will have different spiritual experiences, as well as different patterns of psychiatric experience.” This insight suggests it’s time to reassess the current psychiatric tendency to treat the voices heard by people with psychosis as if they are the “uninteresting neurological byproducts of disease which should be ignored,” she said.

For our forager ancestors, such voices were anything but “uninteresting neurological byproducts of disease.” People who heard them believed they were experiencing a form of divine madness of potentially lifesaving importance and power. A young person who experienced the sorts of hallucinations we associate with severe mental illness would have been seen as a potential shaman—a human being with the ability to move between this world and others. The early manifestations of this ability were terrifying and dangerous but represented “the call to shamanize.” This call cannot be ignored, as the alternative to learning to harness and direct this capacity would be madness or death.

Psychologist Stanley Krippner has spent a lifetime studying how altered states of consciousness (ASC) are used for healing within varying cultural contexts. He notes that researchers have shown that “in 488 societies… 89% had one or more forms [of ASC], usually in a ritual or spiritual context. Some were voluntary, such as a shaman’s ‘journeying’ to the ‘Upper World,’ while others might be partially or completely involuntary, such as a medium’s incorporation of a discarnate entity that ‘rides’ or takes over his or her body, displacing the medium’s personality.” Krippner concluded that how accommodating cultures are to ASC affects their frequency: “Spontaneous childhood past-life experiences are reported most often in cultural groups marked by beliefs in reincarnation even though a number of cases have been found in Western countries that lack this acceptance. The incidence may be smaller because they occur less frequently or because experiencers are less likely to share these accounts if they are stigmatized or discounted.” Taking this insight to its logical conclusion, Krippner argues that because the capacity to easily enter into altered states would have had such significant adaptive value—in that it would potentiate placebo and other types of healing activated by states of consciousness—it stands to reason that this capacity would have been selected for in prehistoric populations. In contemporary societies that dismiss such states and their healing potential, this selective pressure would be reduced, with a consequent weakening of such capacities over generations.

For a sense of how differently shamanic people view what most contemporary psychiatrists would diagnose as severe mental illness, it’s helpful to look at the life story of a Lakota shaman named Black Elk, as told to the poet John Neihardt, and published as a collection of transcriptions of their conversations in Black Elk Speaks, in 1932. The book has become a classic of American Indian literature.

The basic facts of Black Elk’s life are astounding. He was almost an adolescent before he saw a white person, but within a few years, white people had overrun his culture. By any standards, this man experienced almost inconceivable psychological stress. He had witnessed the utter destruction of his culture and the murders of his people’s leaders and, in the hope of discovering “some secret of the [whites] that would help [his] people somehow,” he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and traveled to Chicago, New York, London, and Paris.

At the age of five, before the period of great drama in Black Elk’s life had commenced, he began hearing voices: “I was out playing alone when I heard them. It was like someone calling me, and I thought it was my mother, but there was nobody there. This happened more than once and always made me afraid, so that I ran home.” Stephen Larsen, a psychotherapist and authority on world mythology, distinguishes “mythologized” cultures like the Lakota’s from “demythologized” cultures like our own. In the former, “Mythic meaning and social meaning are… brought together rather than separated, and the archaic type of thinking is fused with mythic images and social realities.” By contrast, Larsen believes that the civilized mind neglects mythological ways of understanding the world, so these images and insights are suppressed, emerging only in fantasies and dreams.

The “great vision” that Black Elk remembered throughout his life was preceded by severe physical symptoms. One day, for no apparent reason, both his legs began to hurt. By the next morning, the boy was unable to walk at all, and his arms, legs, and face were all swollen. While suffering from this condition, he had an extended vision that included conversations with some of his people’s gods and being granted the power to heal others, communicate with animals, and even travel outside his body.

A classically trained Western mental health worker would diagnose anyone with experiences similar to these as psychotic, probably schizophrenic. It’s likely that they’d be told there was no cure for the condition, prescribed powerful antipsychotic medications, and possibly institutionalized for the rest of their lives. But that’s not what happened to Black Elk. Instead, his concerned parents called on a traditional Lakota shaman named Black Road, who sat alone with the boy in a tepee and asked to hear about his vision. “I was so afraid of being afraid of everything that I told him about my vision, and when I was through, he looked long at me and said: ‘Ah-h-h-h!,’ meaning that he was much surprised.” Black Road told the boy that now he knew what the trouble was: Black Elk must respect the voices and “perform this vision for your people upon earth.… Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you.”

Everyone who knew this troubled boy agreed to participate in enacting the images and sounds that had been tormenting him—down to the smallest details. They set up a sacred tepee and spent all day painting the hides with images from Black Elk’s vision. They stayed up all night learning the sacred songs the young man had heard in his vision. Sixteen young men rode horses of particular colors, four each from each of the four sacred directions; four young girls in the village played their part in the enactment, as well as six old men. People painted their faces and bodies according to the boy’s specifications. They gathered food and played drums in unison.

This troubled young man, haunted by hallucinated voices and disturbing visions, was embraced by his community in an intimate, supportive, and loving way. They came together to bring to life, in as much detail as possible, the images and sounds that had been tormenting him for years.

This is not noble savagery. There is plenty of self-interest involved here. In shamanic societies, it’s understood that a person capable of moving between worlds can be a great asset—a healer who will spend the rest of his or her life using this capacity to help others. As explained by psychiatrist Roger Walsh, while “Western psychiatry has a long history of viewing mystics as madmen, saints as psychotics, and sages as schizophrenics,” in traditional societies, these experiences may be seen as “proof that [one] is destined to be a shaman.” Such a young person “is understood by the tribe to be undergoing a difficult but potentially valuable developmental process. If handled appropriately this process is expected to resolve in ways that will benefit the whole tribe and provide them with new access to spiritual realms and powers.”

The sort of cathartic healing Walsh described is what happened in Black Elk’s case. At the climax of the enactment of his vision, the boy looked up at the sky and, as he recounted many years later, “As I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again.… I looked about me and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder and the darkened dream of it was here.” This experience transformed the terrified boy into a man able to withstand psychological pressures beyond imagining.

Not all mental health crises can be resolved by the kind of interventions shamanic societies can offer. Some conditions are organic, due to genetics, complications in pregnancy, head trauma, and so on. In such situations, modern psychiatric interventions can be lifesaving. But most of the suffering we see around us today is due to social causes that can and must be addressed before they manifest as mental illness: economic insecurity, misinformed parenting practices, oppressive educational systems, war and domestic violence, shame concerning sexuality and our bodies, absurd notions of beauty and success calculated to keep us always dissatisfied with ourselves and our lives. No pills will ever address these sources of our distress.

Our civilized impulse is to remove or weaken the perceived danger: kill it before it kills us. We place babies in sterile incubators; send our children to schools with armed guards, metal detectors, and teachers who are legally forbidden to touch even a crying child; drop bombs across the globe that create more potential terrorists than they kill; and administer drugs that quiet voices we should be listening to. It hasn’t worked, and never will—a fact to which we seem to be slowly waking up. Our survival depends not on eliminating the dangers of life but on relearning to embrace and acknowledge that which terrifies us—including altered states of consciousness.