11.‘ Intense experience’: spiritual or psychotic?
Art (1)
‘I used to believe in the business of ‘the artist as madman’, and worked really hard to have some sort of mental imbalance, but just found I was working harder on being mental than I was on being creative.’ Artist and life-model Gavin Pollock (quoted from his response to post no. 9)
Is the artist’s mental state as interesting as the work produced? Artist Dave Thomas cynically commented (post 9) that public (i.e. publicised) awareness of a particular artist’s sufferings of distress/despair has a marketable value…
Life (1)
At my birthday party there was apparently this really good discussion that I completely missed out on about psychosis, between an ex- and a current psychiatrist, two Africans and a mental health social worker. The subject was whether psychosis is dealt with better in African society than (to use a blanket term) ‘the West’, where you are likely to get plucked from your community, sectioned and drugged and branded with the vague catch-all diagnosis ‘schizophrenia’ and fearfully slammed into an institution to protect the rest of us from you. In African culture, psychosis might be understood, rather, as a possession by a spirit – a spirit which can be got out, so there is an expectation that you might be alright again.
Is this baloney? Am I reporting it wrong? Click here to read a Somali friend’s experience.
How are psychotic/mad people dealt with in China, or India?
Art (2)
Modelling on Monday for Dougal’s life-drawing workshop I benefit from the erudition of The Old Men of Dean Clough. The lunch-break discussion ranges through Dougal on depicting genitalia (hey, Bodo’s going out with Jeni Taylior) to Tracey Emin: her shrivelled little life-drawings. She CAN’T DRAW (Dorian)… Wouldn’t care if she was a looker (Bodo)… I’d rather be going out with Jenny Saville (Kenneth)…
I eat my raw carrots and nod.
Sometimes they reminisce about hanging out with David Hockney way-back-when (don’t forget this is the West Riding of GOC* Yorkshire, Hockney’s homeland). Dougal bought the peroxide for David to dye his hair for the first time. They grudgingly concede that Hockney can draw but he (chorus) CAN’T PAINT.
*God’s Own Country
NB All names have been changed in case there are individuals who are shy about having their pearls of wisdom immortalised
Life (2)
.
Yes I know, I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about schizophrenia.
Why?
I know at least four people who’ve got that label. And there but for the grace of god…
Can’t many of us recall a moment in our life experienced with such acute sensation (emotional pain, I mean) – possibly manifesting in some moments of bizarre or extreme behaviour – that we might have been labelled ‘psychotic’?
Actually I can’t think of one I’ve had myself, but that might be because I’m just not sensitive.
I’m interested in how differing cultural settings may affect recovery rates. Here’s my ROUGH PARAPHRASE of a booklet by an interesting northern England-based clinical psychologist, Rufus May :
In Western countries neuroleptics (anti-psychotic drugs) are routinely used, although it is often stated that only about a third of people diagnosed with schizophrenia benefit from these, while a third may recover anyway, and a third do not benefit at all from the drugs. As in, the latter third do not recover, and are not going to. So why stuff em with drugs…. In other words, in real terms the use of the drugs has not correlated with better outcomes. Studies undertaken by the World Health Organisation show that in countries where neuroleptics are not used to the same extent, equivalent or even better outcomes are achieved.
Do good outcomes partially depend, anyway, on personality? I mean, the will-power of the sufferer?
The Somalian friend I referred to above – a fellow-writer/creative person – got put away in London’s (in)famous Maudsley Hospital with a schizophrenia diagnosis and was given those anti-psychotic drugs that make you put on massive amounts of weight. Somehow Diriye managed to get himself out of there and move on and recover. Read his excellent article here and check out his book of short stories, Fairytales for Lost Children, here.
By the way, it really was my birthday party. Here is my editor/manager Sue Vickerman (who is one year older than me) holding my cake.
Love
Secret Lover was unable, obviously, being secret, to attend my party. All my socializing is as a singleton.
Living alone
Yippee – I have signed a contract for a term’s modelling at a local fee-paying school to which I can cycle in twenty minutes. Two hours per week. A Good Hourly Rate. I have food money for the autumn! (-:
This week’s pic: Keith Hanselman
OLD COMMENTS
These were the 42 Responses from the original blog. They have been copied here to the newly revised website. It is possible to add further comments below
- Suki’s Chief Advisor on Detective Fiction says:
Curing mental illness by driving out spirits can lead to some very nasty stuff indeed – think of the Victoria Climbie case. The combination of Christianity and traditional religion in Africa (and elsewhere, no doubt) is really interesting, not to say scary.
Mike says I can post some comments he emailed to me. See below. Mike, a retired counsellor, was until recently working in the mental health system in Northern Uganda. Suki
Whether or not African culture deals better with psychosis than the western model is an open question. I would, however put it at 50/50 and it is going to be the default position [in Uganda] sooner rather than later [due to the drug-providing NGOs withdrawing]. Many patients that had violent/demonstrative or wandering conditions were just given the ‘mad’ label. Many patients never came to health centres. Some were just tied in their homes to minimise their effect on others or damage to themselves. A lot of psychiatric clinical officer time and drugs were spent on epilepsy.
I was not aware of any comparative studies between drug treatment and traditional/herbal practices. There is a school of thought that the ‘placebo’ effect is very important – if clients used traditional medicine or spiritual/witchcraft/ritual practices, trusted them and had faith that they would help, then maybe they would. I am sure I read somewhere that in Holland or Germany 55% of all tablets are placebo. About 60% of patients coming to health centres with mental health problems also visit traditional healers.
At the end of the day, the use of mental health drugs is not affordable or sustainable. The dependence culture [on NGOs bringing in drugs] will have to change because NGOs are leaving Northern Uganda bearing in mind that it is post-conflict…
I hope that future research will seek community solutions… [which] will have to encompass non-damaging rituals and culturally acceptable traditional practices. Many NGOs provided psycho-social services – one even used western-based psychotherapy. But they only touched the tip of a huge ice-berg.
I’ve previously given my opinion about art and magic, and the artist and African witchcraft discourses. That was punting down the river compared to this wide open sea of cultural understandings of insanity.
I think the main, striking difference between ‘Western medicine’ (WM) and non-Western and/or pre-modern systems of medicine (‘Indigenous medicine’ (IM) is that WM has more potent drugs that affect the body that can assist in helping ‘heal’ the mind, bringing the patient to a cooperative and/or normative set of behaviours. I think it’s a question of the tools in the toolbox, and the real question is how you use those tools and why.
It’s appropriateness is key: I mean, you can clean your ears out with a screwdriver; paintbrushes make useful tea stirrers; dilute fairy liquid makes a refreshing, albeit accidental, summer drink; and rusty stanley knife blades can pop your spots a treat – And I’m still here! Botching and improvising was usefully described by Levi-Strauss as bricolage. And if anyone wants to be a guinea pig for some interesting alchemical experiments I have in mind, I’d love to hear from you (just not in the ear perforated from last time I ran out of Qtips).
So don’t knock the nganda’s (witchdoctor’s) solutions! They might just work… in a roundabout way… possibly…
Oh, Senex has problems with insomnia and low spirits, but that’s natural if you’re haunted by a lamia…
Thanks to my Detective Fiction Advisor and Mike W and Nic for these comments. Re: ‘traditional’ healing methods, I am reminded of a public exorcism of evil spirits I attended in a remote hut on the Deccan Plateau (Maharashtra, India) on a hot night about twentyfive years ago. It almost had a festival feel – whole village crammed into a hut; sweets served. A travelling holy woman had been called in to exorcise three young men whose ‘evil spirits’, as I understood it, were manifested in their alcoholism/unemployment/wife-beating. They were sort of being called to repent of the error of their ways. I won’t go on, but they ended up in trance states then jibbering on the floor (reminiscent of charismatic Christians…).
I suppose that exorcism in this case was a ‘community solution’ to a behavioural rather than a mental health problem. It seemed like a good idea. But the Victoria Climbie case shows – well, obviously the driving out of evil spirits can be a murderously bad idea.
Sorry to hear by the way Nic that your chap Senex is sleepless and depressed.
Senex says thanks for your concern, but he’s not sure that it’s getting any better. :0
Getting worse minute by minute…
God this week’s blog is getting a bit too erudite/ manic depressive, isn’t it! I’m going to make my next 4-week topic light-hearted and funny. Hasn’t anyone been offended by the Wise Men of Dean Clough’s sexist comments? At that group’s Private View (South Square Gallery) last night, I met someone – a Feminist Man – who was. BLOG ABOUT IT please. Or let’s have more dog pictures. Doggy readers please come forward! Woof woof!
Shut up Suki. You are so superficial.
Thank you for that contribution Sue Vickerman. Stop hiding behind ‘Admin’.
I would have revelled in the company of those Wise Men of Dean Clough. Although finding sexist comments absolutely abhorrent I much prefer them to Tracey Emin’s “art” – and as they appear to have been slamming it rather nicely I’d have been high as a kite.
I’d have differed about her looks though as I’ve always thought her striking – as no doubt did Charles Saatchi.
Ooh, Lois – d’you think that’s how women get on as artists – they have to look good?
So what does Jenny Saville look like?
Is it like that in the USA? Is this a universal phenomenon?
It’s indisputably the case that female classical musicians these days are marketed on their looks.
(re: women artists having to ‘look good’ to be successful)
Ouch!
… and historians, and physicists, and so on. I believe Government Ministers are attempting to clone dynamic, for which connote sexy, civil servants. We live in a plastic, presentational age, with people desperate to sell and thus look to a the glamour of the thing, not its substance.
When ‘Goblin’ becomes sexy, then I might have a slim chance…
Anyway, Senex is off to find a solution to his problems… (final post I promise)
Please do not worry that you look like a goblin, Nic. Goblins are sexy. the actor Jack Nicolson looks like a goblin and yet is a sex symbol.
(This is the Somalian friend mentioned in my post, who had the Maudsley Hospital Experience – SUKI)
Dear Suki
I love the blog. It’s engaging, intelligent and beautifully put together.
I wanted to share an image with you. It’s called ‘The Blue Queen’ and I did it when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder two years ago. At the time, I was spinning in a completely self-destructive, self-sabotaging cycle and I felt like a hamster with it’s legs caught in a wheel going at full throttle.
So I returned to The Centre. I call this place The Centre even though it exists only within my own mind. It’s a destination that requires a great deal of psychic travel and it requires graft to get there. But once you arrive at The Centre, there is a quietening down. One’s interior life starts moving at a very languid pace. You become less aware of your physical actions and morph into a spirit within your own body.
For me, making art has that quality. When I’m painting, my subconscious kicks into gear but there is no logic, there is no planning and there are never any consequences.
‘The Blue Queen’ is my attempt to manage that manic energy and the more obsessive I became with the etching of details, the more the rush amplified itself. It was like sex on speed: fast, painful, joyful and fulfilling. It’s a painting about survival turned into the kind of decorative art that wouldn’t be out of place in a living room or hallway. It’s art, not as therapy, but as pain distilled and there’s a thrill to that.
Much love, Dxx
Thankyou so much for this Diriye – for the compliments re this site (it is Website Genius Martin Hanavy who has done the ‘beautifully putting together’), and for sharing your experience.
Readers – see the links below to get a flavour of what Diriye does with his art, modelling, writing and recordings.
http://www.diriyeosman.com
http://www.saatchionline.com/thegoddesscomplex
http://www.soundcloud.com/diriyeosman
…Sexy as in the power to attract fame, fortune, and influence. ‘Coz I am very happy with my very special lady goblin.
Hi Suki,
This is all incredibly interesting, particularly the discussion of the relationship between mental health ‘issues’ and creativity, on the one hand, and with spirituality/religion (which of course are not the same thing) on the other. I particularly appreciated some observations by your mental health professional friend, as paraphrased in Blog Number 8. These pointed out the high instance of eating disorders in monastic women, and also highlighted the link between eating problems and former childhood abuse. According to this observation eating disorders manifest as a form of mental illness, if not strictly or necessarily a symptom of psychosis, and one which occurs disproportionately in specifically religious forms of life. Wow ..
What I think I’d like to add here are simply some further, but related observations of my own. Having spent many years in an exceptionally focussed/closed and intense form of religious community, I can say that , for all the grandeur of its vision and the extremity of its demands, the life did encourage states of mind that I think might well be considered ‘psychotic’ by a modern mental health professional. One need only look at the ecstatic and visionary experiences of the leading lights of many forms of religion (mine was Roman Catholic, so, think Teresa of Avila, and Bernadette of Lourdes, although Joseph Smith and Mohammed would be equally good examples) to see the close similarity of ‘visionary’ experiences with those generally classified as symptoms of psychosis. In fact, such manifestations appear, not just as ‘decoration’ on the face of the history of religion, but within its very fabric, at its foundations.
Look at St Paul on the Road to Damascus. It’s all there, the voice from heaven, the dazzling light, the special messages, secret insights, compelling mission, and the sense of utter disorientation. It’s there throughout all four of the canonical gospels (even more so in the wacky, so-called gnostic and apocryphal ones). Angelic visitations, out-of-body experiences, transfiguration, resurrection .. even bodily ascension (levitation). As you know, it’s a consistent development of the biblical trend known as Apocalyptic .. which is otherworldly, paranormal, and transcendent by its very nature. These are altered states of consciousness without (as far as we know) LSD. Or mushrooms. It’s all attributed to an invisible entity known as the Spirit. I think many of us know what it ‘feels like’ .. but the Church has made it official, has even tried to own, or control it. When the Church approves it, it is indeed seen as a mark of specialness, and its subjects often canonised. When it doesn’t, individuals are at best silenced, at worst locked away (or, for medievals, burned at the stake. Remember Joan of Arc).
Anyway, it seems that the original biblical trend took shape and developed under conditions of national crisis, and seems to have done so because it offered a strong appeal to those in extreme conditions, those undergoing life-threatening, or identity-shattering difficulties, for example. After all, Apocalyptic offers forms of extra-terrestrial hope and deliverance that can neither be rationally proven nor disproved, and therefore cannot be gainsaid; they have to be taken on trust. Trust and vulnerability seem to be central here. We reach out in hope, and trust, don’t we, when we have no other sources of hope on which to rely. Crisis, moving to spiritualized forms of ‘irrational’ trust, was therefore the seed-bed out of which biblical visionary experience, and then early Christianity, grew.
The question is, is this scary? Does it undermine religious claims? Are Dawkins and the scientific materialists just right, end of story? Given the link between trauma, crisis, vulnerability, ‘irrational’ (or ‘spiritual’) hope, and intense experiences of an extraordinary or paranormal kind, is the visionary mystic merely psychotic (ie. ‘ill’ and in need of a cure) or is the psychotic a specially enlightened individual, privileged through talent or suffering, to speak for humankind, whether as prophet or artist? Or put another way, is the mystical tradition within religion (all religions) inherently suspect, and to be dismissed as loony and deceptive, because of the close similarity of its symptoms to those of psychosis? Or is there a third and more positive way to understand it (and does ecclesiastical authority need to play a role here)?
I could go on .. and I know it’s heavy (sorry) and has nothing to do with Africa, or Government Ministers. But I hope it addresses your Blog Heading (Intense Experience ..) and offers some relevant thoughts to the mix. One thing I would say, and the statistics are shocking, is that the most intense forms of religious community experience (silent, authoritarian, isolated, enclosed) DO present a strikingly high proportion of individuals with diagnosed mental ‘conditions’. Amongst these are known cases of bipolar disorder, anorexia, schizophrenia, psychotic breakdown, depression, self harm, and so on. Certainly in female communities, which are all I can speak for. In my experience this trend afflicts those born after, say 1960, far more then it does the older ones, for whom a highly disciplined and self-sacrificial way of life maybe more consistent with the way they were brought up. War austerity and food rationing perhaps make quite a good preparation for some forms of monastic life! But, it still does not answer the question ‘spiritual or psychotic’.
The conventional diagnoses of the medical profession in 21st Century Britain rest on very different foundations, and have very norms and models of ‘health’ from, say, medieval Europe, let alone the ancient near-East. Empirical scientific method has replaced the extravagance of faith. At least, over here in the technologically advanced West, that is. Maybe Africa does, after all, have more in common with the early Jesus movement. But I’m still trying to work out whether the ‘cleansing of the doors of perception’ is something that can be experienced, or even attempted, without the releasing of a thousand demons. Or whether it is the duty of every ‘seeker after truth’. Is the creative / spiritual psyche a Pandora’s box, or is it a symphony of angels? Why do some of us yearn for this ‘cleansing’ .. and others shy away from, and protect themselves against it?
Kate – your information about the prevalence of mental health problems among contemporary contemplative monastics – female ones – is shocking.
As a cynic, I would have expected this to be the case – I mean, why else would anyone of – at least – my peers and younger choose that life ( – as you say, older female monastics, on the other hand, came from a very different world in various senses: immediately post-war, etc) unless they’d got some sort of ‘Issue’?
But I don’t actually respect my own cynicism, because it is so harsh and insensitive of me. I think my dismissiveness of the religious life as ‘having a screw loose’ is sour and unpleasant.
And yet you are here verifying some of my most extreme prejudices.
I must confess to feeling well-represented by the philosopher Stephen Law, whose blog link is: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/religious-experience-and-karen.html
You sent me this link, Kate, despite the fact that you don’t like him for being “dismissive of spiritual life”.
As a person who likes to go round declaring I don’t have a spiritual bone in my body, I feel very much in tune with the post Stephen Law has recently put up on his site (8 July 2012) in which he unpacks so-called ‘spiritual experience’ and shoots down that ex-nun Karen Armstrong’s belief (expressed in her book ‘The Case For God’) in the experience of what she terms ‘indescribable transcendence’.
Just another ‘belief’, requiring a leap of faith.
But here’s Inconsistent Me: I do use that word ‘spiritual’ sometimes. Perhaps lazily. I have for example said that life-modelling has a spiritual dimension. What is it that I was really referring to? I suppose just that there are, or at least can be, relationships evolving in the life room that are not superficial, mechanical ones but are personal, or intimate – even if non-verbal – interractions.
Feelings and emotions and interconnections and mutual understanding and empathy and the creative drive – the depth of life – need not be named as anything other (greater) than that noun ‘depth’. Adjective ‘spiritual’.
The naming of these – our most intense – experiences as being ‘divine’; coming from somewhere else; a separate power; a Being with which one has a relationship, possibly even a sub-dom one (worship of that Being, etc)… Isn’t the correct term for that ‘psychosis’?
P.S. Stephen Law has written a book called ‘Believing Bullshit’.
More on the looks issue.
I would say that if you don’t have the talent or skill to create beautiful, soul-grabbing art in spite of your art college education & training which, after taking into account post-graduate stuff, would have cost the state the same as training a brain surgeon, and which would have kept you in a highly sheltered, nurturing and pleasing environment which other mortals could only dream of, until roughly the age of 25… then DO CONCEPTUAL – such as shock and awe; or tacky and grubby; or accidental and thought-provoking; or huge and laboured necessitating ladders; or piss-take. They are all a DARN SIGHT EASIER than making something beautiful.
And if you’re cute, and a posturing rebel, an advertising baron will sniff you out and see you right, or you’ll win Turner Prizes and commendations from the Tate/s. And then eventually you can go on to get an RA appointment like Professor of Drawing, very likely displacing someone with real talent, self-taught and holding down a day job completely divorced from art – though, horror of horrors, maybe not quite so cute.
(However, I have heard that the Art Establishment actually discriminates against self-taught artists, cute or not, when it can get away with it, e.g. denying entry of their work at certain exhibitions.)
To answer your questions, Jenny Saville, I’ve been told, is an edgy-looking beauty – nothing like the monstrous hulks she paints.
I’m ex-Canadian not American and don’t know their art scene, but I dare say they are looks-freaks too.
Thanks for this Emin critique Lois. I personally am well disposed towards Tracey because she makes me feel better about what my bed sometimes gets like.
It seems that it is OK to criticise Tracey Emin and her art production which is sometimes striking, sometimes more safe. If I were drawing lettering on an etching I would want the”E” to come out ‘the right way round’, but that is just my own preference/difference and maybe Tracey Emin’s mirror text means otherness.
Regarding views on female artists:
I like Griselda Pollock’s passionate response [read it HERE ] to Georg Baselitz’ dismissal of female painters in February this year.
Thanks Janey –
have just pulled out a few choice quotations from Griselda in that article to which you give a link:
“The most boring of all arguments is that men are better than women. It’s self-evidently nonsense….”
“Baselitz says women don’t paint very well, with a few exceptions. Men don’t paint very well either, with a few exceptions.”
Re ‘spiritual or psychotic?’
Simple answer, Suki – we can be both, or neither, or either. And the same applies to creativity.
i once saw a ‘mad’ nun whose mother superior had no hesitation in committing her to a psychiatric clinic, unimpressed by the visions etc. but no reason to think she was not also a good person.
God, Gerard. Mad nuns. Sounds like the subject-matter of a film noir. Or Monty Python.
(Introducing Gerard. Retired psychologist and psychotherapist)
the nun experience was many many years ago in the last century.
i am not yet fully retired.
Bach’s life was mundane but he was certainly angelically creative and spiritual. God’s messenger if ever there was one.
P.S.
… though she did make sexual advances to me in the padded cell in which I saw her. Fortunately my supervisor looked through the door peep-hole and rescued me. But then again other women have made advances who were not necessarily spiritual, psychotic or creative, ( though they may have been) just ladies of good taste. x.
Dear Suki
Kate’s response – how interesting. I have known a few individuals diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’ who have been amazingly creative. Their periodic ‘breakdowns’ seem to come at the point of exhaustion and may therefore be a kind a defence mechanism that intervenes.
Kate’s words are very insightful and have enabled me to look on African exorcism in a rather more sympathetic way – as very much a community rather than individual thing – but also fraught with danger. David Snowden in a study of Notre Dame nuns shows that the incidence of ‘dementia’ appears to be rather lower within communities of sisters and this is probably attributable to their ordered community life. Interestingly I recently attended a workshop in Leeds University which dealt largely with the apocalyptic side of the gospels and Kate is quite right – it becomes most manifest in exteme times. This can be transposed into individuals’ lives.
Very interesting first point: I’ve been working in a drop-in centre, and one crack-user is anorexic when she’s ‘normal’ but when she’s overwhelmed she is brought to us by her friends, and she becomes ravenous. to my lay eye, it doesn’t seem to be bingeing; there doesn’t seem to be any integral self-hatred and anger when she eats, but a very childlike dependency (I’ve actually spoon-fed her – very strange, at her insistence, and under supervision).
I know a fair bit about the latest Kindoki case. May I suggest being a tad sympathetic towards kindoki in the DRC context, but with-holding such sympathy re: the main instigator in the London case? This case was off the scale in terms of the practice.
Hi Albert,
I think I, too, have read a study pointing out that senile dementia, and other age-related conditions are significantly reduced in the case of nuns. I think this was seen as a beneficial side-effect of the ordered lives they typically lead. But, as far as I understood it, this kind of dementia is not a form of mental illness (as in mental disturbance, emotional trauma, or brain chemical imbalance) but rather just a result of aging. Maybe factors such as routine, low toxin consumption (alcohol , nicotine, etc!) and a diet of wholesome simple foods are contributing factors to increased longevity and a healthier old age in religious women. Low stress, and predictability of lifestyle (routine) must also feature here. So, dementia would not, as I understand it, actually classify as a mental illness, when defined as a product of personal trauma, etc. Does that make sense?
Hi Albert – yes, my earlier posts on this topic ask the Big Question – whether there is this link between creativity & having psychotic tendencies…
Maybe there is… But then again, I feel that one of my new discoveries in life – especially since immersion in the nether-world of the life-drawing groups that seem to exist in practically every town and village in the land – is this fact that creativity is in EVERYBODY…
Society/ our education system does not encourage it enough…
Am glad to find, Albert, there is at least one of my clergy friends (Albert is a retired Methodist minister) whom I have not alienated by my earlier cynical comments re ‘spiritual experience’ (its non-existence)… Or maybe you didn’t notice those. Other of my clergy friends are silent… but that on the other hand is most likely because they simply do not number among the three punters and a dog who are my regular readership.
My wonderful son Tom has been locked up in the system for the best part of the last ten years or so. It is called “detained under the Mental Health Act”. At times he has said he has been locked up for his religious beliefs. That isn’t altogether true – mostly he has been locked up to keep him safe. I’ve visited him this evening – distraught at having his leave cancelled again and made worse through being locked up with other mad people.
He took me to one side confidentially only a day or two after he was first detained over ten years ago and said, “Dad, if someone was really ill you wouldn’t put them in somewhere like this.” As the years have gone by we have grown to understand the truth in what he said then.
I repeated it to a nurse on his ward today. I thought she might look puzzled but she understood straight away.
I am too tired to search for links to the research now but there is evidence that people diagnosed with schizophrenia outside of the “developed world” have better rates of recovery. That might be because their treatment is not dictated by the economy of the drugs companies. It might be that the support of extended family systems is more effective. I don’t know. I do know however that Tom has been pumped full of drugs for more than twelve years that have harmed him – yet he is in despair that he continues to be detained for his own safety.
Tom denies that he is ill. He is angry at his diagnosis of “paranoid schizophrenia”. He told me tonight how he worries at the diagnosis in case it means it is like cancer and he will always be mad.
He denies the diagnosis (which is meaningless anyway) and claims instead that he has had a Kundalini experience. (Do Google ‘Kundalini’.) Kundalini is a state that many mystics search for. It is often said that it can be mistaken for schizophrenia. Yet people can spend years and years in meditation and other disciplines to try to achieve this state. In fact the descriptions of ‘kundalini’ and ‘schizophrenia’ are almost identical and it turns into semantics – except for how people respond to it.
So Tom believes he is misdiagnosed and has been detained because of his religious beliefs.
In the sixties many hippies discovered a shortcut to Kundalini that missed out on the hard work. LSD and other psychotropic drugs worked even better. Perhaps it was some bad acid or too strong skunk that contributed to Tom and a number of his friends developing severe mental distress. Meanwhile others continue with strict lifestyle disciplines to achieve the same state.
Kate describes St Paul and others having experiences that seem very like psychotic experiences. Are not the experiences of most mystics of whatever faith so very like the experiences of those who today are diagnosed with schizophrenia? Then – and today in other parts of the world – they were regarded as special or holy, They were revered and cared for. Now we lock them away and people are fearful of them even though they are mostly a danger to themselves.
By coincidence my MA dissertation many years ago was on religious experience and knowledge of the existence of God. I have many more paragraphs to add to it now.
I wonder if those who seek the peace of convents and abbeys are searching for mystical experiences or escaping from them.
Mystics in the past and now would use all sorts of techniques to try to achieve states of “ecstasy”. Fasting; repetition of phrases, words or prayers; self flagellation; isolation; sensual deprivation; meditation. And of course now the shortcut of drugs. Perhaps then it is understandable that some who achieve such states all on their own do not want to be medicated and “cured”. Sometimes it is more fun to be “ill”. It is hard work trying to be what others perceive as “normal”.
I doubt Suki is “normal”. I doubt that I am. Are you?
Tom enjoys art and music and finds them useful as a way of expressing himself and communicating. I hope you like his fish picture that I post here.
There is so much that is easily condemnable about this country’s treatment of people suffering from psychoses/ schizophrenia. What makes you, Michael, and apparently many others particularly angry and desperate is the inappropriate or possibly even cavalier use of drugs, due – as some will have it – to evil capitalist market forces coming into play, with the big drug companies cynically pedalling their wares without regard for how they are being used.
But there’s no point setting up some eutopian fantasy about how good it can be in other contexts. In Africa (see Michael Watson’s earlier response to this post) the treatment for madness is: your family tethers you to a stake.
You mention a kind nurse, Michael, who is working with your son; a person with training; a person who has chosen to work in the field of mental health motivated by – what else? – it must be human compassion. SURELY THIS SITUATION, HERE IN THE UK (and maybe this is the most desolate thing to acknowledge) IS AS GOOD AS IT GETS…?
Here, we at least have the freedom to actively engage with ‘The System’, and can campaign for change, and can effect change. In tomorrow’s post (no.12) I am going to write more about the international movement called Soteria, which promotes psychiatrist the late Loren Mosher’s ideas about alternative ways of looking after people with the schizophrenia diagnosis. There are already possibilities evolving right here in Bradford for alternative care situations influenced by these ideas. Which is cause for huge optimism. It’s so brilliant to have this prospect. Compared to being tethered to a stake.
Re ‘Kundalini Awakening’: that’s where this snake that is asleep in your lower chakra (the one that’s roughly in your bowels I think) wakes up and suddenly zooms up your back-bone and you achieve enlightenment. Isn’t it? No, Tom’s not mad, he’s just having a Kundalini Awakening.
I know that you and I, Michael, and maybe others reading this, agree that people who have Kundalini Awakenings and other extreme psychological experiences – which may or may not be deemed ‘spiritual’ ones; experiences anyway that affect their judgement and abilities to function and look after themselves – such people need taking care of by the rest of us. If your child were my child, I would be SO DAUNTED. I don’t know how I would cope. I, for one, am glad there is a care system in place, as I think it might be just too hard to do it by onesself or purely within one’s family. You might end up needing the stake – just so you can have a few minutes’ rest.
I agree Michael that there is no ‘normal’. Humans are SO FRAGILE it’s frightening. The brain is so unknown but seems to be so delicately set up. One bash can utterly mess it up. Part of my personal endeavour to stay sane is my refusal to interpret any of my own psychological experiences in a religious context, or even to describe my experiences using the terminology of spirituality. I keep my feet on the ground. Earthed.
Your Tom’s painting is lovely. Intriguing. It occurs to me that I subconsciously assume drawings/ paintings to be illustrative of the artist’s mind. Don’t we automatically look on a canvas for something of the artist? We know whether we like them, or identify with them, or are turned on by them, or are unmoved by them.
To return to ‘indescribable transcendence’ .. I do actually like Karen Armstrong, and find her a very intelligent and sensitive writer on religion. A lot of what she says rings true for me. That doesn’t mean I ‘don’t like’ Stephen Law (sorry Suki .. I think you are mis-quoting me there!) What I have said about Stephen is that he is a good debater and organises some really stimulating discussions, often on topics surrounding philosophy of religion. I take my students to hear him, and get them involved in these debates, too. The fact that he has what I called an ‘anti-spiritual bias’ doesn’t mean I don’t actually like him (he’s a cool guy), but more that he presents intellectual challenges that are simultaneously difficult and healthy, ones that I know it is good for me to face, uncomfortable or not.
Have JUST finished Jeanette Winterson’s new bio, ‘Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?’, which I’ve read end to end over the past two days! As ever she is compelling, wonderful. Towards the end of the book she explodes the ‘either/or’ approach to our understanding of experience, or of ourselves, highlighting the complex, sometimes ambiguous or contradictory nature of reality. She says ‘I had styled myself as the Lone Ranger not Lassie. What I had to understand is that you can be a loner AND want to be claimed. Life isn’t this thing or that thing .. the boring old binary oppositions .. it’s both, held in balance’. And that complexity seems borne out by the fact that, for all her vehement critique of the structures of religion, she can say that she still reads ‘Mind Body Spirit stuff’ because ‘if you are raised on the Bible you don’t just walk away, whatever anybody says’ . That, anyway, is her experience.
The concepts of spirit and soul may appeal deeply to us at an intuitive level .. even when we are debating, and enjoying debating with the likes of Stephen Law. The awareness of something perceived as ‘indescribable transcendence’ doesn’t just go away once you’ve examined all the arguments .. necessarily. We are more complex (and, as contingent and vulnerable beings) contradictory than that! As you say, Suki, we can be inconsistent, or at least complex and multi-layered, and maybe that’s part of the human package. Giving objective, external labels (such as God, an angel or a revelation) to our subjective experiences (ineffable) may be defined as psychotic .. I’m not sure, as I don’t know the precise definition of the latter .. and if that is the case we can safely dismiss thousands of years of religious activity as a form of dysfunction. But, isn’t that throwing the baby out with the bath water?
Just following on (lamely) after Kate’s use of the baby / bathwater analogy: don’t judge motherhood by the fortunes of Mothercare, ie. please don’t judge faith by the institutions that claim to contain it. Having embraced my inner goblin, I’m only too grateful for a drop of forgiveness and a crumb of comfort, even if I find idiopathic imagery such as ‘creeping into the womb of God’ very,very helpful. I appreciate that others find this odd, even insulting to their own beliefs (so I tend to keep a lot to myself nowadays). It is quite wonderful that there are people around who feel such a good ting that they feel a compulsion to share it: shame I don’t often feel it, and don’t want to be working through their gift’s premises again for the umpteenth time.
Conversely, outsiders can deconstruct, say, why I love my wife – we have so much in common, share so much (20 plus years of marriage), I’m dependent on her as she forges on with her career, and she needs me to cook etc for her – but no-one really understands my experience in its totality, eg, that my goblin heart melts to mush on seeing her brush her hair, by holding her hand down Putney Hill in the morning, her enigmatic grin. Mind you, I’m not asking other people to accept what I have to accept by being married to her: no alcohol, practically constant companionship, her dislike of jigsaws and her physical intolerance of eggs (so I don’t cook them).
I’d be interested to know what Stephen Law doesn’t regard as ‘bullshit’; and his givens for what is ‘bullshit’ over what is plausible but indemonstrable.
Thanks Kate and Nick for these – and sorry Kate for slapdashly misquoting you.
I, too, am a loner who contradictorily wants to be claimed (great Jeanette Winterson quote, Kate!).
I stand hard and fast against the jargon of spiritual life, words like transcendence, soul, revelation, etc etc etc. I dig in my heels at anyone’s insistence that our lives are somehow mysteriously more than the sum of their parts. Life – just the sheer daily living of life – is rich and full and great and deep. I reject all assertions that there is something else to be had. Something better. We should be happy with what we’ve got. This is it. As good as it gets.
Yet as Jeanette says, life isn’t this thing or that thing… the boring old binary oppositions… When I say I’m happy, yet in the next breath am wanting more, my contradictoriness is typical (for I am a total pleb) of the behaviour of millions. I want, I want, I want. I would for example love to be loved like Nick’s wife.
But this could not possibly happen for me. Just for starters I do not brush my hair.
Am belatedly catching up with this intriguing discussion after a camping holiday in the Dales. I have two close, female relatives, who have experienced, and are still experiencing psychotic / “schizophrenic” states. I have much more faith in talking therapies than medication, but recognise that drugs may provide some short term relief. One of my female relatives has got stuck with drugs for 25 years. She is living a stable, fairly content, but under-achieving life, I would say.
I was brought up as a practical, coping one in a large family, where others were considered artistic, so I can be a bit cynical about the need to protect/foster the artistic, sensitive (tending towards psychotic) personality. But I realise it’s not something to be glib about – I really don’t know what it would be like to cope with psychosis. I’ve had my own journey of reclaiming sensitive, artistic sides, as well as realising that my practical, coping sides stand me in good stead in society as it is.
As part of that journey, I did several therapy groups at the Pellin Centre in S London. One of their basic tenets is about trying to increase the amount of time spent in the inbetween (stable) area, between the extreme moods / swings of a pendulum. I find this helpful to remember and work on. And perhaps this links in with communities of religious sisters benefitting from the stable routine of their lives (and suffering less from dementia.)
p.s. I notice that admin sometimes adds info about a person (e.g. is a retired Methodist minister). I’d query ethics of that a bit…does Admin first check out if person concerned is happy for extra info about them to be added? Just a thought…
Thanks for this response Fran – and I must of course address your criticism re the confidentiality issue even though there is much else to respond to here…
Suki and I are new to this blogging world and it really does take some getting used to. Suki didn’t check with Albert (Surname Not Given) whether he was ok with being potentially identifiable (by virtue of her contextualizing him by naming his profession) as the writer of one of the responses above. She did however check first with the two others who have responded to this current post, about whom she then proceeded to offer extra information.
‘Outing’ Albert as a Methodist minister (oops, done it again, am as bad as Suki) was an oversight. He might be WELL wazzed off with Suki; I don’t know. I suppose it didn’t occur to Suki to check with him, in his particular case, because she was not struck (in terms of his subject-matter) by any obvious reason for super-confidentiality.
I know how many hits this site gets and from whence in the world they generally come and frankly, although this thing is technically available to the entire developed world, I have a strong sense of its smallness and insignificance. I know that Suki’s nearest and dearest don’t read it. Most people she knows don’t read it, and she is convinced that if they do, they don’t really READ it… not with a view to finding out other people’s secrets… She assumes it is all skimmed a bit. Pictures looked at. And as for readers who Suki doesn’t personally know… well, they don’t know the people she knows who have added responses, so what does it matter?…
For my part, I think it’s easy to get irrationally anxious about putting words into the world. Who is really that interested in us, except us? If writing publically on the net (e.g. responding to this blog) is going to cause someone anxiety, it’s better if they just don’t do it. Or only do it in a setting over which they have absolute (though I don’t think it can be absolute) control of information, i.e. their own password-guarded website/blog.
I did delete a reference to someone in one of Suki’s posts (no name was given, but they still got anxious) because they asked me to. This has made me take more care with monitoring Suki’s words. I know she doesn’t wilfully wish to cause anyone anxiety. Suki herself is thankfully immune to that kind of anxiety. She once came out as a lesbian in an article she wrote in the Saturday Guardian newspaper and she told me that nobody noticed, or if they did they couldn’t care less.
Because of Suki’s own experiences of putting a lot of words – often very personal ones – out into the world (her poetry, her novel, her articles) – all to no detrimental effect to herself, it therefore has never struck her, when she writes stuff, that it could make anyone else anxious.
But she is definitely a bit short on ‘empathy’ and always has been.
Tom’s fish picture is terrific. All seemingly effortless strokes dashed off with blushes of colour to produce a creature so convincingly smooth and predatory, slipping its way through deep, deafening water.
I derive a lot of sensation from this picture. In other words, it does what art should do.
I just took another look at Tom’s fish picture, Lois [see above]. It is astonishing. Creativity is innate to the human species – I believe this. And I think some people never manage to access their creativity / express themselves, which is a shame. Maybe some only manage to be creative when they have had a nervous break-down / gone crazy.
The below is Janey’s response to SUKI’S NOTICEBOARD on PAGE 11 of Suki’s serialised autobiography A SMALL LIFE (scroll down below the text of the story). ADMIN
You ask us to compare and contrast life rooms of Jane Fielder and Chris Murray.
Why is music used? It is tricky. I love the sound of rain/shower water. The images are wonderful, and the montage. But the “Psycho” reference?
Chris, who ‘has a voice’, has a Beethoven treatment in his score. Gravitas. Phallic aconitums and Irises.
Cirrus Minor by Pink Floyd on both!
- Bel says:
Thank you Janey for commenting on the life rooms – and for “liking” the Chris Murray one on Vimeo. It is great to get a response.
Do you think the photos would work better with silence? I think Suki and I felt that it would add to the interest to accompany them with music and sounds – though we are not film makers or editors and are getting by with very basic free software. The original idea was to get the artists to choose the music to accompany theirs, but that has not always worked out.
We added the Hitchcock ‘Psycho’ reference as a bit of fun. It seemed so bizarre to be drawing Suki in the shower, and some of the photographs just lent themselves to it. Suki actually made me tone it down from my first edit!
I guess the use of music and sound also helps us to make the different Life Rooms distinct (see link on my home page to view all we’ve made so far). There is a danger they could begin to look the same. We look for a theme in each, where we can.
Using the Pink Floyd on both? I’ll have to give it a try!!
I’ve had a quick look back at your Vimeo page, Janey. I do like the videos you have posted there – especially A to D.
Thanks for your response, Bel. I love Janey’s A to D video too.
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11.‘ Intense experience’: spiritual or psychotic? — No Comments
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