Belief and Mental Health

[Tao_Equus]

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
'T is the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, -- you're straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Emily Dickinson.

[Prober]

Oooh, I like that! (Love E D in general)

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by dauer

I think to a huge extent there's a relationship. If you look at for example the shamans and prophets of various religions, I think they probably would have been diagnosed in many cases as mentally ill by Western medicine. Of course in general I think the modern approach does more harm than good by labeling what is "normal" and labeling everything else "abnormal" instead of different.
And when you think about the types of experiences that religion can stimulate, that's not normal. It's abnormal. So I think that religion can also develop these latent tendencies on otherwise normal folks.
It's important imo to reclaim "thinking different." Not Manson different, but Ezekiel and maybe Elijah different. Elijah was a bit of a nut, but I think some of that may have also been due to cultural conditioning that glorified mass slaughter of the other. I really have no response to the whole Isaiah wandering around naked thing.

I hope it’s OK to be "different" or "abnormal" as long as our mental health is not detrimental to our own (or others) general well being and ability to function in life.

It seems to me that modern Western society itself is the root cause of much of the apparent increasing level of poor mental health.

s.

[ardenz]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

So, to what extent do you think beliefs affect our mental health or states of mind (and vice versa) ?

s.

Thanks for starting this thread Snoopy.

There are some interesting genetic studies being done, about possible links between schizophrenia and alcoholism. Recently I was asked while donating blood if I would take part in such a study (...as the control group - ??!!)

I can understand religious belief working as a grounding mechanism for people who are chaotic.. but then the same behavioural instincts, whether its a chemical imbalance or other, maybe trigger delusions.

On another mental health note: Buddhist mindfullness meditation, as an adjunct to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has been proven to be very effective for depression and much more. CBT and meditation being preferable to handing out pills.

"mindfullness meditation is a technique in which a person becomes intentionally aware of his or her thoughts and actions in the present moment, non-judgmentally" -wikipedia

"CBT is based on the idea that how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion), and how we act (behaviour) all interact together. Specifically, our thoughts influence our feelings and our behavior. Therefore, negative and unrealistic thoughts can cause us distress and result in problems."- wikipedia

So yes, I think our beliefs affect how we think, how we feel and act.
........
now where is that little blue pill

[earl]

I entered into college during the hey day of RD Laing and studied his thought. It seems that he and his followers have almost glamorized such severe mental illnesses as schizophrenia as the harbinger of mysticism and spiritual break-through. In 25 years+ work in mental health can't say I've ever known that to be the case. Am on-call and spent 2 hours in our local ER last night attending to some poor 18 y.o. in 4-point restraints with 6 people including police officers holding him down for over 2 hours in a severely combative, psychotic state while the ER doctor tried to sew up his face after he had thrust his head through the police car window in which he was being transported.

There have been good attempts made to carefully distinguish between symptoms of spiritual difficulties and actual mental illness in tranpersonal psychology with David Lukoff being the lead exponent. Here's his overview:

From Spiritual Emergency to Spiritual Problem: The Transpersonal Roots of the New DSM-IV Category

There is a big difference. earl

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

“Is there a relationship between Religious mania and madness?”

I think severe depression and mental breakdown's leave a person especially sensitive to relearning the world through a very different lense.

Coming out of a pretty heavy depression in 1996 I found myself opening up to whole new realms of spiritual understanding I'd either ignored or else been unable to deal with before.

I then withdraw from the world as a teetotal celibate vegan and just spent most of my time getting stoned and meditating on keeping in touch with this incredibly powerful spiritual vein I was able to tap into.

Following was a kind of Prophetic/Messianic experience, where you become so overwhelmed by the spiritual information you can draw in, that your relationship to the world can seem like it only makes sense if you're a prophet of some kind.

It really is a very self-centered perception, though, but I also think it's something that a person needs to spiritually grow through - I think there are huge spiritual pitfalls and dangers, such as claiming authority and titles, which I would argue are expressions of ego and self.

This is why although I may not necessarily agree with the positions of the Born Again's and modern-day Prophets I come across online, I can seriously sympathise with their positions because I've been through similar overwhelming experiences myself - but I also see them as immaturely developed because by putting them above people they break a fundamental spiritual rule that we are all equal.

I've been planning to write a whole series of posts sharing my own spiritual insights and perceptions in a column next to Bobby's, if nothing else because it may stimulate interesting discussion - but also because I don't put enough of myself emotionally into CR.

I guess in conclusion - spiritual experiences in themselves are extraordinary, therefore it can require an extraordinary state of mind to experience them. But an extraordinary state of mind does not in itself guarantee the spiritual experience.

2c.

[Tao_Equus]

Brian!!! Aint you meant to be up the Black Isle?

[Prober]

Wow!

Thanks Earl,

Fascinating and informative...

Regards,
Mark

[juantoo3]

Thanks to both Brian and Earl for their posts!

[Tao_Equus]

The balance between a rational approach and accepting the mystical relevance to the individual concerned is a very delicate one. I do agree that Mr laing does tend to over-grandise the situation of hallucinatory experience in the schizophrenic. But at least his efforts are /were a genuine attempt at empathic meeting on a non-judgemental playing field. Earl's link clearly shows the lack of relevance and respect that psychiatry has for the mystical safety-net that the sick tend to construct. Would be nice to see mainstream doctors utilising this sense of mysticism rather than a battery of zombie drugs.

TE

[Snoopy]

Hi to all!

I just wanted to say Thank You for all the interestesting posts (and maybe more to come...). The topic of this thread is something which interests me greatly so a special thanks to Ardenz to coming up with the suggestion. There's plenty of good reading and thoughtful stuff on here already so I'd better get delving...

Snoopy.

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Prober

I think you could relate this to the "reasonable / unreasonable faith" discussion.

I see what you mean. An atheist and a theist may both think the other being “unreasonable”; it’s unreasonable to believe in God when you can present no proof / it’s unreasonable not to believe in God when the proof is all around us. This I hope would not lead a psychiatrist to determine that one or the other has poor mental health on this basis. After all, there must be psychiatrists of all persuasions regarding the existence or otherwise of God / deities etc (I hope!). According to the World Health Organisation, mental disorder is “the existence of a clinically recognisable set of symptoms or behaviour associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal function.”

s.

[Francis king]

big long post this...

... I had a religious experience in 1994. In 1995 I was diagnosed with schizophrenia. I had gone to the doctors for anti-biotics, she struck up a conversation with me, and I'm all loved up and blissed out on my religious trip, lets not forget I'm only 19, and like flower power, and am dropping a lot of acid, and I tell her about where I am in life...

... the next thing I know my GP is telling me I have schizophrenia and she bases this diagnosis on my abnormal beliefs and positive symptoms- mainly that I could now hear the thoughts of others (aural hallucinations), I was having bizzare bodily sensations, like those in temporal lobe epilepsy, somato-sensory hallucinations, I was intensely spiritual and devoted my time to reading and talking about religion, yet as my new found faith was mainly "Indian" and therefore, alien to me as a white working class woman, this was evidence of my beliefs being abnormal for someone of my culture, and the icing on the cake was I believed in magic powers, and believed I had them myself, which was evidence of magical thinking. How preposterous that I should think I had always been a psychic, with my clairvoyant dreams. How insane I was to attribute these new found delusions to my religious experience, and she gave me some pills.

I tried the pills for about a month. I was heavily sedated and spent most of the time in bed. I also gained a lot of weight rapidly and became spotty and depressed. I was also having chest pains and was finding it difficult to breathe. (The pills have since been banned for causing heart problems, btw... )

anyway, against doctors orders I threw the pills away, packed a bag and went on the run, away from the CPN's who wanted to come to my house and inject me, far away from the shrinks who wanted to incarcerate me for thought-crime... I hadn't made a bomb to kill those secret satanic pensioners down the road with. I wasn't plotting to put sarin gas in the subway. I hadn't wanted to harm anyone- on the contrary! I felt it was somehow down to me to show the world this great thing I'd seen, even if I didnt know quite what it was yet. I wasn't painting the windows black and hiding behind the sofa. I wasn't acting inapropriately in Asda, yet because I was intensely religious and spent a lot of time studying texts and meditating and had these "delusions", I was told I was a schizophrenic and had a poor prognosis because it had all started so early, and I'd probably end my days a rambling incoherent mess dressed in rags and sleeping rough on the streets. Unless I took these pills.

Great news, when ur 19.

So, what happenned next I hear you ask? Can you imagine what happens when you leave a schizophrenic like me all alone, a person who is hearing things and seeing things and having these bizzare abnormal bodily sensations and these visions and dreams, a person without "support", either ppl, such as social workers, cpn's, psychiatrists, and also without medication, for ten years?

Well, I didn't run round the town naked. I didn't wear a bed sheet and proclaim myself to be the new messiah in the town square. I did not think my neighbours were poisoning me or that my cat was the anti-Christ. I did not take the tablets, I was not forcibly injected once a month to develop tardive dyskinesia, sulcal widening and hypertrophy of the amydgalae, and I was never an inpatient in a psychiatric facility, voluntarily or not.

Instead, I kept up my studies, I went on religious retreats, I danced with gopis in Vrndavana, I prostrated before the Buddha, i did zazen sessins, tantric visualisations and voluntary work, I had a social life, I was accepted by the communities I visited and met a few good "lamps for the path" along the way. I realised that actually, I wasn't the only one to experience such things, there were lots of us, and it was only as significant as the significance which was placed upon it.

Now, if I really am a schizophrenic and have such a poor prognosis, why hasn't it all gone wrong yet? How come I havent ended up in the hospital, dosed up to the eyeballs..? How come I'm not in jail? could it be because I'm not actually a schizophrenic at all?

surely they didn't get it wrong..?

Most cultures traditionally saw those with mental health problems in one of two ways- either u were possessed by devils/demons, or u were a holy being, touched (by God), a child of the Gods... this of course, if different from being a seer, or being a visionary, or a saint, and yet, at least this difference is recognised in religion... in psychiatry, there is no room for this difference, and yet it exists.

If you get your average saint or mystic from any faith, and we look at them via any ranking system for determining mental illness, most of them have enough symptoms to be diagnosed with a severe and enduring mental health problem. Yet they are not howling at the moon or covered in faeces. They are not randomly stabbing you in the head on the train. They are not hearing voices telling them to kill their children- unless they are Abraham... and he doesn't count, does he? as he never did the deed...

anyway...

As Rd Laing found with Mary Barnes, all the best intentions in the world are no good to a person with the type of florid and long lasting psychosis which is resulting in them almost starving to death and covering themselves and their enviroment in excrement, as did Mary Barnes. Schizophrenia exists. I know it exists because I work with people who have it. There is a world of difference between Mary Barnes and say, Moses, although if we gave Moses a shed load of anti-psychotics for 30 years then maybe he too would drool, and shake, and shuffle, and be incoherent at 55.

What Laing taught me was... the system becomes too reliant on controlling symptoms, instead of appreciating that these symptoms are relevant and need to be understood for what they are, worked with, rather than against, and he suggested to me that sometimes its better for everyone if you allow ppl some room to become more congruent in a real and lasting way, rather than suppress symptoms with drugs indefinately, the by-product of which is, unfortunately, lasting neurological changes of a type which eventually become more disabling than the initial "positive" or "first rank" symptoms.

I am anti-psychiatry, but only up to a point. Some people need more help than others, are more disabled by their symptoms than others, but the current conventional one-size-fits-all approach to psychiatry does the majority of ppl it supposedly serves a great disservice. In-patient psychiatric services in my country are abysmal, unsafe, dirty, overcrowded, noisy places, with little in the way of therapy apart from increased doses of medication, and it's all about control and containment, and rather than be symptom management in a therapeutic setting it's like being in any institution- a horrible place with a two-tier system where those with the badges know less than the people without them... there is no real treatment- and people, once diagnosed, are put on medication for often the rest of their lives, they develop diabetes, blood disorders, liver and kidney and heart problems, they develop neurological deficits, and they drift, from crisis to crisis with a whole raft of ineffective services given to them which they are supposed to show gratitude in receiving but which help little.

We deprive ppl of their civil liberties, we dose them up, we try to control their lives in every area, we infantilise them and then berate and patronise them because they cannot cope, because they forget how to, and they are forced into the sick-role and become stereotypical mental patients, which is scandalous, and lets face it, counter-productive.

...it made me laugh to read that u felt like a prophet, I Brian- so did I! Most of us do. Hopefully that bit wears off, though, and u realise u're not the only one...

...let's not forget that this "Irregular brain chemistry and over-active neural activity" tao equus, which you think is the cause of schizophrenia is only usually discovered post mortem OR discovered in those who are already taking anti-psychs, and may be a direct result of taking anti-psychotic medication rather than be a true symptom of the condition.

I spent some time in a therapeutic community, as an observer, to better appreciate the "millieux", and on speaking to the resident psychiatrist he gave me some stats- 70% of the ppl who stayed at this particular community benefitted from it because the community inside was a safer yet identical model of that outside- workers did not become decision makers, everyone did. People didn't get ministered to by nurses, and medicated- they worked alongside co-workers in the gardens, cooked meals together, coming to terms with their crises in their own fashion with real peer support, and they made it through to the other side. After their stay, they did not go on to go in and out of hospital- something had changed for them. They had realised their strengths, they had been a valued part of a community of equals, and they had changed.

...therapeutic communities work. They work in jails with lifers, they work with drug addicts, they work for people with mental health problems, they work for children with behavioural and emotional problems. They are humane and cost effective. Yet...

they're as rare as hen's teeth.

[earl]

I appreciate your personal post Francis. Yes it is very important for mental health folk, as that link to Lukoff's work intimates, to attempt to differentiate schizophrenia form other phenomena as you descirbe-you're obviously not schizophrenic. You mentioned that you may have had some psychic experiences. Admittedly, personal/cultural belief systems of practitioners do influence their presumptions about what is going on with someone and, if you deal with a professional that does not believe it's possible to have psychic experiences, than there is the possibility that that person is going to see such an experience as "pathology." That is what Lukoff meant re ensuring professionals receive training in various "exceptional" states of consciousness. But, then again, when 1 lives in a culture that is still largely of a reductionistic-materialistic view of Reality, odds are not good professionals will receive training re that. I know nothing re the mental health system of the UK and can really only speak of practices at our organization. However, even those professionals that are not open to considering the reality of these experiences are not going to suggest heavy duty meds simply for psychic experiences in and of themselves. Rather, as in the case of anti-psychotic meds, they may be suggested if the individual is experiencing debilitating "voices" of a more classic schizophrenic sort-i.e., persecutory and/or command hallucinations, as in the example I gave of the young fellow requiring 6 people and 4 sets of hand-cuffs to keep him and others safe from him- at least at that point in time he would require more than a therapeutic community. have a good one, earl

[Tao_Equus]

Francis,

What a wonderful post to read!!

You most evidently understand this subject to a far greater extent than I but from what little I do know I support the value of everything you say. And it mirrors my own views down to the last full stop.

Just 1 point tho, when you quote me

..let's not forget that this "Irregular brain chemistry and over-active neural activity" tao equus, which you think is the cause of schizophrenia is only usually discovered post mortem OR discovered in those who are already taking anti-psychs, and may be a direct result of taking anti-psychotic medication rather than be a true symptom of the condition.

I actually made a very incoherent post there and failed to mention temporal lobe epilepsy as I had intended. I have seen nothing to suggest that these two irregularities are to be found in the schizophrenic. Perhaps I should stick to what I know reasonably well rather than trying to dive between sites stealing statistics to make a post

TE