I had put together a post last week sometime about some things I was reading on schizophrenia. I had found a pretty good article about schizophrenia & shamanism, and their connections. Interesting stuff.

Anyway, I posted a passage from a person in the article who had undergone some schizophrenic experiences, and it was really interesting. Actually, let me go ahead and paste it in here again:

…words held too much meaning. I would listen to something as banal as a football match commentary, and to me it would be the story of the last battle of the gods. Everything was so vast, so deeply mythological. I’d see the arcane history of the world in everything, every little detail would hold another clue, and I was trying to hold all this information together, launched upon a mythic quest that terrified and excited me in ways far more real, far more vivid, than my life ever had up to that point.

Then I said something about how that sounded remarkably similar to what happens to me if I get really really fucked up on pot (I’ve never tried any psychedelics). I guess somebody out there in radio-listener-land got worried, because they proceeded to anonymously leave me a link to an article about a medical study linking marijuana use with an increased risk of schizophrenia.

Whoever left the comment with this article, thanks. It’s interesting, and illustrates for me the backwards thinking of conventional medicine in this area. The study comes out of Sweden, and was done on a test group of soldiers. Basically, the “finding” is that as pot use increases, so does the statistical incidence of schizophrenia. One asshole in this article even goes so far as to say that “marijuana use ‘predisposes’ children to schizophrenia later in life.”

What a crock of shit.

First of all, I’m more and more of the opinion that what people refer to fearfully as “schizophrenia” is in fact the normal healthy operating-style of the human mind. And that our modern fetishizing of a singular rational-logical mind is both delusory and dangerous. Actually, I have a great quote about this which I found recently, which I’d love to paste in again. It’s from James Hillman, one of the founders of so-called archetypal psychology. The quote is about multiple-personality disorder, but I think applies equally well to schizophrenia:

“Multiple personality is humanity in its natural condition. In other cultures these multiple personalities have names, locations, energies, functions, voices, angel and animal forms, and even theoretical formulations as different kinds of soul”.

Aside from James Hillman, you can find out more about the natural schizophrenia of the human mind through such notable psychological rebels as Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing (and for more on Laing, go here and here). These thinkers look towards an understanding of the human mind as a multi-faceted (ie, multi-faced) entity with a depth and variety to it far beyond the ego and rationality. I like to think of it as a polytheistic psychology, which recognizes that each individual consists of many smaller components, which sometimes work together and sometimes separately.

Szasz was also a major antagonist to modern psychiatric institutions. He believed that they were a tool of repression, and analogous to the Inquisition.

Here’s a good quote on Laing:

It is notable that Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but simply viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, madness could be a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveller could return from the journey with important insights, and may even have become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.

Anyway, yeah, my take on the “study” in the article which sparked this whole post in the first place is this: people smoke pot because it helps them realize and get in touch with the way their mind works. When people start tinkering with the machinery of their mind, using drugs, meditation, organized religion, or whatever, lots of things can start happening. You can start to become freed of artificial realities which are foisted upon you by others. You can also start to work towards creating a reality which will make you a much happier and healthier human being. Of course, by submerging yourself in areas such as the workings of the mind and views of reality, you can get lost. Especially if you’re scared, unprepared or have a bunch of problems going in in the first place. This, I think, is where they are getting their statistical information from. The connection being that when you smoke pot, you become like an astronaut or explorer in your mind, and the reality that it creates. The more you explore and the deeper you go, the easier it can be for things to get screwed up, or for you to temporarily lose your bearings, and have some sort of unpleasant “schizophrenic episode”.

This study, of course, doesn’t at all take into account any of the good and positive things that can happen to you from smoking pot. And why would it, right? They don’t want you to think about that. Especially when you could go and take a good old-fashioned designer drug, an anti-depressant - or better yet, an anti-psychotic - which would not only be much more profitable for the medical industry, but might also give you such wonderful side effects as becoming suicidal.

With that in mind, I’m gonna close with one of many great segments from an amazing article by columnist Mark Morford in his excellent article, Drug Up Your Teen Today! This just in: Prozac is a better treatment than talking to your kid. Isn’t life fabulous?

Actually, you know what? Fuck it. Just read the whole damn article.