Sometime in the next few months, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases will publish an article that describes an unusual experiment with newly diagnosed schizophrenics. This experiment randomly assigned young people with that diagnosis to one of two different forms of treatment. Some entered a psychiatric hospital where they received drugs to quell their psychotic ravings. The others went to a place known as Soteria House. They lived there for several months with a small group of other schizophrenics and a team of empathetic men and women (not medical doctors) who gave the disturbed individuals round-the-clock emotional support. The study tracked the research subjects for two years. According to the new report, the schizophrenics who lived in the therapeutic home and received no drugs fared better than the ones who received medication in the hospital. Furthermore, “The ones who did the best are those who would have been predicted to have the worst outcomes.”

Like Loren Mosher, John Weir Perry also set-up a therapeutic facility called Diabasis which was roughly modelled upon R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall. The overall medication rate at Soteria was about 50%; at Diabasis, it was roughly 15%. ““…85% of our clients (all diagnosed as severely schizophrenic) at the Diabasis center not only improved, with no medications, but most went on growing after leaving us.” — John Weir Perry

Here’s an excerpt from a work of Perry’s…

Treatment or Therapy?

The medical model of handling the acute “psychotic” episode comes under the classification of what is known as “treatment,” which implies doing something to the patients to relieve them of their symptoms, even to cure them. The alternative paradigm I am proposing is based on the concept of a “therapy” that gives respectful heed to the psychic process underlying the symptoms.

The original meaning of the Greek word therapeia was a “waiting upon” or a “service done” to the gods, with implications of tending, nurturing, caring and being an attendant; in time the word was applied to medical care. The original connotation is pertinent to the handling of acute “psychotic” episodes, since the persons going through them are in a state of being overwhelmed by images of gods and other mythic elements. Hence a therapist does well to “be an attendant” (therapeutes) upon these mythic images so as to foster their work. “Treatment” strives to stop what is happening, while “therapy” attempts to move with the underlying process and help achieve the creative aim implicit in it.

Visionary experiences of various kinds, including acute episodes, have a tendency to take six weeks to accomplish their inner aims. It is intriguing to reflect on the connotations of this, for this number is recognizable as forty days, with all this time’s connotations. Pacing is an important phenomenon that invites our scrutiny. Our experience indicates that in the acute episode the more floridly disturbed the persons are, the more rapidly they move through it. Intensity seems to correlate directly with favorable outcome. The persons who are frightened, overwhelmed with imagery, and engrossed in their preoccupations are the ones most likely to have a favorable inner experience, from which they emerge with significant change.

When we admit individuals who are at the very onset of their episode and again, at the height of their disordered state, they may be fragmented, often mute, with scattered bits of ideation passing across the mental stage. At this phase of the process the mental content is a hodgepodge and the ego has quit the field, lost in the deep interiors of the psyche. Listening to an individual at this time gives kaleidoscopic glimpses of mythic themes that often leave the listener bewildered. Yet if we sit quietly and attentively with a person in this state for only two or three times, we may find the fragments coalescing into a story that gradually begins to move forward.

Source: Trials of the Visionary Mind

One of the stories I’ve read in the past few years that’s really stuck with me was the case of a woman in Afghanistan whose husband and seven children were tortured and then murdered. She was a witness to those events and in the aftermath, she went blind. There is no physiological rationale for her blindness but there certainly is a psychological one that most anyone could understand — it became too painful to see. Shades of Jackson Brown’s Doctor, My Eyes

I have occasionally heard the term ‘idiom of distress’ used before in relation to what appear to be culture-bound illnesses– when you know something is deeply wrong, but you can’t put the exact nature of it into words or even pinpoint it yourself, the unexpressable distress will sometimes manifest in the form of a ’sickness’ paradigm which is known and recognized within your culture.

John Weir Perry, who has been a voice of experience in the wilderness for me, notes that the role of culture frequently plays a significant role in the schizophrenic experience. I don’t know if the same would hold true for all forms of “mental illness”.

PERRY: … the concerns of the regression to infancy are no more personal than one would expect. They are mostly concerned with the interpersonal field, with the parents and siblings, and with the problems of childhood and adolescence. The great surprise, during these weeks of turmoil, is that even more of the concern is about cultural and societal issues.

Our new understanding shows that the process of re-connection to the unconscious … is made up of the same stuff as seers, visionaries, cultural reformers and prophets go through. They also experience much of the same content, except that in their case it is specifically concerned, first and foremost, with the culture itself. Any kind of personal subjective ideation is made to serve and clarify that end.

When I started looking into these cultural parallels of the “schizophrenic” process, I also began to find very clear similarities in the rituals of almost every society. There are striking parallels in the visionary states of reformers and prophets and Messiahs. Messiahs are found all over the world, you know! Almost any culture that’s going through a profound upheaval of rapid turbulent change, produces seers and visionaries who glimpse the new myth-form and express its guidelines - the basic ideas and paradigms that give the people a new sense of direction. This is particularly true, of course, at the tribal level - in almost every part of the world. The shamanic visions are particularly close to what we see in “psychosis,” with all the ideation of death and rebirth, and symbols of world destruction and regeneration.

O’C: Are you saying, then, that the psychosymbolic images, feelings and ideas which emerge into consciousness during the “schizophrenic” process, also carry basic symbolic relevance - at the level of the collective unconscious - to the alienation of Humankind as a whole?

PERRY: Yes!

[Source]

Perhaps Laing and Mosher simply didn’t go quite far enough in their assessment of environmental factors.

My own experience was not particularly spiritual or transformative in nature, although years later, I’ve come to view it as having been, among other things, a manifestation of spiritual distress I was feeling at the time.

It’s a shame that mainstream psychiatry doesn’t actively encourage individuals to consider the full range of their experience, instead, everyone is forced into a cubbyhole of flawed, but fault-free neurochemistry.

Since then, in the online environment, I’ve managed to encounter numerous individuals who have had such experiences. Some of those experiences are easily recognizable as forms of spiritual transformation, some have a distinctly schizophrenic flare, and others (I suspect) may have started out as transformation and turned schizophrenic as a result of the treatment and attitude inflicted by those around the individual who was undergoing the transformative turmoil.

I’m interested by the fact that theories of a psychodynamic origin for some schizophrenias have fallen out of favor in the last few decades. I’m aware that there were a lot of instances in which parents were unfairly blamed for having made their child ‘insane.’ Parents were once thought to be the ’cause’ of autism, too, and discovery of a neurological basis has resulted in the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, with parents now seen as the heroic martyr victims of their own children (see Bettelheim’s Worst Crime: Autism and the Epidemic of Irresponsibility for more on that).

As someone pointed out in the “Psychiatry: an Industry of Death?” comments, it’s not even considered necessary to ask about the patient’s life history or circumstances any more. Even people whose feelings of depression and anxiety were due to traumatic experiences are now being told that they will have to take Prozac for the rest of their lives– apparently, a ‘neurologically healthy’ person is supposed to experience no adverse effects from traumas at all. The biodeterministic paradigm has resulted in the absolution of everyone around the ‘mentally ill’ individual– it’s not proper to examine whether they might have done anything to exacerbate or even create the patient’s problems. Rather, they are considered to be martyrs and victims.

A quote from Loren Mosher, who was one of the most active and outspoken voices in the psychiatric community against the idea that schizophrenia is a single, discrete, neurologically-based disorder: “There are two aspects of family life that have been consistently highly associated with what’s called schizophrenia. One has been dubbed ‘communication deviance.’ It’s simple. Just means that when you sit with these parents, you can’t figure out what the hell it is they’re talking about. They can’t focus on things. You can’t visualize what they say. (…) He says the other thing that’s pretty clear from studies is that “when families are very hostile to and critical of their offspring, that’s not good for them.”

(Rest of the article here: http://laingsociety.org/colloquia/thercommuns/stillcrazy1.htm)

In other words, if you never say anything clearly and beat around the bush about important subjects, your children are going to grow up feeling rather crazy themselves, and won’t know how to express it when they’re in distress. I think this is particularly dangerous in combination with families where things like serious illness, death, and alcoholism/drug addiction tend to be swept under the carpet and never discussed openly. I have occasionally heard the term ‘idiom of distress’ used before in relation to what appear to be culture-bound illnesses– when you know something is deeply wrong, but you can’t put the exact nature of it into words or even pinpoint it yourself, the unexpressable distress will sometimes manifest in the form of a ’sickness’ paradigm which is known and recognized within your culture.

I’m always wary of any attempts to pinpoint a single universal cause; like you said, there are a lot of dissimilar experiences which get subsumed under the header of “schizophrenia,” from shamanic experiences to genuine neurological problems. Obviously, it would be expected that of everyone who grew up being exposed to certain types of attitudes, only a small percentage of them would manifest apparent psychosis. However, I find it interesting that another family member and I both experienced ‘psychotic-like episodes’ at about the same age. She was hospitalized for hers. I never went to the hospital, never took any antipsychotic medications, and never described my experiences in detail to any doctor or therapist. My specific ’symptoms’ may have been more easily hidden– her parents have never been forthcoming about the exact nature of her experiences– but she was exposed to the same ‘we’ll pretend that certain things just do not exist in this family’ attitude that I was.

My own experience was not particularly spiritual or transformative in nature, although years later, I’ve come to view it as having been, among other things, a manifestation of spiritual distress I was feeling at the time. I do feel that it showed me something which led me to change my life and outlook in positive ways, in that I saw where I would end up, in some sense, if I continued along my current path. There was also a lot about my family bound up in it– things I couldn’t acknowledge or find words for at the time. I didn’t recognize any of this until years later, though; I had to step away from it, and get into a better ‘holding environment,’ before I could start to examine the symbolism of it.

When I questioned why a link (that you had to click to actually view) would be removed, while a statement that espoused hatred of others would be permitted to stay at a site dedicated to “healing” I was booted from the site — apparently, for the protection of those who hate people like me. I still haven’t read much of Szasz but I already know he must be dangerous for he seems to make people crazy.

Lynn: I have long thought that perhaps schizophrenics aren’t crazy, they just can’t tune out the voices in their heads.

The fellow who originally coined the term “schizophrenia” added an “s” to the end of it. Even then, it was understood that there were various types and degrees of schizophrenic experience. Perhaps nowadays we see that reflected in the various labels offered by the mental health industry: schizoaffective disorder, bi-polar disorder, borderline personality disorder, sociopath, multiple personality disorder, varieties of psychosis, etc. Perhaps too, this is part of the confusion among the lay public which tends to lump all these varieties under one group label called “schizophrenia”.

Over the past few years I’ve explored the subjects of schizophrenia and psychosis fairly intently. I was driven to understand a personal experience that, in other cultures, would be understood as one of shamanic initiation, mysticism, gnosis, etc. I soon stumbled across the term “spiritual emergency” which identified a subset of characteristics that would otherwise be considered, “schizophrenic”.

Since then, in the online environment, I’ve managed to encounter numerous individuals who have had such experiences. Some of those experiences are easily recognizable as forms of spiritual transformation, some have a distinctly schizophrenic flare, and others (I suspect) may have started out as transformation and turned schizophrenic as a result of the treatment and attitude inflicted by those around the individual who was undergoing the transformative turmoil.

“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If God talks to you, you are a schizophrenic.”

I have long thought that perhaps schizophrenics aren’t crazy, they just can’t tune out the voices in their heads. We all have those voices, don’t we? Voices that say things that are as innocent as “you must have this brownie”, or voices that motivate us to work harder. My mother claims to hear the voice of her mother inside her head telling her she’s a bad person.

That being said, I agree with SMR that there is something plain bizarre about Scientology, and the cult-like way in which it protects its secrets doesn’t help any.

http://www.panexa.com/

In terms of sincere and grassroots efforts at addressing human rights abuses in the field of mental health, I have to recommend MindFreedom.org.

It’s a very very difficult battle, this, and whoever will join in is welcome as far as I’m concerned.