The Schizo-Stroller

A large group, a population perhaps, are in hell up to their necks in shit. One of them pipes up, ‘You know we’re up to our necks in shit?’. Some of the others start to argue that it’s the natural order of things, it’s the way it’s always been, we are in shit therefore we are essentially ‘in-shit’ dwellers. ‘Oh,’ says the original speaker, ‘I just was wondering how we got here.’ ‘…And? What you think you’re better than us?’ ‘Elitist!’ ‘Snob!’ cry the others. ‘Sorry’ says the original speaker, ‘I just thought it might help us get out of here.’
After a bit, somebody else suggests, ‘You know it does smell a bit.’ There are a few cries of ‘you’re as bad as him’ and ‘Blasphemer!’ but then another goes ‘You’re right, I keep gagging.’
And so it continues. But there are still those who want to stay right there and wish to keep everyone else there too. Forever the anti-intellectuals.

“Whoever goes voluntarily to a psychiatrist entrusts that person with their emotional suffering. This situation is very similar to that of a believer in the confessional. The doctor who precribes a psychiatric drug thus exercises a function akin to that of a priest… We are all believers; in the past most people were believers in the religion practiced around them, while today most of us believe in science. One part of our belief in science includes our belief in doctors, including psychiatrists and their words – expressed, after all, in the name of science. Just how unscientific and uncertain those words are is, of course, only clear to those who study this field.

If the psychiatrist or the doctor is a respected expert – as the priest used to be – who can influence the subjective state of the believer’s soul with words, and if the doctor is able to convince the believer of the positive effect of the treatment, then the same holds true when the experts use their authority to predict a relapse if the patient stops taking the psychiatric drug…

Anyone who is labeled schizophrenic is given high-dosage neuroleptics in the hospital. This treatment is not prescribed in a simple, cool and unemotional manner. For the psychiatrist it is of great significance, it is the most important thing they can possibly tell a ‘schizophrenic.’ Their message is loud and clear:

‘You are ill, you are schizophrenic. That’s the way it is, it is your fate. The only possibility you have of leading any kind of normal life despite this illness, is if you take your neuroleptics. You have to realise this, we expect you to recognise that you are ill. If you do accept this we will discharge you soon. We will see to it that after you have been discharged you will go regularly to a general practitioner or psychiatrist who will prescribe you neuroleptics. We would prefer if you had a depot injection of neuroleptics every two or three weeks; then we would be absolutely sure that you don’t forget to take your tablets out of negligence or because you don’t understand the need for them. If you don’t belive us, if you refuse this absolutely essential treatment you are making a very big mistake because you will suffer a relapse within the forseeable future and sooner or later you will be sent back to hospital. Never forget, you are ill, you have the predisposition for schizophrenia in you, you are vulnerable, easily hurt. The symptoms of your illness can appear at any time, even though at times you’ll feel better. Don’t let yourself be persuaded by any irresponsible people that you are sane, that you can live a good and useful life without medication. That would be a great mistake, we know better. We have a great deal of experience with this illness. You must believe us! You have no choice. You need neuroleptics like a diabetic needs insulin’

For the duration of their hospitalisation they are confronted continuously with this point of view. they don’t just hear it from the doctor, they hear it from all the staff several times a day. Relatives also play an important role. They hear the same message. Relatives are given the task of making sure that those they are responsible for can live a protected, irritant-free life without excitement. And most importantly, the relatives must see to it that the ‘patients’ take their drugs regularly… In other words, the relatives are put under pressure by the opinion that the person affected is ill and that the only possible way for them to avoid further hospitalisation is to be aware of their ‘illness’ and the risks they face, and above all to keep taking the prescribed psychiatric drugs.

This behaviour leads to illness. It creates immense pressure which is almost impossible to escape from…

Most of those affected believe more or less al lthey are told. They identify with the diagnosis. They accept that they are ‘schizophrenic’ and therefore different from the rest of the ordinary members of society. And along with the diagnosis they accept the ‘fact’ that they are at risk. Put another way: the contact with the psychiatrist causes them to be anxious, extremely afraid of another outbreak of the ‘illness’. But things don’t stop there. Not only are they themselves anxious, all those around them are anxious too – both their relatives and their psychiatrist as well as other professional helpers. Those caught up in this scenario – both during their period of hospitalisation and after – are surounded by a climate of fear. They are afraid and the people around them are afraid. They all fear another outbreak of the ‘illness,’ the ‘psychosis,’ the ‘schizophrenia,’ another ‘episode’ and another period of hospitalisation.”

(Marc Rufer: ‘Creating Fear/ Removing Fear – When you wish to withdraw the opinion of your doctor can be dangerous’ in Lehmann, P (ed.) ‘Coming off Psychiatric Drugs’ 2002 Peter Lehmann Publishing)

Things were bad, the world was a living hell.

I felt tired and tried to sleep.

But in my sleep I had terrible nightmares, I slept for years, fitfully.

Then when I woke up all the shit was still there. Nothing had changed.

So I’m going to do my best to fucking change it.

And if you blame it all on the individual ever again. Making each and every wo/man individually guilty of something we are collectively responsible for again, leaving each and every wo/man isolated and alienated, I’m going to fucking smack ya.

All those with me meet me out the back door

Peace and love, Schizo xxx

So we have the concept of twinness, the idea that we are attracted to those similar to us, so as Stephen Biddulph explains ‘people who differ on the surface but are very similar deep down, will be inexorably drawn into couple relationships.’ He continues, ‘you will be aware of your differences but your similarities will, for the most part, be unconscious.’

Biddulph’s argument is that we are born in a sense with natural gifts of clear intelligence, intuition, concentration, spontaneity, warmth, etc (this is a belief I have found shared from Liedloff to Rowe), but through the child-raising processes of the modern world (and I would argue other cultural and social facts) these abilities are often repressed by adults who find it too much, but our repression occurs differently with every individual, thus Biddulph suggests ‘we are attracted to people because they have activated certain qualities, which we also possess but in an unawakened state’. If you hold someone in great esteem  it is because you have an untapped ability to be like that person. This, according to Biddulph includes the heroes we admire.

Now if we think of popular heroes then what comes to mind is the fact that Winston Churchill is often voted as some sort of greatest Britain, again and again. The worrying thing is this means that there are vast numbers of people who feel the need to be like him to be complete. Does this include his eugenicist beliefs then? (http://www.winstonchurchill.org – and for those who think this is a smear, sorry, these following quotes are from the official site) Does awakening their capacities involve being ‘in favor of the confinement, segregation, and sterilization of a class of persons contemporarily described as the “feeble minded?”‘ Are we to believe that a vast proportion of the population have an untapped capacity to believe that “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate.” Are a large proportion of the nation trying to reach a place where “The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life.” People who are not whole because they are yet to regard “races as different, racial characteristics as signs of the maturity of a society, and racial purity as endangered not only by other races but by mental weaknesses within a race.”

Perhaps some lacking in our personalities might be better left unawakened…

“I am not a man! I am a free number!”

I recently failed an Employment and Support tribunal on the grounds that if I can do a PhD, albeit part-time I can work. Apart from the trite protest I make, to translate what I say into ‘common’ language (thus losing something in translation and relying on generalised suppositions) that “I have a mental illness not a learning disability”. Something that I was not able to come up with until after the decision. I was unable to say, being unrepresented legally at the tribunal for reasons partially due to government regulation on legal aid, that the reason that I can do a PhD is that being theory based I can practice a Socratic method with my voices in the comfort of my own home whilst studying, something I would not be able to do in the majority of jobs I can think of.

I will do reading, then cogitating on what I have learnt will think about it as I wonder around, at which point my voices will interject. They are usually, pointless, prejudiced and narrow minded and not considerably academic interjections however what they do do is allow me to come up with a suitable defence thus streamlining my thought process, determining to myself that I understand what I am reading and writing about.

This considered, I was fascinated to read in an unpublished PhD thesis of Terence McLaughlin, the late Hearing Voices Network activist and editor of Asylum magazine, comments from his voices, which he included in his thesis whilst writing, the voices thus becoming part of the thread of the text.

It seems it is not just me who is capable of this, or who has done this. That is nice to know. Thankyou Terence.

Seriously, this was a search term someone used to find my site.

So here’s the answer: Don’t!

Being ‘disciplined’ by others is highly likely to be a factor in their breakdown. So unless you’re unusually cruel or un-self-reflective, leave well alone.

Please! I mean this – PLEASE! For ‘whatever you believe in’s sake, DON’T!.

A lot of people who seem to cope with hearing voices seem to have some belief that their voices are those of dead people, as do also many who don’t seem to be able to cope. The difference seems to be the power of the voices over the voice hearer.

I’m not arguing for against this reality, but let us take it hypothetically to be true. Those who can pick or choose whether or not to believe the voices they hear seem to be able to get this power relationship right. Those who seem to feel their voices have some powerful all-knowing wisdom that is superior to theirs don’t.

So what does this mean. Well in plain english those who cope realise that just cause Uncle Ned is dead, doesn’t mean he’s somehow magically reached nirvana. If Uncle Ned was a tosser when he was alive, chances are he still is. If you think he’s talking shit you’re probably right.

I could go into coping mechanisms being affected by previous relationships with authority figures, the ability to be heard in personal relationships resulting in feelings of powerlessness etc etc but the above paragraph probably says it better

We often blame the ones we lose for our loss. At least when the cause is a death you can’t hurt them by doing so.

For various reasons my wife and I have been looking at a form of communication called Non-Violent Communication (NVC) developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It is used and taught to counsellors, military personnel, aid workers, corporations around the world. It is at its base level a counselling technique that aims to allow one to fulfill  needs (based largely, but extended, on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) through identification of the feelings triggered by these needs not being met. It also teaches one to empathise with others, which ultimately requires learning to listen – properly i.e. not giving your opinion; not telling someone what they are doing/ feeling wrong but accepting that what they are saying is based on what they are feeling and thus one can hear their needs. Combined these techniques allow one to communicate effectively with others.

However my wife and I have found this difficult. I can empathise, it’s a struggle, I fall into patterns of saying ‘Oh well you should do this’ or I end up being defensive and making excuses rather than saying for example, ‘Oh you’ve been looking after our son all day and you are feeling tired and you would rather I didn’t ramble at you as soon as you get home about what I’ve been reading  because it makes you feel irritated.’ But I can do it although sometimes it takes the shit to hit the fan for me to realise I haven’t been listening and I need to do so, quickly. However I am getting better, and it is amazing what just listening to what someone has to say can do to their self-worth.

This of course has relevance to Hearing Voices Groups and their efficacy but this is not the aim of this post. As I said I can empathise, but expressing my feelings is hard. Perhaps that is why I facilitate the groups in an NHS setting rather than participate as a member of HVN? Now I must say both my partner and I find the language awkward, unnatural and unwieldly, although we get the principles and try to use them in a more colloquial way. Own your feelings, don’t say ‘you’ say ‘I’ etc. However, my difficulty is not so much the language but actually identifying my feelings. We have printed out a list of feelings and we refer to them when we need to express ourselves but I seem to be unable to actually identify them unless looking at these sheets. If I read them then I can go yes that is what I am feeling, if you ask me without the sheet, then it is ‘I dunno’. Currently my partner is reading Why Love Matters by Sue Gerhardt and she has identified this as a disregulation between the emotional and symbolic parts of the brain. I’m not keen on the term ‘disregulation’ but for lack of better knowledge I’m stuck with it. Language is often no more than the failure to express our thoughts and emotions and thus becomes the use of what is available as the next best thing, something that comes from a shared experience but is never truly our own. Anyway, it seems I am perfectly at ease at identifying my emotions in text but not in verbal language, according to Gerhardt this is due to early experiences often due to a significant other having a similar problem.

I have to point out right now, this is not ‘blame’, I do not like that word and is often bandied around as a censoring accusation due to an inability to take responsibility for our actions. If I cannot learn from my history, my psychological make-up, my experiences, my life and all that has occured in it then I cannot develop, I cannot move on. As Habermas suggests without learning from our mistakes and those of others then all learning (copying, memory, rote etc) is merely accidental. We make this world and this world makes us. Deal with it. We are both responsible for our actions AND our actions are affected by others. We have to deal with the consequences of our actions but we should not be expected to predict perfectly what they are, we WILL make mistakes. As Hannah Arendt points out if we cannot forgive then we are stuck in a circle of vengeance. Of course it does bring up the important question of how we can have action, political or otherwise, that does not stem from ressentiment or the position of a schöne seele, a belle âme, a beautiful soul.

So at this point I jump. Why bring this up? I’m reading Giddens’ Capitalism and Modern Theory at the moment, primarily as revision for teaching and while reading Weber’s ideas on forms of social conduct I started thinking on his views on rationality, primarily as I am trying to apply Habermas to Hearing Voices Groups. Weber has four basic forms of social conduct.

1. Purposively Rational Conduct, the individually rationally assesses the probable results of a given act in terms of the calculation of means to an end.

2. Value Rational Conduct, is directed towards an overriding ideal.

3. Affective Conduct is that which is carried out under the sway of some sort of emotional state and as such is on the borderline of meaningful and non-meaningful conduct.

4. Traditional Action is carried out under the influence of custom and habit, and as such is also on the borderline of meaningful and non-meaningful conduct.

So if we return to NVC, we can understand our affective conduct as an expression of unmet needs. Weber understands it as action for its own sake, if we are to understand NVC this is not strictly true, but it is not purposive or value rational, it may borderline traditional in the sense that we often return to learnt habits from others when acting emotionally. However I would argue that NVC brings purposive rational conduct, or instrumental action into this by having as a goal the fulfillment of one’s needs (I would argue however that it is not strategic action, NVC requires plain language that avoids perlocutions). Thus it brings a reason to affective conduct, or a source of reason. Psychological blocks, or as I now call them having learnt the etymology of the word from the Ancient Greek for ‘obstacle’, satans, are what gets in the way of purposive action. And as such, if not rational in the sense that rational is often contrasted to affective behaviour, are reasonable forms of conduct. Interestingly enough this is attained through communication, but contrasts, as instrumental behaviour, slightly from Habermas’ ideal type of communicative rationality.

Of course Weber’s concept of rationality stems from Kant, who wished to divest all emotional or affective thought and behaviour from reason. Thus we have a form of alienated soul, where the ideal of pure reason, the transcendent external God is separated from its emotional blocks, its satans. If this is the case, how can political action escape from the subject as beautiful soul? How can we subjectify ourselves if we don’t drag along with us our blocks in communication our emotional outbursts? Perhaps Deleuze was right when he stated that in resistance to the Control Society ‘the key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.’ (Negotiations, p. 175)