This is a long read but definitely worth it in my opinion. Deals with the psychosis from a spiritual scientific point of view with some intelligent thinking which makes sense. If your up for a interesting and thought provoking read, then this is definitely for you
The remainder of this copyrighted article may be found at
The Technical Addendum, Vol. II—Spiritual/Dimensional Reality Copyright © 1998 Eric Knickerbocker. All rights reserved.
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What is up with all these Christian nutjobs recently? (No offense to the non-nutjob Christians). I’m beginning to feel like there’s a forum somewhere that’s targetting us as their people to save for the month…
Anyway, this had the look of a reposted spiel, so I googled a bit of it and yep, Mountain_Fire77 posted the same thing on sciforums (alink to the text-only google cache, since I can’t get at the page itself for some reason.)
There’s also the masterpiece “A Great Video Which Is Throws The Theory Of Evolution Out Of The Window” (cache linky) which is pretty self-explanatory.
Mr. Mountain_Fire77 has also posted a thread entitled “A Great Video Your Science Teacher Didn’t Want You To See…” on abovetopsecret.com, which appears to be a conspiracy theorist site. Amusingly, even the people there think he’s a moron. And he’s also posted this very thread there, too.
Oh, but the important thing is that the entire spiel is, as pointed out by someone on that last forum, entirely ripped off from this site, and as noted it’s a copywrited work. Mods?
Playboy?
I always knew I should have read the articles.
Wouldn’t a Spiritual Illness and a Chemical inbalance be the same thing? 
Ur’ve done your homework Sherlock, but i just wanted to get these topics to as many people as possible cause there’s a chance for every forum i post in that there be someone with a outstanding response to this article and thus bringing more wisdom to this subject, but my attempts to find such a prodigy and creature has failed on several fronts, but to be serious…I’d like to start a intellectual debate over this matter, the such as which people would get their granny involved
From what i’ve seen, at several seperate forums you’ve *had * an outstanding response to this article, and they’ve helped bring more wisdom to this subject - by rubbishing it. It seems as though, by posting it in so many forums, that you’re looking for validation (“You’re so right!”) rather than an actual debate on the subject.
But to be fair, i’d like to ask you this; could you summarise what you’re getting from this article in your own words? This isn’t your own work (and that’s fine, as long as you attribute it to the right source and don’t post too much of a copywrited article) so it’s possible that it doesn’t entirely reflect your own views 100%. So what do you think about the article?
Mountain_Fire77, we take copyright violation quite seriously around here. Do not post the entire text of another person’s efforts, here, as your own. Particularly, do not post copyrighted works without attribution (only as much of a work as would be permitted under fair use laws–and that WITH attribution). Provide a link, as I have done.
In addition:
This will go much better for everyone if we leave out the personal insults.
And while the following may be technically inside the line (insulting a group rather than a poster, directly), we also frown on insulting groups when the clear implication is to insult the poster.
[ /Moderating ]
That’s fair. Apologies to the board in general and Mountain_Fire77 in particular for that.
I’ll bite.
From the linked article:
First, you need to prove that there is such thing as a “spirit”. I don’t believe that we have one. Secondly, you have to prove that this “spirit” communicates in any form.
Not around here, they don’t. You’ll find that only a minorty of us even believe in “souls.” Prove that they exist.
One would hope that spiritual entities would take the rare opportunity to share something more enlightening than the either banal observational commentary, blistering condemnation and criticism or suspicious and antagonistic suggestion that folks who hear voices often describe.
They move in mysterious ways, I suppose.
All I can say is, if you belive this, you’ve never spent any time with a schizophenic. I have, and it isn’t pretty.
I’m a schlzophrenic, and some of us are pretty!
I suspect the OP’s interests lie solely with the promulgation of fundie-christian assertions about the dire consequences of being insufficiently Bible-pounded, but I actually do think that schizophrenia is better described as an ailment of the spirit than a (nonproven, hypothetical) “chemical imbalance”.
I would also assert that not all of us regard it as an illness of any sort. Condition ≠ illness. Not all differences are inferiorities, and I don’t care how many diagnosed schizophrenics have been seen or known personally by how many board members and perceived to be suffering horribly for it, the fact remains that you’ve only seen them in a very nonwelcoming context. (And people would have testified in much the same manner about homosexual people that they’d met or that they knew back in the days before Stonewall and the courage to come out).
The theories about “chemical imbalance” are in large part reverse-engineered from a combination of studies of normative brain behavior and studies of the mechanism of drugs that people (not necessarily the patients) have found efficacious and useful in the treatment (and/or control) of schizophrenics.
I have posted often (some would say ad nauseum, I suspect) about why the claims of clinical knowledge made by the psychiatric profession re: what schizophrenia actually is should be held at arm’s length with a very skeptical set of intellectual tweezers and surrounded by the quotation marks of dubiety. I’ll do so again here (and or post links to older posts/threads) if requested, but I’m also fine with a general consensus that most of you have heard it and don’t care to rehash.
At any rate (returning to the OP’s premises), to the extent that spiritual crises have provoked the thoughts and behaviors most likely to land one a diagnosis of “schizophrenic”, the role played by conservative-fundamentalist-literalist christianity has been univocally and spectacularly that of cause of trauma, not solution.
I’ve never understood why “chemical imbalance” would have to be in opposition to “spiritual experience.” People experiencing psychosis, whether bipolar, schizophrenic, or from the use of psychomimetic drugs generally report experiencing profound shifts of meaning and meaningful connections. For many people, this has spiritual or religious significance. That its mechanism may be described chemically or functionally in some cases, or stopped in others, does not suggest to me that it is not also spiritual. Oliver Sacks argues that Hildegard of Bingen had migraines and that this accounts for the phenomena she experienced. Again, does being able to account for it biologically mean it wasn’t also religious?
I agree that the description of “chemical imbalance” is dubious. It’s a condition whose symptoms can be ameliorated with chemicals, but that doesn’t prove that the condition itself is simply the result of having brain chemicals in the wrong proportion.
However,
I’m pretty shocked by this. I don’t think there would be many people familiar with schizophrenia who would consider it to be just another aternative way of living, and not say that it’s definitely a pathology.
What the hell are “chemicals” anyway? We’ve made up these words to describe the substances present in the brain, but they’re just labels. When you get right down to it, it’s pretty goddamned impossible to explain just how those “chemicals” cause us to have consciousness and feel emotions. Neuroscience is really still in its infancy, and there are many more questions than there are answers. There’s not neccessarily a contradiction between “spirituality” and “brain chemicals.” In the end, they’re both ways of understanding the as-yet-unknowable.
I too am very surprised by AHunter3’s statement, and would like to know more.
My only direct experience is as an instructor. One of my students (I am told) was schizophrenic. He was pleasant, often bright, and at times uttered some strange non sequiturs. Then all of a sudden (again, I am told) for some reason he stopped taking his meds. His looks became leering stares I would interpret as menacing. His mannerisms became deliberate and his utterances more and more bizarre. Eventually he was asked to leave the school, I can only assume as the result of complaints. I was not involved in the decision in any way, but to be honest I was not surprised and a bit relieved.
I bring this up as a request to have my ignorance fought. My working definition of schizophrenia has been a state of brain chemistry that produces delusional perceptions (hearing voices or otherwise perceiving events that do not map to reality). Is this definition correct?
Are there degrees of affliction (if that’s the right word) beyond which even AHunter3 would agree require “fixing”? To the extent to which “A Beautiful Mind” is true, is it illustrative of what AHunter3 means, i.e. a condition that doesn’t need fixing or at least where the cure is worse than the disease? If delusions are part of a schizophrenic’s reality, is it possible to identify them as not real (as seems apparent in “A Beautiful Mind”)? Is it easy to do so or does it take heroic mental ability?
To directly address the OP’s title (I haven’t read the article): Doesn’t the fact that medication appears to reduce the delusions and return the “sufferer” to “normalcy” (I use these terms for their convenience and stand to be corrected) indicate that it is an affliction attributable to chemistry? Has couselling either by a priest or by a psychologist ever “helped” a schizophrenic, providing support for the spiritual illness theory? Has prayer or religious conversion worked? Anticipating the answers to be “no,” doesn’t that support the (shall we say) medical basis theory?
Historically, the movement against forced psychiatric treatment has had a large contingent of people who did not consider themselves to be ‘sick’ despite having been diagnosed with one or another ‘mental illness’ (very definitely including schizophrenia although not limited to it); for most of the last 40 years, the main political ‘line’ they (we) have taken is that schizophrenia (and the rest, and ‘mental illness’ as a whole) just doesn’t exist; that, like medieval witch-burners who considered themselves to be burning witches, the psychiatric profession is doing things to us in the name of a nonexistent ailment/phenomenon.
But not only is it hard to prove the nonexistence of anything, it’s also hard to be taken seriously when what you’re saying sounds so close to textbook denial, and I don’t just mean ‘denial’ in the clinical sense of the word: people being red-baited as ‘communists’ found it unworkable to deny that any subsersive communist fifth column existed in the United States, students accused of smoking pot might more readily be assumes to be lying if they deny that they’re aware of any students who smoke pot… it’s like the recurrent joke on this board about “The first rule of ___ is that there IS no ____”.
And besides, although damn near anyone can, under the right (wrong) circumstances, run afoul of a diagnosis-tossing shrink, it’s just not true that everyone is equally likely to end up with a psych diagnosis. There’s something we have in common enough of the time for everyone from nursing students to subway riders to recognize us from the DSM-IV description. Yeah, we’ve seen those behaviors. You have. I have. Etc. One could assert (as I do) that, like extreme anger or visceral horror, it’s a state that anyone’s mind can end up in under the right (wrong) circumstances, but even then there are people who end up like that with far less provocation than other people who in essentially identical circumstances don’t display that pattern.
So there’s an “us”. And in the movement there’s a growing tendency to embrace an identity-in-common. But we see who we are and can be as a much wider spectrum that folks who are only aware of us when we’re, umm, you know, like that. And there are trade-offs, and some of us think we don’t have such a bad deal. Or wouldn’t if our culture treated us like people with a difference instead of sick/dangerous people. (Did you know we aren’t more dangerous or inclined to violence than the general pop?). Anyway, if you want to read more, Google phrases like “consumers / survivors / expatients” and “forced treatment” and “psychiatric oppression”.
The determining factor is the wishes of the person. If someone considers themself to need “fixing”, and the “fix” ls legal and available, who am I to tell them that I know better than them what’s best for them? On the other hand, if someone likes who they are and hasn’t broken any laws and cannot be shown (by standards that apply equally to schizzies and nonschizzies alike, mind you!) to lack basic decision-making competency, who is the doctor to tell them what’s best for them?
The right to refuse treatment is a fundamental civil right and is our central rallying cause. (We also want fully informed consent and have a lot of critical things to say about the rose-colored lavender-scented lying bullshit that the profession offers to mental patients regarding the efficacy of recommended treatments and how scientifically reliable and useful their diagnostic system and treatment protocols are. Yeah, they help some people, but the success rate and scientific backing isn’t like “insulin for diabetes” (one of their common claims); it may be a bit better than “whisky for a broken heart”, but it looks closer to that than the insulin analogy.
I know very well that AHunter3 has a wealth of opinion to share on the legitimacy of the diagnosis and/or explanations for schizophrenia, and I don’t want to get in the way of that for those who have been down that road before. I do respect very much his perspective on the matter.
I would be curious to hear more about the “nonwelcoming” context, however. I assume that by this he is referring to a medical/treatment context, although I might be wrong. I would suggest that both anecdotally and from an empirical standpoint, symptoms of schizophrenia are pretty much the same across settings. The guy muttering to himself on the street corner may be in a nonwelcoming context, but at some point one has to wonder if all contexts that schizophrenics experience could be described as non-welcoming, and what that might mean for the definition and cause of non-welcoming.
Part of my job for several years as a graduate student was interviewing people with schizophrenia and their family members. Certainly, the family could be described as a non-welcoming context, but I can tell you that family members witness and bear a great deal of the burden of dealing with symptoms of schizophrenia.
Thus, I head into the discussion about the non-welcoming context with a clear bias to the effect that “wherever you go, there you are,” or “you make your own gravy,” or “you can’t run away from a pantload,” or that contexts quickly become non-welcoming when confronted with several possible features of schizophrenia.