It seems somewhat obvious to me that psychotic episodes, while things unto themselves, draw a lot of material from the real world around us.
Like, you’re not going to have a delusion that your TV is bugged if you’ve never known what a TV is. Or hell, if you never knew what “bugging” technology was or that it even existed.
Similarly I doubt that I would ever get delusions or hallucinations about demons, if I had never been exposed to religion while growing up. My mind just wouldn’t have that material to draw upon. I would probably think it was something else when I’m symptomatic.
So anyway it’s just interesting to me to imagine the sorts of delusions that might have happened in ancient civilizations.
Like for example a civilization whose only supernatural beliefs involved the spirits of the dead - So would a schizophrenic member of their community have delusions and hallucinations about being visited by spirits of the dead?
Did schizophrenic people in ancient Greek culture, experience encounters with the Greek deities in their own minds? Since that would have been the material around them.
Basically it’s interesting to look at different ancient cultures from around the world and image what their psychosis probably entailed.
Did the Celts experience visits or shenanigans from fairies?
Might also be a bit of a chicken/egg thing. Like how much of what we consider mythology today, was the product of the creative psychotic mind?
my own personal reading doesn’t go back much further than the Romantics, like Byron, and Henry James, and they called it melancholy and mixed sensibilities, deep down feelings of remorse.
More needs to be done in finding out, I totally agree. I like the way you think about this, and I want to know more too.
I have an extreme curiosity to know what was psychosis like before the internet and the media. My moms friend that also has sz he used to think he had a direct phone to the Kremlin for example, that he was a spy, influenced by spy novels he read.
Me, too. Some of my paranoid delusional episodes were heavily inspired by what I found on the internet, including the episode I had where I thought the government was going to put everyone in FEMA camps and kill us all. That was almost completely inspired by things I found on the internet. So I also wonder what the same episode might have been like without that material.
Not to say I am against free speech / expression or anything like that. I don’t think others should be stifled online just to protect those of us who are vulnerable. BUT I still do also feel curious as to how it would be different.
(I have Artaud’s book Watchfiends & Rack Screams by my computer.)
My family has had lots of psychosis.
Generation of my parents’ content: USSR, the Mafia, phones are bugged by FBI
Generation of my grandparents’ content: McCarthy, neighbors
Generation after mine: aliens, secret government projects, constant surveillance+++
Me: somehow a throwback to medieval times: morality plays, demons, unredeemable guilt
Across generations, all of us have concerns about unfamiliar cars.
But the content of visual hallucinations seems to retain some themes across time: monstrous appearances of human faces, corpses, bloody stuff, etc. weird animals, living shadows. For example, Artaud’s imagery is not unfamiliar or dated in a way I recognize.
Who knows you may have been listened to based on what particular culture we’re talking about and what was probably based on social circumstance. Before the world basically nearly homogenized due to cultural supremacy and western conquest there had been so many different social models that who knows who would have “lost it” and who may have been considered “touched by the gods” hell the Oracle of Delphi in Greece was consulted in all seriousness about major world events and these were pretty much girls said to have been huffing natural gas to induce states of altered consciousness, and in reality who knows what it really was. A secret?
I have a family member who completely changed their life entirely based on a native American sweatlodge ceremony. What would that have been like? There’s a society with a thousand different social models who all beleived in a world inhabited by spirits. A society nearly obliterated by what I think of as the great American social experiment (gone wrong?)
It didn’t become common I don’t think til modernism, suicide from mental health conditions,
Frost, a relative genius, had a son who killed himself, and even James Joyce put away a daughter,
in the 60’s artists and people with ailment killed themselves in plenty, into the 70’s. Please see Thomas James an Illinois poet who killed himself young.
thinking of it realistically from maybe a hunter gatherers point of view, maybe even small tribes that rely on each other for food and warmth,
i think there would be less mental illness back then, not saying there would have been none but i think they had so much to lose back then,
if you were thought to be mad you could be called a witch or a warlock or something, people couldn’t trust you and you could be ostracised which would leave you on your own in a brutal world.
Just look at some of the characters in religious doctrines…
Jesus ran off and fought with the devil for 18 years to come back enlightened and sure that he was the son of God… as his mother had told him… sounds like the zionist bloodline had some mental illness in it.
When I was actively delusional, not episodic, just generally out of it (since I don’t remember my episodes) I have delusions about gods…
The last one was a goddess I have never heard of called Keta, the Goddess of Balance and Equality…Basically a Goddess of Karma. She was always telling me to go after bad people…an reward good ones…if I had done what she told me to, W Bush would be dead, as would Bin Laden, ah and so would a few hundred other people…oh and the guy who jumped into a river to save a kitten would have a new truck…I was being told to be an Agent of Karma…a Karmic Agent…hmmm I like the sound of the second one better…
I think it was about the same as now. Ur psychosis is only psychotic to all that u know. U can’t be psychotic to that which u don’t know. So in essence with the creation of the internet we are more psychotic then yesterday’s psychotics since we know more. As time goes on psychosis will increase because people will understand more.