Madness and Meaning

As a young physician entering the world of the asylum, the mental hospital, the world of insanity, like many others before and since, I was fascinated by the prospect of finding meaning within madness, understanding behaviours that appeared, at first blush, inexplicable, understanding the de-contextualized speech patterns of many patients, understanding their delusions and voices.

This was the era of Timothy Leary, of a wish on the part of some to find a chemical path to enlightenment, the era of R.D. Laing seeking parental and family causes of insanity, of Thomas Szasz telling us that mental illness is a myth, the time of Foucault telling us that our society causes madness, and Alan Watts telling us that, really, madness was just an alternate flight path.

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Madness and Meaning

I had a chat a while back with my brother after a round of golfā€¦

Me: "You know John. I donā€™t really care if I keel over tomorrow. Iā€™ve been ā€˜at oneā€™ with the world on more than one occasion over the last number of years. Iā€™m talking about Zen.

Bro: ā€œPatā€¦thatā€™s NOT Zenā€¦thatā€™s insanity!!ā€

Me: ā€œOh yeah? Well maybe you have to go insane to reach that Zen-like state of mind!ā€

Bro: ā€œHmmmā€¦ā€

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An interesting article -

i donā€™t personally see any either/or - there are physiological, psychological, sociological & transpersonal areas/ranges to what people experience.

i think that there is a sense in finding a personal meaning to life & our experience.

That was interesting.

I spent lots of time reading Carl Jung, Foucault, Laing and others (including Deleuze and Guattari).

To me, the main question, the only question, is in this article: what helps?

I have read so much trying to find a real way to assist a person in psychosis who refuses medical treatment. No one in the anti-psychiatry movement presents even a theoretical model of emergency care for the most ill. Nor do they try to figure out a way to get people with serious mental illness housing or keep people out of jail.

The theoretical positions taken up by some writers in the field are not actually mutually exclusive, no ā€œeither/orā€ as you say, Apotheosis.

Like Patrickā€™s example, why would going ā€œinsaneā€ and being ā€œā€˜at oneā€™ with the worldā€ ever be considered not possible?

Itā€™s frustrating that there is such thing as either the anti- or pro- psychiatry movement when medical care should mean each person receiving whatever forms of help are needed (right away!) and work for that person. Then, when safe and relatively stable, being able to sort out the meanings of these experiences.

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What do you make of John Weir Perry/Diabasis - Loren Mosher/Soteria (CooperRiis, Open Dialogue, the sanctuary, Laingā€™s Kingsley Hall, Burch House, Windhorse, the Agnews Project etc [many others]) - As well as the field of depth/transpersonal psychology & comprehensive psycho-social/spiritual approaches/understandings (shamanic/mystic etc) in general? (many authors/exponents).

Dear Apotheosis,

I am going to write later on today. I am only familiar with a handful of those authors/placesā€¦and will respond about the ones Iā€™m familiar with:)

What I see and hear is that the psychotic spectrum patient who is given to intellectualizing and verbalized, conceptual explanations as a means of defending his or her ego against projected threat is usually interesting to listen to, but unlikely to make much movement toward emotional comfort. Itā€™s more or less the empirical example of those who didnā€™t get it when we were told by our gurus back in the '60s and '70s that ā€œconceptual understanding without direct experience is just the booby prize.ā€ (Took me decades to get that. Decades.)

Foucault has analyzed a discourse of madness not madness as diagnosis per se ; Deleuze and Guattari were reinventing and subversing Freudian concepts of sexuallity - all of them were interested in greater concepts such as rethinking the subject/ subjection and its identity.

For the most part, I am deeply interested in the models of care you mentioned and from what I have read, I believe they could be helpful.

Letā€™s set aside the fact that only rich people or people in the right time periods and geographical locations can benefit from these projects. I have spoken directly with people from both CooperRiis and Windhorse: $$$$$$$$$$$$$!!

None of these models, to my knowledge, provides emergency assistance for people deep in psychosis who, in my opinion, need to be gotten to safety until they feel better. To my knowledge, none of these models provides outreach to people whose psychosis has resulted in homelessness or imprisonment. There are people with psychosis starving themselves, hurting themselves, making illegal mistakes.

As much as there is controversy around involuntary treatment, I was relieved my family member was grabbed by the cops when he was suicidal. I was glad he was in a relatively safe hospital for a brief time period. Do I wish he had not been traumatized and demeaned? Yes. Do I wish he had received ongoing, real, and relevant treatment from the start? Yes. Do I want anyoneā€™s rights taken away? No. Do I believe in forced medication? No, but I hope my family member someday tries medication to find out whether it helps.

I understand there are environments far more conducive to well-being than the societies we live in. Nobody can be dragged into CooperRiis or back in time to Kingsley Hall or to a meditation retreat and kept there. Itā€™s all about choice.

Maybe Open Dialogue where everyone participates would help once a person is relatively stable. Itā€™s my understanding that no one is being singled out or removed from the community. Everyone is opened to needed change. From my point of view, that seems worthwhile. Plus, far more accurate since no individual has to be the ā€œidentified patient.ā€

This is where I am most concerned: I want to preserve my family memberā€™s life, well-being, and rights (in that order I guess). I also hope my family member finds a safe way to be in the world that makes sense to him.

I have never heard of Diabasis, the sanctuary, Burch House, or the Agnews Project, but I will try to familiarize myself with them.

Apotheosis, I think some of my opinions about the other stuff might be triggering to some and I hope the above was not. Would it be alright to pm you if I can figure out how?

Dear Sarad, Yes, I just finished reading Anti-Oedipus (in translation to English). Mostly theoretical, mostly above my head.

I guess I hope that encountering new concepts and theories could somehow allow me to change my own thinking and behaviors.

For my purposes, reductively speaking, the most important parts of Anti-Oedipus are about understanding that fascism becomes internalized and moving towards phenomenologyā€¦

I am sad about the ways I have taken up societyā€™s ideas and tried to force my family member and myself to conform (get a job or go to school) to something that wasnā€™t even my idea in the first place. Itā€™s painful to me that I sacrificed my real feelings and relationships to these demands. Still need food and shelter thoā€¦how to live?

Iā€™m talking too much:) This is the first time I have ever participated in any forum and these are my strongest personal concerns as well as being my areas of interest.

Fine to PM. i donā€™t mind what you discuss personally.

You appear to have rationally & ā€˜objectivelyā€™ considered the subject a lot, which is refreshing.

How society & the mental health system currently is - is how it all is. i think it could all be a lot better. How to change society/the system?

i went through 4 forced hospitalisation & forced drugs, 7 major breakdowns/episodes totalling around 8 years in severe florid psychosis. A serious suicide attempt, 17 years in heavy addiction/alcoholism & all manor of difficulties. Some have it worse. i have made a lot of progress & past is past - No changing it all. Things have been a lot more stable the past 11 years, but Not without problems. For around this time i have been posting a lot on-line. i genuinely expected before using the internet so much, that the majority of people would be in very large agreement to a lot of my views - i was mistaken - the vast majority of people have been largely in opposition to my opinion on things.

There are considerable rifts, embittered polemics & arguments in the area of mental health. iā€™ve toned down a lot of my thinking & opinions over the past decade - i canā€™t change anything in regard to wider society. iā€™ve let go of a lot more, & come to far more of a place of acceptance. i do think that we live in an insane civilisation.

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That sounded just like my brother.

I think there is much to say for trying to find meaning in madness. Meaning in a rather mundane sense of the term, not divine purpose or anything. But rather an understanding that makes sense of the words of the delusional. Although for some this may be a purely theoretical challenge, there may very well be some real practical consequences that can follow. A current trend is to conceive of delusional speech as empty speech acts, sheer babbling, irrational nonsense. Conceived as such this makes empathizing with delusional patients a near impossible task. Sympathy is still possible of course. A conceptual frame through which empathy becomes possible seems to me to be able to do a lot of good in the relationship between a patient and his doctors. But this is very hard to establish, or so the history of thinking about these issues has proven. Moreover, the topic gets muddled for many confuse conceptual elaborations of meaning for causal theories of how the phenomenon comes about. Hence, it may seem at times as if such attempts at finding meaning are at odds with neuroscientific investigations and the like.

To reduce everything down to us being ā€˜blobs of meatā€™ is of course going to be at odds with more sociological, & especially psychogenic/transpersonal understandings & meanings to madness.

Only if you think about meaning in terms of causation, which I hold to be a very confused conception of meaning.

iā€™m Not quite sure what you mean by that?

An elaboration of meaning does not involve making causal claims. There are accordingly no qualms with investigations into causal histories. If I write a phrase here, and person x would explain its meaning, while y would tell you how it came to appear on the screen (the causal history), the two neither agree nor disagree, they are simply doing something different.

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Thank you for explaining, yes itā€™s a good point. Both meaning making & causality can obviously have multiple interpretations, across many levels, opinions, perspectives.

Ok hereā€™s an example of ā€˜Madnessā€™

That opening bit about the Dr. entering ā€˜The World of Madnessā€™?
I assumed for a second that he might be referring to this world that we are already in and our Earth a
simulacrum for research.

But I know enough not to panic at that idea nor take it 100% seriously - Possibility? Maybe but what good is wriggling if we do suspect we have a hook in our mouths? Better to methodically, patiently and quietly try to find a way to wriggle off the line?

The big problem is lack of information or rather information sharing. A lot of what was eating at me in the past was actually covered in philosophical and epistemology classes at universities which I could never afford to attend.

Knowledge held aside only for those of wealthy background; keeps the competition for good jobs down and held aside for the aristocrats.

Epestemophobia is the fear of acquiring too much knowledge only to come upon forboding or disturbing information that one can no longer ignore upon discovery.

To some point this happens to be the case but the information which Iā€™ve uncovered is only uncomfortable in the sense of absurdity and strangeness and nothing eluding to malevolent intentions or any proven doom.

What people should find more frightening is that we have no English term for the ā€˜fear of ignoranceā€™ and it is ignorance that has made a guessing game when it comes to trying to determine peculiar experiences that fall outside of what we were told to expect as children; from this point forward we all become independent scientists in the dark left only with the crazy conjectures left behind by other lost scientists and artists before us.

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