expressive eggThe Schizophrenic and the PsychocratA long-form essay about the myth of mental illness and the fraudulence of psychocracy.Blog of Da
7 March, 2017Mental Illness does not exist. It was invented for two reasons: to control unruly and bothersome people, and to provide a justification for irresponsible behaviour. As Thomas Szasz argued, we no longer speak of arrogance, conceit, selfishness, boredom and so on, but sociopathy, narcissism, schizophrenia and attention deficit disorder. We do this to justify incarceration of undesirables and to pass the buck of our fears and cravings onto a phantom physical cause.
The fundamental fraudulence of the psychiatry industry does not mean there is no need for therapy and for help with our emotional problems, or that the problems themselves are inventions: they are often terrifyingly real. What it means is that the institutionalisation and medicalisation of our social and moral problems is a racket and those who willingly fall for it are handing their responsibility and autonomy over to a secular priesthood which cannot even perceive what ails us, let alone treat it.>snip<>snip<>snip<THE SCHIZOPHRENICSo if we remove the power of institutions and institutional ideology to determine reality, what are we left with? What is schizophrenia (or, by extension, ocd, adhd, manic-depression, phobia, bulimia, etc, etc)? If it’s not an illness, what is it? Does the word have any use?
The word schizophrenia (and its adjectival forms, schizophrenic and schizoid) are functionally the same as boredom, anger, guilt and desire. The time may come when these too become ‘diagnosable conditions’, but for now we correctly recognise them as emotions, which tend to produce certain kinds of ideas (anger, for example, tends to create ideas of revenge, justification and so on) and behaviours (stormy brow, raised voice, etc), which, further, tend to produce certain kinds of effect (tense atmosphere, cowering dog, etc). When we say that ‘he is angry’ we tend to mean he is behaving in a certain way and when we say ‘I am angry’ we tend to mean that we feel a certain way; meanings which blend into each other. We don’t tend to mean that he or I have some kind of anger virus or that the anger organ is malfunctioning and that this is causing the red face, clenched fist, subterranean threat of violence and compelling feeling that everyone else is to blame.
And so it is with schizophrenia. Once we have jettisoned the idea that it is an illness we are left with emotions and behaviours which, like all emotions and behaviours, are generated by the self (my responsibility) or by the world (our responsibility). If these emotions and behaviours tend to occur together, as they do, and are unpleasant or painful, as they are (to a terrifying degree in this case), then it makes sense to consider them — roughly and metaphorically — as one kind of thing (‘schizophrenia’) and then to investigate what might cause this kind of thing.
The problem is, as we shall see, that two profoundly different kinds of ‘emotion and behaviour’ are ordinarily described as schizophrenic. One of these is extraordinarily unpleasant and causes a great deal of suffering. I suggest that, once we have freed it of its mythical medical cause, there is no reason not to call people who think, feel and behave in the following ways schizophrenic:
1. Being unusually unresponsive (alogia, catatonia, ‘affective flattening’).
2. Feeling unusually anxious, even terrified.
3. Speaking metaphorically (‘my tools aren’t in the garage’), incoherently (disorganised speech) or ironically.
4. Paranoia and intense self-consciousness.
5. Grandiosity and ludicrous self-importance.
6. De-realisation; a sense that nothing is real, a conviction of living in a dream, a film or a shoddy virtual copy of the world.
7. Detachment and disengagement, a sense that nothing matters.
8. Fragmentation; the sense that everything is shattered, divided up, in bits.
9. Staring, an obsessive ‘fixing’ upon thoughts or phenomena, intense scrutiny of details.
10. Excessive rationality. The premises are bizarre and so are the conclusions, but the route from the former to the latter is [often] worked out with impeccable logic.
There are three kinds of people exhibit these symptoms.9 The first group, those usually admitted or sectioned as schizophrenic, are young people, usually men, who have grown up in an atmosphere that combines excessive emotion (especially critical, controlling or ‘emotionally overinvolved’ parents) with disabling dishonesty about it10 and who are conceited and lazy — who do not feel special enough (sometimes they have a more successful sibling), or unique or ‘esteemed’ enough (often through being deprived of any opportunities for independence, meaningful apprenticeship, etc) and who live in cities or urban areas. By using the techniques of obsessive mentation and sense-denial that such men have already picked up in the [urban] home and school, they begin to cut themselves completely off from the context and focus obsessively on objects (usually the body) and derealised ideas, which now, because they are without their originating, unifying, unselfish source, become a) fragmented and fixed in a freakishly hyper-real (or hyper-awake) present — which provides the sense of isolated protection schizoids seek from a painful reality — and b) are experienced as having come either from elsewhere (a.k.a. paranoia; ‘my thoughts are beamed into me from Titan’) or solely from me (a.k.a. grandiosity; ‘My thoughts control the moon!’) — both of which provide the sense of specialness lacking in the schizoid’s ordinary life. As with any denial of reality, there are dreadful side-effects from behaving in this way, which help confirm to everyone concerned that ‘he is a danger to himself and others’ and that he ‘requires care / attention / medication.’
The second type that exhibits schizoid thinking, feeling and behaviour is the modern and post-modern artist.11 The desire for attention without having actually done anything, intense focus on irrelevant details, absurdity unconnected to any underlying ‘strange truth’, denial of reality, constant irony, detachment and disengagement (think of Warhol’s tight, wry, knowing and slightly sneering distance from everything), shattering wholes into bits with an over-smattering of rationality and order are all hallmarks of the modern artist.
The modern (postmodern / contemporary) artist is exalted by the academic and media institutions of the world. His or her work is the standard of excellence to which all other art must reach if it is to gain access to prominent galleries, television documentaries, culture-section special-features and so on. Why should this be? Why should such transparently ugly creations, which display no harmony, no reality (by which I mean deep reality, not merely ‘things that happen’), no craft and no sense of refined sensibility whatsoever, why should these be the standard of artistic truth in our world? Could it be that this art is felt or perceived to be, by a large number of prominent people, beautiful, interesting or reassuring in some way? Could it be, to put it another way, that those who make decisions about what is artful or not, enjoy the schizoid view? Could they be, in a word, mad?
Yes, and not just them. Not even just those who celebrate Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Eva Hesse, Wassily Kandinsky, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jasper Johns, Damian Hirst, and other such high priests of ugly, irreal, meaninglessness. Take another look at the list above. Recognise any of those?
That’s right; the third category of schizophrenic… is you.
Are you not? Do you not have a tendency to stare, get utterly caught up in isolated fragments of experience (thoughts, ideas, things, tits, gun-sights, little high-tech objects…)? Do you ever smile thinly and let out cold, cheerless, sarcastic little witticisms? Do you ever get intensely and paralysingly self-conscious? Do you ever feel like life has no ultra-vivid zest, that strong passions and reckless delight seem like childhood myths, that all is drear? Do you ever feel dogged by a restless anxiety, a needling tension, awkwardness or a simmering sense of dread that no amount of fun, no quantity of money, no achievement or orgasm can ever quite quench? Do you ever have a bizarre sense that it’s all about you? Do you ever feel special, or are you addicted to activities which do nothing but make you feel special (famous, liked)? Do you ever get caught up in massively over-the-top enthusiasms which have a touch of mania about them, which sort of excludes everyone, and which you later feel a bit ashamed about? Are you sometimes rather too rational, does your rational mind sometimes lead you to absurd sometimes even horrific conclusions? Do you get annoyed with ‘irrational’ people, do simplicity, nature, innocence and presence sometimes make you feel a bit angsty, a bit irritable? Do you think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that truth doesn’t really exist, that reality is a myth? Do you ever have a sickening sense that nothing is real, that you are living in a shoddy cardboard cut-out of a world?
Every one of us is more or less schizoid. Those of us who end up in the funny farm — the full-blown schizophrenic — are just those of us who have taken this mania further than anyone else (very often not much further). We are all born into a world which puts continual pressure on us to focus on isolated objects and data, to perpetually and excessively think, to be a self, to give our autonomy over to institutions and our responsibility over to scapegoats, to be special, to demand unearned self-esteem, to be anxious and needy and to ignore, ridicule, co-opt or actively destroy the context.12 Those of us who bend to these pressures, who deform themselves to win in a world thus structured, are, at best, only different to the self-obsessed, self-conscious, self-imprisoned lunatic in degree, not in kind.
THE DISSIDENT AND THE MYSTICBut there’s another kind of person routinely labelled as ‘schizophrenic’, who exhibits a group of symptoms which, at first glance, might seem similar to those above, but in fact, is radically different. An enormous number of people who have been diagnosed as schizophrenic since the days of Blueler and Kraepelin — and forcibly institutionalised because of it — have exhibited one or more of the following symptoms:
1. Seeing or hearing things which other people do not see (hallucinations and delusions).
2. Bizarre, surreal or flamboyant ideas.
3. Intensely critical of the whole of society (rather than mere players within it).
4. Intractable; particularly antagonistic towards institutional authority.
5. Obsessed with the ineffable, the inexpressible, the ungraspable, the mysterious.
6. Language non-literal; metaphorical and paradoxical.
7. Unpredictable, outrageous, offensive.
8. Intense sensitivity.
9. Remarkable creativity.
10. Love.
Such people might include Jesus of Nazareth (‘Lift the stone and there you will find me. Split the wood and I am there.’), Jacob Boehme (‘Not I, the I that I am, know these things: but God knows them in me.’), Leo Tolstoy (‘Governments are not only not necessary but are harmful and most highly immoral institutions’) Sri Ramana Maharshi (‘I am everywhere’), Aldous Huxley (’Eternity — it’s as real as shit’) and Ivan Illich (‘School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.’)… in short mystics and dissidents. That these people were not committed is an accident of history. Any one of the quotes above, at the wrong time and wrong place, would be enough to confirm a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Institutionally entrenched professionals are unable to tell the difference between mysticism / dissidence, and schizophrenia for the simple reason that it serves their purposes to institutionalise the job lot. That one group function normally, are healthy and happy, even brilliant, and the other are incompetent, unhealthy, deeply miserable and dull doesn’t enter into official diagnoses.
One consequence of this is the common idea that ‘geniuses are touched with madness’ — or, as Laing had it, ‘schizophrenics are sane and we’re all mad’. There is now a positive mania to diagnose creative geniuses with mental illnesses. The impulse to bring Homer, Buddha, Shakespeare, Beethoven or whoever down to the level of a diagnosable patient is irresistible to those in power and those who serve it. To say, in effect, ‘ah, well, The Odyssey and the Late Quartets are all very wonderful, but I’m glad I’m not a nutcase like those guys!’ and thereby denigrate the mystic, trivialise craft and dedication, exalt fictitious insanity and, once again, abnegate all personal responsibility to oppose authority and find the creative source of life for oneself… How useful!
Creative geniuses (or, more accurately, creative people sufficiently hollowed out to let genius speak) suffer more conspicuously than ordinary people, not because they are famous but because they work to experience and express life without the civilised internal censor interfering. But this is why they are loved: not because they are mad, but the precise opposite, because they are paragons of sanity. We love Chaucer and Mozart and Akutagawa and Krishnamurti because they show us what it really means to be an ordinary human; not an exceptional genius (much less a white man or a Japanese homosexual or whatever), but a conscious member of our species which, underneath the schizoid self, we know ourselves to be.
And this is why they are persecuted. Mystics and dissidents seek and seek to express responsibility, autonomy, what we have in common; life, the context, the consciousness that precedes the intrinsically schizoid self, the sane source of humanity underneath our millennial brainwashing and the present moment. What there is — direct, without the interfering filter of mentation and emotion. All of which is horrifying to authority.
You may have noticed this in your own life? You may have been overwhelmed by a storm of strange and wonderful ideas, tumbling pell mell into your blasted mind? You may have had a profound feeling of horror at the zone of evil that we live in? You may have realised that ‘we are led by the least among us’ and resisted the glad-handing coercions of authority? You may have felt intoxicated by the indescribable mystery of life, or the intense thisness of what is actually happening — and you may have reached beyond your normal, literal speech to grasp a magical analogy, or song, for it? You may have been blessed with a moment of near terrifying brilliance, courage or dignity? You may even have witnessed visions or heard a still quiet voice speaking long-forgotten truths to you? You may have felt, coming from nowhere, an inexpressible love — not love for anything, but an experience of love that, astonishingly, you just are?
You may have noticed that, underneath your schizophrenia, you too are a dissident and a mystic?
>snip<>snip<>snip<There's more.... https://expressiveegg.org/2017/03/07/sc ... sychocrat/ So much more... https://expressiveegg.org/ 
