Don't do it without supervision, I nearly jumped 100m because the voices in my head convinced me I'm a Star Trek captain and will be transported to my bridge mid-jump.
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".
Prtty much echoing what you said, in this video Cecila McGough, who has schizophrenia, talks about how important it is that people don't do anything to confirm her hallucinations.
That's good to know, but it leaves you without many options, since all the experts also suggest not to confront them with reality. So how to interact with somebody who as a psychosis and sees a complete twisted reality?
Call an ambulance. Acute psychosis needs immediate treatment, they may easily hurt themselves or others. The psychosis can be stopped with one injection, don't prolong their suffering. Before the ambulance arrives, try to reassure them that they are safe, there is peace around them and help is on the way. Once the ambulance arrives, go away - it might get messy.
I am not sure from which country you gain your perspective, but in Germany it's not what's gonna happen. Your human right is the highest good, and police or any doctor is only permitted to force you to take drugs or put you in a clinic when you are acute suicidal or you harm others.
Unfortunately I know that first hand.
I was wondering why she wasn't looking at the camera or interviewer.
Turns out the reason was that she saw an hallucination in that direction. So she looked away, she explains, in a follow up video 5 years later: (I found via the YouTube comments section)
Since she was 100 km away, it didn't make sense she was going to be there in 15 minutes by normal means, so it meant either she was lying or OP was actually going to be teleported. OP apparently chose to believe the latter, since it confirmed their current delusion.
So it didn't postpone anything, maybe if she had given a realistic ETA (or just said "I'm coming, wait for me") it would have worked though.
It's very difficult to know what to do in these situations though, I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
> I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
The problem here in my opinion is rather that most people are used to lie, manipulate and betray (in society this behaviour is actually euphemized via the term "white lies"). In this particular case, such a behaviour does have consequences. See the example of this thread where the girlfriend claims she will be there in 15 minutes, despite being 100 km away.
Since most people are not used to being honest (or, I assume, actually never were), they give similar descriptions of their difficulties when their lies do have consequences like your "everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines".
It's a bit more complicated than just "not being used being honest".
Being 100% honest and not hiding anything doesn't work either, so it's a constant balancing act between telling them the truth, reassuring them and sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying. Lying is out of question though and I think the people who resort to that do it out of laziness more than anything, or maybe well-intentioned wishful thinking in the case of the aforementioned girlfriend. But this is always harmful, not just with psychotic persons.
In the particular example, the girlfriend did lie to him by telling him she'll be there in 15 minutes despite being 100 km away. This exactly lead to the strange chain of thoughts.
I think what GP is saying is that white lies are not necessarily betrayal. Betrayal is when someone violates your trust somehow. [0] You can see some examples of lying in the wiktionary definition I linked. (see the last two definitions) However, both these definitions involve the lie causing some negative consequence. A white lie is specifically a lie done to spare someones feelings. It's possible that the white lie can cause negative consequences, but that is not always the case.
To take a concrete example, consider the classic white lie "no, that dress doesn't make you look fat". It is possible that this could cause someone to wear an ugly dress, but the person probably looked at themselves in the mirror too, so they probably will end up choosing a dress that doesn't look awful. In this case there is no negative consequence associated with the white lie unless person wearing the dress is unable to accurately self assess. (which is something the speaker hopefully would know about the dress wearer)
You could define being lied to as a violation of your trust. In particular, I think autistic people often can't pick up on social cues, and so rely more on people speaking the truth to them. However, that doesn't mean white lies are betrayal for everyone. If you in particular feel like white lies are betrayal, you might want to tell people in your life that so they know it's important to you. They won't automatically know and it isn't automatically important to them.
I believe you when you say that white lies violate your trust. I'm saying that that experience isn't universal though. Different people define violations of their trust differently. Thus my suggestion at the end to make sure that the people around you know that this is part of your definition. (Though you might have already done this)
A lie is a lie, and GP's point still stands. In effect, you're proving their point by doing everything possible to justify a state of affairs for a preponderance of people whereby it's okay to water down the reality of the situation to "spare them an emotional reaction".
I can understand where GP is coming from. A lot of my professional career even exists because someone has to cut through the massive layer of bullshit and distortion people generate in an org to be able to make substantive statements about what is the truth, born out by quantitative data and observation.
After a while in the field, you really start to lose your appreciation for other people walking around "sparing" one another from the Truth.
I agree that in professional settings, it's usually best for the efficiency of the company to be direct about everything. I also generally prefer that people provide accurate feedback about how I am doing in interpersonal relationships. I do think that "sparing" someone from an emotional reaction is sometimes a reasonable thing to do in an interpersonal relationship though, depending on the relationship.
Back to the dress example. Let's say the dress wearer is my girlfriend, and I have been asked the question "does this dress make me look fat?". Let's also assume I do think this particular dress makes her look fat, but generally find her attractive, and know that she has body image issues. If I answer "yes", or even "that dress isn't particularly flattering on you", she might interpret that as "He thinks the dress makes me look fat" -> "I am fat" -> "I am ugly", which is not actually what I think and not what I want her to think of herself. Even if I try to reassure her that I don't think she's ugly, she might think that my reassurance is a lie. People with insecurities don't always think logically about them. I think "You look beautiful" would probably be the most ideal response, (in that is both true and doesn't cause her to spiral) but if I didn't have time to think about my response, "No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
If I feel the need to actually help her choose the right dress, I can back that up by pointing out exactly how some other dress that looks better on her actually looks good.
Of course, if I feel like she could take it well, then pointing out exactly how the bad dress is bad might be helpful to her. However, I feel like keeping her from spiraling is more important then informing her of every detail of my taste in dresses.
Obviously, I made this scenario very concrete, but I feel like you can't really decide if it is a good idea without that very concrete knowledge. Which is one reason why white lies might be a bad idea in professional settings, where you don't necessarily know how people will respond to things in the first place. (Because you might not know them well)
>"No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
And you're right. It'll feel like the better response; because all of our social circuitry heuristics honed over our lives by a biological imperative to minimize energy expenditure will happily present that as a quick, harmony preserving fix. However, in that case, are you not doing an injustice to your partner with self-image issues by A) bearing false witness to your true feelings on the matter (dress does not fo you any favors, darling) and B) not addressing the pathological denigratory self-image with active confrontation and refutation of the validity thereof, with an accurate accounting of your own reasoning?
Example: I've had that question asked of me while my partnner and I were trying to shopping for wear to attend a wedding in. My partner loves blue. Like BSOD blue. Cobalt electric blue. She was drawn to a dress in that color. She had a friend along that was already giving the customary platitudes, but asked me my thoughts on it. That color, unfortunately, in my eyes, does not love her back. Her skin/complexion tends toward the rosey and warm; a combo which strongly clashes with and fights with said the coolness of the blue, and which would tend to cause the eye to pick out the paler aspects of her instead of accentuating the her livelier parts. The cut, and just how it laid on her body didn't complement her. It hid her best parts, and accentuated the parts I knew she was ultimately more self-conscious about because there wasn't a damn thing to do about them, and the baggage that came with it. The strong blue just visually overwhelmed the visual experience to the point where all you saw was the dress, and how it dominated the image of her; not the person wearing it, with their actions and body being accentuated and emphasized by the dress. I told her if that was what she really wanted, and if it made her feel good, then what does it matter? However, I thought she'd look better either in a purple, or perhaps more importantly a dress of a different cut. One that instead of looking like a wrapper, would actually lay on her body in a way that would naturally draw the eye to her, and what she was doing.
End result? She kept looking. She ended up picking out a pattern and cut that she felt was more befitting for her role/relation to the two getting married (deep or high saturation colors are apparently reserved for the bridesmaids per her thoughts on the subject, and something a bit more matronly made her feel more comfortable at the event). She also picked up a dress I thought really made her look gorgeous, and I adore seeing her looking regal af in, and wouldn't be out of place at about any event.
I acknowledged, and reaffirmed that ultimately, the most important thing was how she felt. I also provided a truthful evaluation about the answer to the question, giving her more insight about how I see things,the things I look at, and the affect they have on me; and as it turned out, she's gotten way more use out of the dress she ultimately picked than she'd ever have been comfortable getting out of the blue one. So by taking the path of truth, I opened a door to a novel experience for her, and she says she's happier for having done so.
Not to mention, you're kind of doing yourself an injustice by not really valuing your own feelings on the matter. I'm not saying that it's okay to tell someone the dress looks them look like they're wearing a trash bag; but it's absolutely okay to express your feelings on something in that type of circumstance, even if your rational side tells you that maybe you should be silent. The only way to help someone through the healing process is to acknowledge there is something there, and to be supportive and truthful. Placing care about everyone else above your own care for yourself is as sure a recipe for a bad time as any. One can't wholely and truly give for others what one does not yet possess for themselves have.
It may not necessarily win one many invites to fancy parties, but I've found that getting into the habit of twisting things makes the process of growth, healing, or recovery so ruinously complicated as to present an overall harm in comparison to the brief cauterizing application of truthful, sincere communication. See the cleverest code as compared to the most straightforward as applied to social dynamics. Many of the same principles transfer.
I acknowledge that all lies are going to make things more difficult in the long run while making things easier in the short run. I would like to point out that sometimes things need to be easier in the short run though. In code terms this is something like technical debt.
Getting back to the example. If there is some combination of not being close enough, (in the example, lets say just started dating) and insecurities running too high, then they won't necessarily trust your reasoning. They might just feel like you are attacking them, or that you are trying to cover for not reacting fast enough. The end result is that they now feel ugly and like their date hates them. This won't make their body image issues any better.
While I've not dated anyone with that level of insecurity, I've been friends with a some, though none of them had body image issues specifically. In my experience they have to both trust you quite a bit, and also be ready to confront their own insecurities. I've tried to speak my mind clearly to one friend who evidently weren't ready to process their insecurities, and in the end it just seemed to make them feel bad and also hurt our friendship. They seemed to feel like I was attacking them and making excuses in a manner similar to what I talked about in the example. I've had some level of success with another friend, but they had actually expressed self-awareness and a desire to change. My current policy is to keep away from people's insecurities unless they express a desire to change or ask me to be brutally honest.
I could choose to only let people into my life that don't need me to route around their insecurities. However, I do want to be available to people who need emotional support, which means occasionally placing myself in a position where I need to be careful with people. My actual weapon of choice here is to re-frame the situation, because I'm pretty terrible at lying convincingly and also don't enjoy doing it. An example of a re-frame is the "you look beautiful" in my first post. However, re-frames are also a stop-gap measure as other people won't do such re-frames on their own. What I am doing is not technically deception, but I don't feel like the sort of deception that white lies are composed of has significantly worse side effects. They are both just a way to push the issue down the road. Furthermore, coming up with re-frames is a moderately difficult skill that I have specifically cultivated, and I think white lies are easier to do "untrained". Thus, if someone is put on the spot, I'd prefer if they didn't write off white lies just because they fit the definition of lie.
As far as your comments on doing myself dirty. Guilty as charged, I certainly have work to do on that front.
To me GP seems like an insane person with an out of whack understanding of what "white lies" are and what's going on in that social dynamic. I think they need to seriously get a grip. Normally I wouldn't write things like this on HN because it's rude and they're a complete stranger anyway and I don't know what's in their head, but I wouldn't want to "betray" them by not saying it.
I think I spelled it out in the post you are referencing, but I see a white lie as the equivalent of "not saying something because it is rude", except for when you are forced to say something and not doing so would be meaningful.
I'm pretty curious about what you think white lies do in a social dynamic though. I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate.
EDIT: My post is literally your GP, but based on your stance earlier in this thread, I think you were talking about aleph_minus_one's post I was responding to. In which case I think our opinions are similar?
Yes I was talking about aleph_minus_one's post, apologies for the confusion (I got a bit mixed up). Unfortunately it's too late to edit it.
In terms of the social dynamic I agree with you, the "white lies" serve as a way to be considerate of the other person. And it's not just "lies" about them either, if someone is in a hurry or in some casual context and asks how I am and I've had a shitty day, I might say "I'm fine" to avoid them feeling the need to talk through my problems with me. If someone asks at dinner and I spent the morning having explosive diarrhea, I don't share that either. That is a classic white lie but to see that as a betrayal strikes me as extremely bizarre.
>sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying.
You mean lying by omission? A.k.a. not speaking the quiet part? It's still received and noted by the other person you know. Likely by the part of the psyche they haven't got consciously integrated, or are experiencing a connectivity problem with.
Remember, that part of them is still a very big chunk of human neural processor. It isn't stupid. It's also not terribly capable of straightforwardly communicating. What it is scarily good at is navigating the external world, which includes seeing the void of what one doesn't say. If it's already running amok, pouring more fuel in the form of duplicity on the fire is probably not the greatest idea.
In this particular case, it was sort of the opposite. I'm used to her always being honest, so when she told me it's 15 minutes I trusted her 100%. She was getting a friend to rescue me, and she was counting on me trusting her and waiting at home, but unfortunately that was of no use as I went off to the city before they could even pack their things after that call.
Should she have been more honest and said "X will be their shortly. I'm really worried about you, please stay put."? Just trying to follow this chain of reasoning.
Yes, that would work. I was really looking for confirmation, so if she said something like this the issue could be avoided. But who knows what I'd come up with 10 minutes later...
This is the reason that I've only ever done LSD once.
It wasn't especially anxiety inducing for the most part and was quite fun, but I feel as if I just got lucky and that in a slightly different circumstance I could just have convinced myself that my apartment window was in fact the front door and fall out of it.
Retrospectively, it was a total blunder - not truly hers since she couldn't be expected to act perfectly in that situation, but it's definitely something we've discussed as the TOP ONE thing to never do and always mention it to others when discussing situations like that.
It didn't postpone anything. I called her because I knew I'm going mad and wanted to confirm if it's true or not. Of course I didn't word it this way, though. What she said confirmed the delusion, nearly got me killed and even though I didn't jump, I got lost in the city, hurt myself, nearly hurt others, until someone called the police few hours later.
You're reading into it too much. You don't think you're actually Picard or Kirk, you think the world around you is very similar to the stories, but not actually the story itself.
In my case, it went like this: Whoa, my crew is telepathically beaming me instructions and we are right in the middle of a mission. Where the fuck am I? Crew, give me my command protocols. Oh, I command a starship? Sure, sorry, the heat around here, I might be hit with something, I don't remember, help me! Oh, you're going to transport me? Sure, go ahead, let me just run away from this commando waiting on the hallway using the only other exit - the window... Now it makes sense that I'm a starship captain, why would a commando be waiting there otherwise...
Without supervision? What good is that? This is a disease that breaks people. Those who would convince themselves to see such symptoms in a positive light are doing nothing but damage.
Yes. What I mean is that doing it can have unintended consequences - so don't do it if you don't know what you're doing and/or not fully in control of the situation.
I find this fascinating. Could you please elaborate about anything youd find relevant/interesting about how such delusions come about without being obvious delusions? I cant imagine actually believing I am Star Trek captain, but I sure can believe someone else do. I just cant imagine how that must feel/look like inside that someones head.
At the beginning, you know you're mad. I remember the first hour or so, I was thinking "no fucking way this is real". But it feels so real that you quickly stop believing anyone who says otherwise and you mark them as the enemies. Your head keeps inventing reasons why is it real and the voices keep explaining it - in some cases it's religious experiences, in my case it's hyper-advanced technology enabling telepathic communication.
I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.
At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.
How do you know it isn't true? Philip K Dick came to believe in his psychosis visions (he believed he truly was in Rome in 60AD or so but was being fed a created world by the Romans). But he had good personal evidence for it that he couldn't deny even in a non-psychotic state. Do you have anything like that?
I guess a better way to phrase it is, do you have compelling evidence that your beliefs are true that you have to force yourself to ignore, or does it just seem like nonsense when you aren't in a psychotic state?
Not OP, my manic episodes come with extreme paranoia, and I have had two psychotic breaks during really bad ones. This may be a completely different experience. Apologies if I sound a bit flippant.
For myself, my brain always knows what reality is because all of my senses work. Delusions are clearly internal. My self-awareness is firmly in reality but all I can do is watch myself react as if the delusions are reality.
Many people can’t grasp this. Awareness and control are always linked. “Blind rage” is just that. Awareness is gone.
I hope no one else ever has to experience being powerless in their own body and screaming uselessly in their head to make it stop.
As horrifying as this sounds, these experiences don’t haunt me. I thought they were just burnout from stress and carried on like nothing happened afterwards.
“Normalization of deviance” doesn’t even begin to describe my life experience. Eventually, I was convinced by my doctor to see a psychiatrist for ADHD. It wasn’t until my third visit she realized I had severe, high-functioning bipolar. Once I got over a month of denial, it was “Okay. That does explain a lot.” XD
You're not suddenly irrational in a psychosis, you still have your logic working, just with crooked inputs. So it took me months to sort through some details and make sense of what actually happened and what didn't. There are some things I'm probably never going to be able to explain and I just have to leave it like that. But I don't believe any of my delusions happened, I just would like to know what happened.
All the voices, and the sense of urgency and danger go away immediately when you wake up after a dose of antipsychotic medication. Your first thoughts are that you lived through some weird things which are not happening at all anymore, and now there's a psychiatrist untying you from a hospital bed and handing you a cigarette, which puts stuff into context. You also probably feel the best you felt in weeks/months because it's your first night of sleep since forever.
I can easily imagine someone thinking "well, I had a psychosis, but there was shit going on". Fortunately that's not me.
This is your personal experience, but I'll note there are others who do become irrational along with having altered perception. It's hard to give generalized descriptions.
So, rather than just having some false facts, they will make bizarre "inference" steps in thinking that can border on free-association. In the case of one of my relatives, this process would accompany something almost like amnesia. After a burst of this illogical reasoning that gets way out into the weeds for tens of minutes or hours, she would seem to lose track of it and "reset" in some way to start again.
Out of this recurrence, you could start to sense an overall theme that was evolving at a different time scale, beneath all the illogical tangents. Even through different phases of treatment and remission, those themes would resurface as a sort of barometer of her illness. There wasn't always as stark of a difference between normal days and psychotic break days.
I really appreciate your responses (and ones others have made elsewhere in this thread), they give much better insight into what someone is going through internally than the clinical definitions I see.
Just a general piece of advice: when a person is discussing their struggles with psychotic delusions, its kind of messed up to say "Yeah, but how do you know they aren't real?"
Given the context in this conversation about how confirming a delusion can be dangerous, I think the concern is just that there may be situations where asking this genuine and interesting question could cause harm.
I think probably that on balance you've got away with it though because the people commenting seem to be safely outside the other side of their psychosis and are able to answer interestingly without being harmed by the question.
Yeah, it was odd because the first time I told a psychiatrist that I heard voices, it was because of a split-second incident out in the street where I swear I heard a distinct vocalization from the vicinity of a traffic light. No human was there, of course, and the illusion was over before it began.
That was enough to slap a prescription on me for years to come.
Eventually I began to question why they kept wanting to prescribe this stuff and why one of the standard questions was always "do you hear voices?" and I also began to question their terminology. "What do you mean, by hearing voices?" "Oh, well, hallucinations." and I drilled down into their definitions and epistemology for a while.
I told them that I am a Christian, and of course I hear voices. People of faith, who are quite sane, discuss this openly all the time. We are always encouraged to listen to the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Holy Spirit, to listen to the voices of those who wrote Sacred Scripture. I told the doc that I'd be crazy (and lost, and significantly more troubled) if I didn't hear anyone's voice.
Of course they're probing for stuff to medicate, they're probing for irrationality, and they're probing for evil voices who goad us to do harm to ourselves or to others. And of course I was troubled by those types too.
But they weren't unreal. They weren't hallucinations because the sources exist in reality. They don't come from human bodies, but spirits are real to Christians.
The solution is not to medicate the voices or deny that the voices exist or to ignore the voices, it's to form our consciences so that we can stand up to lies, stand up to temptation, and resist evil. It's as simple as that. Whether the voices come from Mom and Dad, or social media, or television, or they're 100% in our heads, we need to discern their spirits, and deal with them according to our conscience.
It was so jarring that the doctors would be goading me to deny my faith in this way and to claim that if I heard a voice encouraging me in a moral direction, that it was fake, a hallucination, a disease. I have been so profoundly insulted. This is one of the many reasons I lost trust in them.
A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
For myself, my imagination and view of reality merged. My senses were fine but all of the processing and my imagination started writing to the same memory spaces.
I was aware that my senses didn’t match what I was processing. It didn’t matter.
That's what happens to kids. Up to eight years old, if I recall correctly, they're unable to tell apart imagination from reality. If they think of something, say a monster hiding at home, it exists in reality. Which is a big problem while watching movies that can have scary parts as they now think they're real.
A six year old can perceive normally. They really don’t see people who aren’t there. They consciously know the difference between seeing a monster and thinking it exists. They can mis-attribute information by categorizing something they see as a monster. They play and they get really invested in it. Children are not psychotic. They are using their imagination to explore reality.
I see the monsters in the room. I spent four months as a bipedal wolf feeling wind in my fur and the motions of my tail. I truly believed I wasn’t human and the humans would kill me as soon as they found that out. My childhood memories were replaced by imagined ones.
I've had sleep walking episodes for most of my life since I was about 5, probably driven by sleep apnea. I've also had experiences that are as real as this waking life while meditating and especially back in my party days.
The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.
Some examples of mass psychosis:
* Many people don't know that their boss charges more than they're paid in wages.
* Many people work administrative and loss-leader jobs and perceive their work as a cost on the organization (programmers, engineers, most people outside of sales).
* Many people think that those around them are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than they are, and don't realize that their manager or boss is mostly winging it based on a probabilistic estimate of the best course of action.
* Many people think that they are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than everyone around them (egocentric people working in IT/tech, doctors, lawyers, billionaires, etc).
* Many people think that everyone else shares their spiritual worldview, everything from a man in the sky to we're all one in universal consciousness.
* Many people think that others don't share their spiritual worldview (Christianity and Judaism may not see parents giving up their meals for their starving children in a bombed out Islamic community).
How can we have civilized society, including free and fair elections, under such mass hysteria? When people have so many delusions that politicians can pit half the population against the other merely be selecting sides from a short list of wedge issues?
My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.
But hey, I'm the delusional one.
Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.
I've been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder when I was in my early twenties.
I've had several full blown psychotic episodes and been hospitalised several times.
Fortunately there was one medication - Amisulpride - that kept me stable enough to be able to have a professional career, though not without a lot of struggling and sacrifice.
I know what psychosis is and honestly, this avatar therapy feels a bit like bullshit to me.
When in psychosis, you are not listening to your voices - you are your voices and they can command you to do things you do not want to do. You are not in control of you consciousness.
There is hope though. A revolution in mental illnessis going on - check the metabolic mind site for more info - https://metabolicmind.org
Many other people have substantially improved because of metabolic therapy and there are dozens of random control trials going on with very promising early results.
There are ever more cases of successful treatment via metabolic therapy
Under the risk of being unpopular, it's my responsibility to let people know about this treatment option and bring hope to those who suffer from this terrible illness.
I don't question the good faith of the researcher but i think we should prioritise what works - and there is a growing volume of evidence that metabolic therapies work.
I take back the bullshit qualification though - it was a mistake on my part.
One of my favorite speculative hypotheses is Bicameral Mind Theory, which asserts that something like schizophrenia was relatively common until relatively recently, about 3000 BC. It argues that it was relatively normal for humans to hear voices in their head directing them. So when we read religious texts about the gods commanding so-and-so to do such-and-such, it wasn't just a spiritual metaphor, but an actual voice people heard in their heads and interpreted as higher powers.
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
Humans migrated to the Americas by at the latest 8900 BC when the land bridge disappeared, and we have evidence for migrations way before that. There's no way any kind of genetic change that occurred around 3000 BC could have made it to the Americas, and the indigenous population does not seem to exhibit such divergent modes of thought. They are essentially modern humans. So this date needs to be pushed way back.
No, Jaynes posits it happened as recently as 3000 BC, and bases the hypothesis on evidence from sources that are far more recent than 70 kya (not that we have any literary sources that are 70 kya old)
I’d speculatively propose the reverse: that a change occurred that led to our suppressing these “voices” to our subconscious, where they are still present but suppressed below the threshold of conscious awareness. Interestingly, in parts of the world, these voices persist (eg Ethiopia where a high percentage of people report regularly hearing voices in their heads). Also interestingly, this book you mention was one of David Bowie’s favourites - yes, he of the multiple pop personas.
The phenomenon of auditory hallucinations often attributed to schizophrenics in modern day, was, far from being an aberrant condition, in fact the normal every day condition of ancient bicameral man. There was no concept of "I" or "free will;" the gods merely issued their auditory commands, and man obeyed, not having any choice in the matter. This was simply every day life for the bicameral man, who lived in a community of other "like-minded" beings that also experienced similar auditory hallucinations, often commands or admonishments, from the same god-king ruling the civilization.
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
The gods were in no sense "figments of the imagination" of anyone. They *were* man's volition. They occupied his nervous system,
probably his right hemisphere, and from stores of admonitory and preceptive experience, transmuted this experience into articulated
speech which then "told" the man what to do.
Several factors were attributed to its decline: the development of written language localizing a disembodied voice that was once omnipresent into a stele or rock carving; the emergence of trade and the contact of other societies, governed by different god-kings, leading to proto-theories of mind meant to explain the differing behaviour of the rival civilization; selective pressures against the viability of such "bicameral theocracies;" the development of free will. Reasons abound, but what followed was the collapse of bicameral mind and the disappearance of the voices, substantiated by various observations of ancient cultural artifacts: hypnotic induction of trance at the Oracle of Delphi, the practices of divination and omen reading, the production of artistic works in Mesopotamia depicting empty thrones and absent gods, or the crying out to the gods for their assistance and return, as in The Babylonian Theodicy, or the Psalms. All this in order to "re-awaken" the voices of gods that had once dispensed wisdom and now fell dormant with the emergence of modern, self-conscious, free-willed, individualistic man.
The two hemispheres started to communicate (better) so wouldn't feel each other as strangers anymore. Or at least that was my understanding, in very simple words and without asking any AI :)
In market economics and evolution alike, when we posit that an organism/industry became more effective through some kind of change, we also require an explanation for "And why hadn't it already done this? What was stopping it from doing so earlier, and what was the mechanism that this constraint was removed?"
Genuinely unexploited niches and entirely novel strategies exist, but they are extraordinarily rare.
Do other primates show strong bicameral connectivity in terms of physical brain structures?
I don't know how far back "back in the day" is, but the UK sources below seem to show that alcohol (particularly spirits)[1] seemed to be quite popular in the late 1800s[0], and that in the 1550s it was Ale, 1650s it was Gin, 1750s saw a drop during the industrial revolution.
It's really a non-scientific idea, in the Popplerian sense. How would you debunk it? How would you confirm it? It's not in that class of idea.
A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
Oh, you've debunked it? That's pretty cool. I look forward to your published interviews with people from the time.
You have an opinion that the hypothesis is false. I share that opinion. We probably have fairly radically different reasons for our opinions, though. Either way, they are just opinions, however well informed. We don't have proof.
Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between”
Idea or theory can be great, well constructed and intellectually interesting without being true.
Aquatic ape hypothesis is similar. It's a initially a great theory and explains many things. Only when you start to investigate other explanations, the theory starts to fall a apart.
Endurance running hypothesis on the other hand seems to hold. Incidentally it explains many of the same things as aquatic ape hypothesis, and there is more supporting evidence.
Interestingly this idea of helping people to talk to the voices in their head is not new. The basis for IFS therapy (which emerged in the 80s) actively teaches people to have dialogue with their inner "parts". It is becoming one of the gold-standard therapies for CPTSD, anxiety, and a range of other trauma related conditions.
The core discovery of the therapy is that the human mind has an inherent multiplicity. Once you accept that and go from there, the rest of the technique emerges naturally. It's really quite amazing. I highly recommend the book "No bad parts" by Dr Richard Schwartz, the discoverer of the technique.
What really excites me here is the use of a virtual avatar that personifies the voice. That is really new to me and I can see all sorts of possibilities to link with IFS.
Most schools of psychotherapy are equally effective, with the very notable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders. For most patients, the school of psychotherapy only matters insofar as they buy into it - nearly all of the therapeutic benefit is totally independent of the particular methodology or even the training and experience of the therapist. Even therapeutic approaches specifically designed to be pure placebo turn out to be just as effective as everything else. If IFS or Freudian psychoanalysis are metaphors for how we think, then they just aren't useful metaphors.
This just isn't proven at all. And likely untrue. There is a reason the dodo bird effect is controversial.
1. Most therapies have not received the number of RCTs as CBT so it's not possible to make statements like the one you made.
2. There is wildly varying quality in therapists and the quality of the therapeutic relationship is widely accepted to be centrally important to treatment outcomes. It is thus much more likely that a good therapist with a shitty tool is better than a bad therapist with a good tool. Averaged out, this would explain the same effect.
You've inverted the burden of proof. If someone dreams up a new kind of therapy, it's their job to prove that it actually works; they can't just assert that it works based on anecdote. I'm flattering those relatively-untested therapies by assuming that they're all equally effective. In any case, the effect size over pill placebo is extremely small (again, with the honourable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders).
I would tend to agree with you here, with a caveat.
All these theories are describing the same underlying phenomenon so there is a "blind men and the elephant" effect. They also substantially build on one another
The caveat is that what really sets these models apart is how they propose to navigate the mind. This is where I believe IFS stands out. But it would take a much longer comment to explain that. Maybe it's worth writing an article about.
I've come to the conclusion that psychodynamic therapy is harmful for neurotic depressives like myself. Dwelling in my neuroses enhances them.
I wish there was a triage psychiatrist I could see that would help me identify the most effective type of therapy for my situation and then help me find a therapist.
I would hesitate to say bullshit. They are all models and very abstract relative to the complexity of the mind. But to extend the blind men and the elephant allegory, there is a practical difference between describing a leg and describing a trunk.
This reminds me of a book I loved and still love, which was mentioned recently in another topic: Peter Watts - Blindsight. Hard sf with a bit of everything, including this multiplicity you mention.
See also Genpo Roshi's Big Mind, Big Heart which has one assume the persona of various aspects of their mind and attempt to carry out a dialogue as that aspect.
>As much as 8 percent of the population reports experiencing auditory hallucinations on a regular basis (13 percent hear them at least occasionally), compared to just 1 percent who are diagnosed with schizophrenia. https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/articl...
Hearing voices may be a symptom of something serious, but not always. As long as a person's grasp of reality is not in danger and voices don't stress out people, they can live with them and not even seek help. Not all people hear negative voices. Older lonely people have been known to say that voices keep them company.
> voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated complete persons since childhood ,visually and everything. He discussed matters with them. In the end, he was able to get rid of them when he decided that they were not helpful anymore. It's easier to understand his weird theories and spirituality when you have read his autobiography. The guy was off the charts but not disabled by it.
> Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated completely people since childhood ,visually and everything.
It's maybe easier to understand his focus on individuation, or integration of the component parts of the psyche into a cohesive whole, in light of this. Jung draws from esoteric alchemy and other related traditions (see his work: Psychology and Alchemy) which, instead of viewing the mind as a singular, monolithic entity, prefer conceiving of it as an organism comprised of many parts - Hermetic Qabalah being one such example.
Looks like a really promising approach to therapy as well.. right up until they said they'd stop voicing it by a skilled psychologist and get an AI to do it, while putting the psychotic person into VR instead of over a screen.. that was a big 'fuck no'.
I see where they're coming from, though: right now you have to be certified on this very specific program, meaning you only get the benefits if you have access to one of the 38 people currently trained for it in the UK.
I would definitely want a professional to be in charge but, as the article itself points out, "Joe recently went back to his GP in search of help with his anxiety (...) The GP put him on a waiting list for NHS talking therapy, and warned that he could be in for a very long wait". Given how bad access to mental health resources is I may be willing to take "a community nurse, or a nursing assistant" now over "wait several months for a chance at a doctor who may not be the right fit for you".
I wouldn't dream of allowing an AI to roam free - as the article says patients can get more psychotic and arguably "you should end it" could very well be part of the training data. But if the AI suggests lines that a trained human can oversee... then maybe?
I think your proposal of AI therapists with human overseers would be okay if we were able to develop some kind of metrication and monitoring of the human oversight portion.
Without that control, what would inevitably happen would be that the highly-scalable part of the system (the AI) would be scaled, and the difficult-to-scale part of the system (the human) would not. We would fairly quickly end up with a situation where a single human was "overseeing" hundreds or thousands of AI conversations, at which point the oversight would become ineffective.
I don't know how to metricate and monitor human oversight of AI systems, but it feels like there are already other systems (like Air Traffic Control) where we manage to do similar things.
If they are going to get creative, perhaps apply the constructive effects of some mind altering drugs? Under AI shaman supervision of course!
I have never heard voices, but experienced two forms of dissociation for a while after a trauma. Nothing was real, was one of them. Couldn’t trust any scene I was in or the chair I was going to sit on. Unending vertigo and feelings of experiencing a fiction.
I think it’s absolutely weird that the proctor is voicing the avatar
I’m imagining some Unreal Engine Skyrim deity on screen being voiced by my therapist, acting with a vocoder. Like, c’mon.
Definitely train a computer to do this part, generate your psychosis demon and have it really say the abstractions you described. Theyre already shockingly scary in realism when theyre not prompted to be.
A VR headset might be a little too immersive and triggering
Yes you definitely want a possibly suicidal person to be talking to a "AI" engine who talks back with the avatar they normally hear. (This was sarcasm in case you missed it)
If there were some evidence that the voices people hear are generated in a readable portion of the brain and you could train the AI on specifically those parts, it could be a powerful therapy.
Hell, make it into a videogame RPG where the patient is the hero and the labyrinth they must conquer is their own mind. Their party could consist of good friends and trained psychologists who work together to probe, map, reveal, and conquer the demons in the patients mind through teamwork, collaboration, and shared experiences.
However, it probably shouldn't be done outside of a clinical setting and there should be safeguards in place. The last thing I want is for some AI trained on my most psychotic thoughts to exist in any sort of reality, even virtual.
Look at the article, people are walking out because of how ridiculous it is, not because of how triggering it is, this article is too much of a puff piece to say.
And your criticism was the exact reason the article’s therapist puppet master technique was avoided. So we are already passed that point, lets get the roleplaying puppet master out the way. I dont want some therapist that gets off on dissing me as a ventriloquist.
This reminds me of mirror box therapy for phantom limb syndrome. Amputees sometimes feel intense pain in the limbs that they have lost. This is measurable activity in the brain. Unfortunately all of the feedback mechanisms for that activity have been removed with the limb. By showing people a mirrored version of their remaining limb. And then stimulating that limb in a way that would remove pain say massage or touch or unclenching a cramped clenched phantom hand, the patient gets the feedback to the part of their brain via their visual system that there's nothing wrong with that limb. This activates inhibitory circuits that would otherwise be inaccessible.
In this therapy a combination of visual and audio input as well as external control over the behavior of the Voice allows for a feedback mechanism which does not exist otherwise.
This concept has been explored in the "The Outer Limits (1995)" episode 5 of season 2: "Mind Over Matter"
"A doctor uses a virtual reality A.I. device that gives him direct access inside the human mind to enter the mind of a colleague he deeply cares about and help her after she's hit by a car and slips into a coma. Things go horribly wrong."
Kind of relevant to this, there is literature to support the notion that the 'personality' of internal voices is shaped by society -- people experiencing it in Western nations tend to have voices be very negative and violent, whereas people of other nations tend to have more friendly relationships with their auditory hallucinations. It definitely fits with this therapy, where building a relationship with the voice tends to benefit the mental health of the person [1].
I could have told you that voicing deamons in your head gets rid of them 20 years ago.
A bunch of my friends know this trick too.
I have successfully used this in therapy, i.e. helping friends on many, many occasions.
Strange that this is news in the psychiatric world: we "discovered" it by caring, and listening, and trying stuff out.
If psychiatric community is not listening to patients and conversing with them and their demons, and trying pills as a solution while knowing this doesn't work, it should be considered malpractice.
No wonder everyone hates psychiatrists.
Calling themselves doctors and the humans in front of them patients, is probably the root cause.
I’m glad this sort of treatment is getting more exploration and research. While I’ve never heard voices myself, childhood trauma did teach me to anthropomorphize my thoughts so I could discuss things more casually, instead of clinically; I felt more at ease verbally sparring with myself in isolation instead of cooping big, complex thoughts inside my head or onto paper. I chalked it up as a quirk until a therapist recently told me that sort of coping mechanism was quite healthy and “advanced, something it can take patients years to develop with guidance” - so I keep doing it.
Avatar therapy could have implications far beyond psychosis, I think. My “round tables” have helped me begin piecing together why certain behaviors follow seemingly unrelated events (e.g., why going for a walk often ends with my coming home with candy), and untangle the automatic decision-making processes of my own brain. It’s also helped me identify what I actually desire in my own life, as opposed to what I’m sold on during “autopilot”. Said revelations have steered me back towards therapy yet again, seeking professional guidance on my own observations, which I think is the best possible outcome for mental health quandaries.
All of which is to say, I hope to see more human to human research on this topic. The end part, where they want to place AI in command of the voices so it can scale, seems incredibly risky for all but the most “mainstream” of cases, and far too risky for those struggling with literal psychosis; then again, I’m not a Doctor, so I could be very wrong in my concerns. Guess we’ll see when the study wraps.
The Atlantic reported on similar research in 2014. The article from The Atlantic is titled "Learning to Live with the Voices in Your Head" [0]. Here's a choice quote from that article:
>“The problem,” [Intervoice founder Dr. Marius Romme] writes, “is not hearing voices, but the inability to cope with the experience.” In 1987, after two decades of clinical work, the Dutch psychiatrist began promoting a drug-free therapy in which patients were encouraged to accept and analyze their voices.
The article linked in this post has a similar sentiment from one of the patients:
>She hadn’t expected them to go. “My aim wasn’t to get rid of them – just to get along with them,” she told me. “I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to let go. I’d never really been on my own. As abusive as it was, it’s still a relationship.”
Hopefully the therapy takes off, and we don't keep re-discovering this every 10 years.
I know a few people that tell me they experience "voices", but not necessarily hostile ones. The common mechanism they use to organize their thoughts is to assign a name to the voice (or multiple voices) and possibly an appearance to it. I believe it's referred to as a plural system? I honestly don't know what to make of any of it since it's so unlike anything I've personally experienced. They seem to not be self-destructive, though, so whatever they're doing must be effective for themselves. I can't imagine that the mechanism behind it is too different than the one responsible for psychosis, so it makes sense that a similar approach would be effective.
This is fascinating. What I note is that the therapist is collaborating with the patient to create "theatre". I think they should lean into this, new therapists should be explicitly trained in performance and theatre facilitation. There are a lot of solved problems with which they may otherwise struggle.
>Trial participants would create an avatar of their voice: a moving, three-dimensional digital embodiment that looks and sounds like the persecutor inside their heads
I've read that the voices that people with schizophrenia hear can vary depending on their cultural background (people from US hearing violent/confrontational voices, people from India hearing more playful voices / helpful voices). This case talks about affirming for those with violent voices. Wonder how that is with someone who hears pleasant voices.
Reading this article makes me wonder. Whenever I am too stressed, I become very self-conscious and I interpret everyday things and normal nuisances under the umbrella of "See, this is how big of a failure you are, you pathetic loser". Is almost as if there's another voice - not my voice - in my head who tells me this abusive stuff, sitting on the side and being judgemental.
That sounds a lot more like "automatic negative thoughts". I don't think it's considered a form of psychosis, even if arguably it's sort of similar (you're hearing a voice that isn't there telling you things that aren't real).
I use to have this, the book "the power of now" explains how to minimise and remove it.
remember that the internal monologue is not (the whole of) you. I managed to get rid of of my imposter syndrome by getting rid of that constant internal voice
I've never fully understood this voice in the 'ed thing. Does anyone with internal dialogue have schizophrenia? Or is this literal, auditory voice, indistinguishable from actual voice?
Also, there's old technology in the wild capable of doing this[1] and I'd not be surprised to see it eventually become more easily available as hardware decreases in cost. It's already on the 'table' for advertisment purposes, albeit not microwave based.
The whole schizophrenic spectrum is a reversion to survival mode. This is what a animal hears all day- "They are out to get me, its one huge conspiracy" is the thought process of a mouse. Its low energy by default, as it does not require complex thought processes, relative little communication, very little planning for the future. Its a adaption to a warzone and economic stressors shake it loose.
Indeed; the Oracles at Delphi were revered for their ability to divine wisdom from auditory hallucinations which were literally equated with gods. In some modern western cultures, by contrast, you even have active gaslighting of those who are vulnerable to such conditions and exacerbation of their negative qualities.
I would be careful equating the oracles of Delphi with psychosis, since religious practices can bring about visions and out of body experiences without drugs or underlying pathologies. For example, some Eurasian shamans practice "ecstatic dance" where oxygen deprivation and exhaustion result in shamanistic experiences (visions, auditory hallucinations, etc) without the use of drugs.
> The whole schizophrenic spectrum is a reversion to survival mode.
There could be some seed of truth in there, but, sweeping statements about what schizophrenia is need to be delivered with more than assertion.
> This is what a animal hears all day- "They are out to get me, its one huge conspiracy"
Not even wild animals think like this all the time. I feel confident saying they live very different inner lives to what you describe.
> is the thought process of a mouse
Comparing people with schizophrenia to terrified mice is bad. Not all schizophrenic delusions are paranoid in nature, for one thing. And for another, even if the basic mechanism were fundamentally the same (totally unproven) the differences between mouse brains and human brains, mouse culture and human culture, etc, makes the comparison rather pointless.
Add to all this, the fact that no non-human animal has been definitively shown to have schizophrenia in the same way humans experience it.
And of the animals that might have schizophrenia, like mice with a disrupted DISC1 gene, wouldn't they be different to normal, healthily anxious mice?
... Please, consider trying not to make declarations about stuff like this when your domain knowledge isn't quite up to the task.
We all have personalized profiles with little daemon AIs actually tracking and persecuting us. Torturing our every waking moment with judgmental advertising.
No wonder, then, if we are all depressed or terrified or generally mentally ill.
It’s directly caused by the lack of privacy controls and harm done by being online.
Don't do it without supervision, I nearly jumped 100m because the voices in my head convinced me I'm a Star Trek captain and will be transported to my bridge mid-jump.
Never do anything to confirm a paranoid person's psychosis unless you have total control of the situation and a psychiatrist supervision. Never try to peace them by saying unrealistic things, you never know what's going on in their head that you just confirmed. My GF tried to reassure me by saying she will be with me in 15 minutes, but she was 100km away and I thought "okay well that makes all of this real, let's do it".
Prtty much echoing what you said, in this video Cecila McGough, who has schizophrenia, talks about how important it is that people don't do anything to confirm her hallucinations.
https://youtu.be/7csXfSRXmZ0?si=GT6zn_Sytcfw011H
That's good to know, but it leaves you without many options, since all the experts also suggest not to confront them with reality. So how to interact with somebody who as a psychosis and sees a complete twisted reality?
Call an ambulance. Acute psychosis needs immediate treatment, they may easily hurt themselves or others. The psychosis can be stopped with one injection, don't prolong their suffering. Before the ambulance arrives, try to reassure them that they are safe, there is peace around them and help is on the way. Once the ambulance arrives, go away - it might get messy.
I am not sure from which country you gain your perspective, but in Germany it's not what's gonna happen. Your human right is the highest good, and police or any doctor is only permitted to force you to take drugs or put you in a clinic when you are acute suicidal or you harm others. Unfortunately I know that first hand.
A person with delusions like that is a risk to themselves and others.
Here's that YouTube link without the tracking parameter linking you to everyone who clicks it:
https://youtu.be/7csXfSRXmZ0
I was wondering why she wasn't looking at the camera or interviewer.
Turns out the reason was that she saw an hallucination in that direction. So she looked away, she explains, in a follow up video 5 years later: (I found via the YouTube comments section)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Wzb6esnpU
Here she's much better, and explains how she got better (in the beginning of the video)
Thanks
Very important point, thank you for raising it. Mental Health First Aid has good manuals for first aid. Here's the one for psychoses:
https://www.mhfa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MHFA_Psyc...
We were shown this video in our MHFA certification class for discussion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7cMXce5j40
I guess she was calling for help, so the strategy of postponing wasn't that bad even in retroperspective?
Or do you mean you called her becouse you kinda knew you were mad and wanted her to also say it?
Since she was 100 km away, it didn't make sense she was going to be there in 15 minutes by normal means, so it meant either she was lying or OP was actually going to be teleported. OP apparently chose to believe the latter, since it confirmed their current delusion.
So it didn't postpone anything, maybe if she had given a realistic ETA (or just said "I'm coming, wait for me") it would have worked though.
It's very difficult to know what to do in these situations though, I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
> I've been on the side of that girlfriend and you just can't have a full understand of what's going on in the head of the other person, everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines.
The problem here in my opinion is rather that most people are used to lie, manipulate and betray (in society this behaviour is actually euphemized via the term "white lies"). In this particular case, such a behaviour does have consequences. See the example of this thread where the girlfriend claims she will be there in 15 minutes, despite being 100 km away.
Since most people are not used to being honest (or, I assume, actually never were), they give similar descriptions of their difficulties when their lies do have consequences like your "everything is just walking on eggs, except the eggs are actually landmines".
It's a bit more complicated than just "not being used being honest".
Being 100% honest and not hiding anything doesn't work either, so it's a constant balancing act between telling them the truth, reassuring them and sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying. Lying is out of question though and I think the people who resort to that do it out of laziness more than anything, or maybe well-intentioned wishful thinking in the case of the aforementioned girlfriend. But this is always harmful, not just with psychotic persons.
> Lying is out of question though
In the particular example, the girlfriend did lie to him by telling him she'll be there in 15 minutes despite being 100 km away. This exactly lead to the strange chain of thoughts.
It's interesting how OP conflates telling white lies with "betraying" - kinda feels like there are some issues to work through there.
> It's interesting how OP conflates telling white lies with "betraying"
This statement exactly proves my point concerning how dishonest and betraying most people are.
I think what GP is saying is that white lies are not necessarily betrayal. Betrayal is when someone violates your trust somehow. [0] You can see some examples of lying in the wiktionary definition I linked. (see the last two definitions) However, both these definitions involve the lie causing some negative consequence. A white lie is specifically a lie done to spare someones feelings. It's possible that the white lie can cause negative consequences, but that is not always the case.
To take a concrete example, consider the classic white lie "no, that dress doesn't make you look fat". It is possible that this could cause someone to wear an ugly dress, but the person probably looked at themselves in the mirror too, so they probably will end up choosing a dress that doesn't look awful. In this case there is no negative consequence associated with the white lie unless person wearing the dress is unable to accurately self assess. (which is something the speaker hopefully would know about the dress wearer)
You could define being lied to as a violation of your trust. In particular, I think autistic people often can't pick up on social cues, and so rely more on people speaking the truth to them. However, that doesn't mean white lies are betrayal for everyone. If you in particular feel like white lies are betrayal, you might want to tell people in your life that so they know it's important to you. They won't automatically know and it isn't automatically important to them.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/betray#English
> Betrayal is when someone violates your trust somehow.
Which white lies do.
I believe you when you say that white lies violate your trust. I'm saying that that experience isn't universal though. Different people define violations of their trust differently. Thus my suggestion at the end to make sure that the people around you know that this is part of your definition. (Though you might have already done this)
A lie is a lie, and GP's point still stands. In effect, you're proving their point by doing everything possible to justify a state of affairs for a preponderance of people whereby it's okay to water down the reality of the situation to "spare them an emotional reaction".
I can understand where GP is coming from. A lot of my professional career even exists because someone has to cut through the massive layer of bullshit and distortion people generate in an org to be able to make substantive statements about what is the truth, born out by quantitative data and observation.
After a while in the field, you really start to lose your appreciation for other people walking around "sparing" one another from the Truth.
I agree that in professional settings, it's usually best for the efficiency of the company to be direct about everything. I also generally prefer that people provide accurate feedback about how I am doing in interpersonal relationships. I do think that "sparing" someone from an emotional reaction is sometimes a reasonable thing to do in an interpersonal relationship though, depending on the relationship.
Back to the dress example. Let's say the dress wearer is my girlfriend, and I have been asked the question "does this dress make me look fat?". Let's also assume I do think this particular dress makes her look fat, but generally find her attractive, and know that she has body image issues. If I answer "yes", or even "that dress isn't particularly flattering on you", she might interpret that as "He thinks the dress makes me look fat" -> "I am fat" -> "I am ugly", which is not actually what I think and not what I want her to think of herself. Even if I try to reassure her that I don't think she's ugly, she might think that my reassurance is a lie. People with insecurities don't always think logically about them. I think "You look beautiful" would probably be the most ideal response, (in that is both true and doesn't cause her to spiral) but if I didn't have time to think about my response, "No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
If I feel the need to actually help her choose the right dress, I can back that up by pointing out exactly how some other dress that looks better on her actually looks good.
Of course, if I feel like she could take it well, then pointing out exactly how the bad dress is bad might be helpful to her. However, I feel like keeping her from spiraling is more important then informing her of every detail of my taste in dresses.
Obviously, I made this scenario very concrete, but I feel like you can't really decide if it is a good idea without that very concrete knowledge. Which is one reason why white lies might be a bad idea in professional settings, where you don't necessarily know how people will respond to things in the first place. (Because you might not know them well)
>"No, it doesn't make you look fat" feels like a better response than something else which would cause her to spiral.
And you're right. It'll feel like the better response; because all of our social circuitry heuristics honed over our lives by a biological imperative to minimize energy expenditure will happily present that as a quick, harmony preserving fix. However, in that case, are you not doing an injustice to your partner with self-image issues by A) bearing false witness to your true feelings on the matter (dress does not fo you any favors, darling) and B) not addressing the pathological denigratory self-image with active confrontation and refutation of the validity thereof, with an accurate accounting of your own reasoning?
Example: I've had that question asked of me while my partnner and I were trying to shopping for wear to attend a wedding in. My partner loves blue. Like BSOD blue. Cobalt electric blue. She was drawn to a dress in that color. She had a friend along that was already giving the customary platitudes, but asked me my thoughts on it. That color, unfortunately, in my eyes, does not love her back. Her skin/complexion tends toward the rosey and warm; a combo which strongly clashes with and fights with said the coolness of the blue, and which would tend to cause the eye to pick out the paler aspects of her instead of accentuating the her livelier parts. The cut, and just how it laid on her body didn't complement her. It hid her best parts, and accentuated the parts I knew she was ultimately more self-conscious about because there wasn't a damn thing to do about them, and the baggage that came with it. The strong blue just visually overwhelmed the visual experience to the point where all you saw was the dress, and how it dominated the image of her; not the person wearing it, with their actions and body being accentuated and emphasized by the dress. I told her if that was what she really wanted, and if it made her feel good, then what does it matter? However, I thought she'd look better either in a purple, or perhaps more importantly a dress of a different cut. One that instead of looking like a wrapper, would actually lay on her body in a way that would naturally draw the eye to her, and what she was doing.
End result? She kept looking. She ended up picking out a pattern and cut that she felt was more befitting for her role/relation to the two getting married (deep or high saturation colors are apparently reserved for the bridesmaids per her thoughts on the subject, and something a bit more matronly made her feel more comfortable at the event). She also picked up a dress I thought really made her look gorgeous, and I adore seeing her looking regal af in, and wouldn't be out of place at about any event.
I acknowledged, and reaffirmed that ultimately, the most important thing was how she felt. I also provided a truthful evaluation about the answer to the question, giving her more insight about how I see things,the things I look at, and the affect they have on me; and as it turned out, she's gotten way more use out of the dress she ultimately picked than she'd ever have been comfortable getting out of the blue one. So by taking the path of truth, I opened a door to a novel experience for her, and she says she's happier for having done so.
Not to mention, you're kind of doing yourself an injustice by not really valuing your own feelings on the matter. I'm not saying that it's okay to tell someone the dress looks them look like they're wearing a trash bag; but it's absolutely okay to express your feelings on something in that type of circumstance, even if your rational side tells you that maybe you should be silent. The only way to help someone through the healing process is to acknowledge there is something there, and to be supportive and truthful. Placing care about everyone else above your own care for yourself is as sure a recipe for a bad time as any. One can't wholely and truly give for others what one does not yet possess for themselves have.
It may not necessarily win one many invites to fancy parties, but I've found that getting into the habit of twisting things makes the process of growth, healing, or recovery so ruinously complicated as to present an overall harm in comparison to the brief cauterizing application of truthful, sincere communication. See the cleverest code as compared to the most straightforward as applied to social dynamics. Many of the same principles transfer.
I acknowledge that all lies are going to make things more difficult in the long run while making things easier in the short run. I would like to point out that sometimes things need to be easier in the short run though. In code terms this is something like technical debt.
Getting back to the example. If there is some combination of not being close enough, (in the example, lets say just started dating) and insecurities running too high, then they won't necessarily trust your reasoning. They might just feel like you are attacking them, or that you are trying to cover for not reacting fast enough. The end result is that they now feel ugly and like their date hates them. This won't make their body image issues any better.
While I've not dated anyone with that level of insecurity, I've been friends with a some, though none of them had body image issues specifically. In my experience they have to both trust you quite a bit, and also be ready to confront their own insecurities. I've tried to speak my mind clearly to one friend who evidently weren't ready to process their insecurities, and in the end it just seemed to make them feel bad and also hurt our friendship. They seemed to feel like I was attacking them and making excuses in a manner similar to what I talked about in the example. I've had some level of success with another friend, but they had actually expressed self-awareness and a desire to change. My current policy is to keep away from people's insecurities unless they express a desire to change or ask me to be brutally honest.
I could choose to only let people into my life that don't need me to route around their insecurities. However, I do want to be available to people who need emotional support, which means occasionally placing myself in a position where I need to be careful with people. My actual weapon of choice here is to re-frame the situation, because I'm pretty terrible at lying convincingly and also don't enjoy doing it. An example of a re-frame is the "you look beautiful" in my first post. However, re-frames are also a stop-gap measure as other people won't do such re-frames on their own. What I am doing is not technically deception, but I don't feel like the sort of deception that white lies are composed of has significantly worse side effects. They are both just a way to push the issue down the road. Furthermore, coming up with re-frames is a moderately difficult skill that I have specifically cultivated, and I think white lies are easier to do "untrained". Thus, if someone is put on the spot, I'd prefer if they didn't write off white lies just because they fit the definition of lie.
As far as your comments on doing myself dirty. Guilty as charged, I certainly have work to do on that front.
To me GP seems like an insane person with an out of whack understanding of what "white lies" are and what's going on in that social dynamic. I think they need to seriously get a grip. Normally I wouldn't write things like this on HN because it's rude and they're a complete stranger anyway and I don't know what's in their head, but I wouldn't want to "betray" them by not saying it.
I think I spelled it out in the post you are referencing, but I see a white lie as the equivalent of "not saying something because it is rude", except for when you are forced to say something and not doing so would be meaningful.
I'm pretty curious about what you think white lies do in a social dynamic though. I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate.
EDIT: My post is literally your GP, but based on your stance earlier in this thread, I think you were talking about aleph_minus_one's post I was responding to. In which case I think our opinions are similar?
Yes I was talking about aleph_minus_one's post, apologies for the confusion (I got a bit mixed up). Unfortunately it's too late to edit it.
In terms of the social dynamic I agree with you, the "white lies" serve as a way to be considerate of the other person. And it's not just "lies" about them either, if someone is in a hurry or in some casual context and asks how I am and I've had a shitty day, I might say "I'm fine" to avoid them feeling the need to talk through my problems with me. If someone asks at dinner and I spent the morning having explosive diarrhea, I don't share that either. That is a classic white lie but to see that as a betrayal strikes me as extremely bizarre.
>sometimes indeed shielding from the harsh truth by avoiding from mentioning something, which I do believe is different from lying.
You mean lying by omission? A.k.a. not speaking the quiet part? It's still received and noted by the other person you know. Likely by the part of the psyche they haven't got consciously integrated, or are experiencing a connectivity problem with.
Remember, that part of them is still a very big chunk of human neural processor. It isn't stupid. It's also not terribly capable of straightforwardly communicating. What it is scarily good at is navigating the external world, which includes seeing the void of what one doesn't say. If it's already running amok, pouring more fuel in the form of duplicity on the fire is probably not the greatest idea.
In this particular case, it was sort of the opposite. I'm used to her always being honest, so when she told me it's 15 minutes I trusted her 100%. She was getting a friend to rescue me, and she was counting on me trusting her and waiting at home, but unfortunately that was of no use as I went off to the city before they could even pack their things after that call.
Should she have been more honest and said "X will be their shortly. I'm really worried about you, please stay put."? Just trying to follow this chain of reasoning.
Yes, that would work. I was really looking for confirmation, so if she said something like this the issue could be avoided. But who knows what I'd come up with 10 minutes later...
> I'm used to her always being honest, so when she told me it's 15 minutes I trusted her 100%.
But she lied to you - and this lead to your dangerous chain of thoughts.
This ruins my LSD trips. Instead of enjoying the high I end up being scared that I might do something stupid that sober me will later regret.
This is the reason that I've only ever done LSD once.
It wasn't especially anxiety inducing for the most part and was quite fun, but I feel as if I just got lucky and that in a slightly different circumstance I could just have convinced myself that my apartment window was in fact the front door and fall out of it.
Out of curiosity, what is it you imagine would go wrong?
I'm going to assume "selecting a username" :D
lmfao
I don't know, I can try cooking something and actually making a fire
Retrospectively, it was a total blunder - not truly hers since she couldn't be expected to act perfectly in that situation, but it's definitely something we've discussed as the TOP ONE thing to never do and always mention it to others when discussing situations like that.
It didn't postpone anything. I called her because I knew I'm going mad and wanted to confirm if it's true or not. Of course I didn't word it this way, though. What she said confirmed the delusion, nearly got me killed and even though I didn't jump, I got lost in the city, hurt myself, nearly hurt others, until someone called the police few hours later.
Ok I see.
It is really hard for me to relate to, the feeling of believing I am Piccard.
Like do you want logical reasoning?
'I am Gandalf'
'So where is your beard?'
Or just reassurence?
'I am Gandalf'
'No you are not'
You're reading into it too much. You don't think you're actually Picard or Kirk, you think the world around you is very similar to the stories, but not actually the story itself.
In my case, it went like this: Whoa, my crew is telepathically beaming me instructions and we are right in the middle of a mission. Where the fuck am I? Crew, give me my command protocols. Oh, I command a starship? Sure, sorry, the heat around here, I might be hit with something, I don't remember, help me! Oh, you're going to transport me? Sure, go ahead, let me just run away from this commando waiting on the hallway using the only other exit - the window... Now it makes sense that I'm a starship captain, why would a commando be waiting there otherwise...
(Your mileage may vary)
Without supervision? What good is that? This is a disease that breaks people. Those who would convince themselves to see such symptoms in a positive light are doing nothing but damage.
Yes. What I mean is that doing it can have unintended consequences - so don't do it if you don't know what you're doing and/or not fully in control of the situation.
I find this fascinating. Could you please elaborate about anything youd find relevant/interesting about how such delusions come about without being obvious delusions? I cant imagine actually believing I am Star Trek captain, but I sure can believe someone else do. I just cant imagine how that must feel/look like inside that someones head.
At the beginning, you know you're mad. I remember the first hour or so, I was thinking "no fucking way this is real". But it feels so real that you quickly stop believing anyone who says otherwise and you mark them as the enemies. Your head keeps inventing reasons why is it real and the voices keep explaining it - in some cases it's religious experiences, in my case it's hyper-advanced technology enabling telepathic communication.
I didn't think it's the Star Trek from movies, I just thought we somehow made it work in secret and now I'm on it too. Paranoid people aren't paranoid just so, they are paranoid because there is a brutal mismatch between their perception of reality and what people tell them.
At one point, in a different situation, I knew I'm in the middle of psychosis - and my voices told me all about super-agent-psychiatrists who are trying to help me by doing James Bond-style interventions. So yeah, you can simultaneously know you're right in the middle of it, and discuss the situation with your delusions, while thinking the delusions are real.
How do you know it isn't true? Philip K Dick came to believe in his psychosis visions (he believed he truly was in Rome in 60AD or so but was being fed a created world by the Romans). But he had good personal evidence for it that he couldn't deny even in a non-psychotic state. Do you have anything like that?
I guess a better way to phrase it is, do you have compelling evidence that your beliefs are true that you have to force yourself to ignore, or does it just seem like nonsense when you aren't in a psychotic state?
Not OP, my manic episodes come with extreme paranoia, and I have had two psychotic breaks during really bad ones. This may be a completely different experience. Apologies if I sound a bit flippant.
For myself, my brain always knows what reality is because all of my senses work. Delusions are clearly internal. My self-awareness is firmly in reality but all I can do is watch myself react as if the delusions are reality.
Many people can’t grasp this. Awareness and control are always linked. “Blind rage” is just that. Awareness is gone.
I hope no one else ever has to experience being powerless in their own body and screaming uselessly in their head to make it stop.
As horrifying as this sounds, these experiences don’t haunt me. I thought they were just burnout from stress and carried on like nothing happened afterwards.
“Normalization of deviance” doesn’t even begin to describe my life experience. Eventually, I was convinced by my doctor to see a psychiatrist for ADHD. It wasn’t until my third visit she realized I had severe, high-functioning bipolar. Once I got over a month of denial, it was “Okay. That does explain a lot.” XD
You're not suddenly irrational in a psychosis, you still have your logic working, just with crooked inputs. So it took me months to sort through some details and make sense of what actually happened and what didn't. There are some things I'm probably never going to be able to explain and I just have to leave it like that. But I don't believe any of my delusions happened, I just would like to know what happened.
All the voices, and the sense of urgency and danger go away immediately when you wake up after a dose of antipsychotic medication. Your first thoughts are that you lived through some weird things which are not happening at all anymore, and now there's a psychiatrist untying you from a hospital bed and handing you a cigarette, which puts stuff into context. You also probably feel the best you felt in weeks/months because it's your first night of sleep since forever.
I can easily imagine someone thinking "well, I had a psychosis, but there was shit going on". Fortunately that's not me.
This is your personal experience, but I'll note there are others who do become irrational along with having altered perception. It's hard to give generalized descriptions.
So, rather than just having some false facts, they will make bizarre "inference" steps in thinking that can border on free-association. In the case of one of my relatives, this process would accompany something almost like amnesia. After a burst of this illogical reasoning that gets way out into the weeds for tens of minutes or hours, she would seem to lose track of it and "reset" in some way to start again.
Out of this recurrence, you could start to sense an overall theme that was evolving at a different time scale, beneath all the illogical tangents. Even through different phases of treatment and remission, those themes would resurface as a sort of barometer of her illness. There wasn't always as stark of a difference between normal days and psychotic break days.
I really appreciate your responses (and ones others have made elsewhere in this thread), they give much better insight into what someone is going through internally than the clinical definitions I see.
Just a general piece of advice: when a person is discussing their struggles with psychotic delusions, its kind of messed up to say "Yeah, but how do you know they aren't real?"
While incrediblybadly phrased, I feel it is an honest question on how psychosis works.
Then again, I treat my whole life is a fascinating science experiment and people have to beg me to stop talking about it.
Why is it "messed up"? It's a genuine question
The answer lies in this - can a question be both genuine and "messed up"?
Given the context in this conversation about how confirming a delusion can be dangerous, I think the concern is just that there may be situations where asking this genuine and interesting question could cause harm.
I think probably that on balance you've got away with it though because the people commenting seem to be safely outside the other side of their psychosis and are able to answer interestingly without being harmed by the question.
Yeah, it was odd because the first time I told a psychiatrist that I heard voices, it was because of a split-second incident out in the street where I swear I heard a distinct vocalization from the vicinity of a traffic light. No human was there, of course, and the illusion was over before it began.
That was enough to slap a prescription on me for years to come.
Eventually I began to question why they kept wanting to prescribe this stuff and why one of the standard questions was always "do you hear voices?" and I also began to question their terminology. "What do you mean, by hearing voices?" "Oh, well, hallucinations." and I drilled down into their definitions and epistemology for a while.
I told them that I am a Christian, and of course I hear voices. People of faith, who are quite sane, discuss this openly all the time. We are always encouraged to listen to the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Holy Spirit, to listen to the voices of those who wrote Sacred Scripture. I told the doc that I'd be crazy (and lost, and significantly more troubled) if I didn't hear anyone's voice.
Of course they're probing for stuff to medicate, they're probing for irrationality, and they're probing for evil voices who goad us to do harm to ourselves or to others. And of course I was troubled by those types too.
But they weren't unreal. They weren't hallucinations because the sources exist in reality. They don't come from human bodies, but spirits are real to Christians.
The solution is not to medicate the voices or deny that the voices exist or to ignore the voices, it's to form our consciences so that we can stand up to lies, stand up to temptation, and resist evil. It's as simple as that. Whether the voices come from Mom and Dad, or social media, or television, or they're 100% in our heads, we need to discern their spirits, and deal with them according to our conscience.
It was so jarring that the doctors would be goading me to deny my faith in this way and to claim that if I heard a voice encouraging me in a moral direction, that it was fake, a hallucination, a disease. I have been so profoundly insulted. This is one of the many reasons I lost trust in them.
A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.
The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.
Seems like when you are dreaming, where the part of you that can assess if something is realistic or not is shut down.
For myself, my imagination and view of reality merged. My senses were fine but all of the processing and my imagination started writing to the same memory spaces.
I was aware that my senses didn’t match what I was processing. It didn’t matter.
That's what happens to kids. Up to eight years old, if I recall correctly, they're unable to tell apart imagination from reality. If they think of something, say a monster hiding at home, it exists in reality. Which is a big problem while watching movies that can have scary parts as they now think they're real.
This is way, way different.
A six year old can perceive normally. They really don’t see people who aren’t there. They consciously know the difference between seeing a monster and thinking it exists. They can mis-attribute information by categorizing something they see as a monster. They play and they get really invested in it. Children are not psychotic. They are using their imagination to explore reality.
I see the monsters in the room. I spent four months as a bipedal wolf feeling wind in my fur and the motions of my tail. I truly believed I wasn’t human and the humans would kill me as soon as they found that out. My childhood memories were replaced by imagined ones.
I still remember being a wolf. It was real to me.
I've had sleep walking episodes for most of my life since I was about 5, probably driven by sleep apnea. I've also had experiences that are as real as this waking life while meditating and especially back in my party days.
The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.
Some examples of mass psychosis:
How can we have civilized society, including free and fair elections, under such mass hysteria? When people have so many delusions that politicians can pit half the population against the other merely be selecting sides from a short list of wedge issues?My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.
But hey, I'm the delusional one.
Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.
I've been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder when I was in my early twenties.
I've had several full blown psychotic episodes and been hospitalised several times.
Fortunately there was one medication - Amisulpride - that kept me stable enough to be able to have a professional career, though not without a lot of struggling and sacrifice.
I know what psychosis is and honestly, this avatar therapy feels a bit like bullshit to me.
When in psychosis, you are not listening to your voices - you are your voices and they can command you to do things you do not want to do. You are not in control of you consciousness.
There is hope though. A revolution in mental illnessis going on - check the metabolic mind site for more info - https://metabolicmind.org
I talk about my experience in my blog - https://www.feelingbuggy.com/p/finding-hope-after-decades-of...
Many other people have substantially improved because of metabolic therapy and there are dozens of random control trials going on with very promising early results.
There are ever more cases of successful treatment via metabolic therapy
Under the risk of being unpopular, it's my responsibility to let people know about this treatment option and bring hope to those who suffer from this terrible illness.
I wouldn't call it bullshit, it's just unlikely to work for everyone.
I don't question the good faith of the researcher but i think we should prioritise what works - and there is a growing volume of evidence that metabolic therapies work.
I take back the bullshit qualification though - it was a mistake on my part.
One of my favorite speculative hypotheses is Bicameral Mind Theory, which asserts that something like schizophrenia was relatively common until relatively recently, about 3000 BC. It argues that it was relatively normal for humans to hear voices in their head directing them. So when we read religious texts about the gods commanding so-and-so to do such-and-such, it wasn't just a spiritual metaphor, but an actual voice people heard in their heads and interpreted as higher powers.
My mother did a lot to keep us fed, clothed, housed when we were growing up. She wasn't happy, but she wasn't sad either.
I asked her once, decades later, how she coped with it all, and her answer still freaks me out sometimes.
She said she didn’t know she was a person who had choices, or could think about the situation she was in. She just did as she was expected to.
She’s in her 60s now and is far more in tune with her emotions, thoughts and feelings than I remember her when I was a kid.
She was virtually in catatonic autopilot most of her life, because no one encouraged her to think.
There's a quote from Helen Keller in this vein, after she was taught to communicate, though I can't find the full text:
"When the sun of consciousness first shone upon me, behold a miracle!"
Very touching ;)
In buddhism (I'm not a specialist by any means), I think awareness and consciousness is a central concept too. "The light of awareness", "awakening" is seen as holy. I really think that awareness is essential to enabling us to have hope to improve and specially understand our life and our problems; besides making us more connected, participating in reality. I like Thich Nhat Hanh's saying of a "serene encounter with reality" he finds through meditation. Different, each in its own poetry, ways of saying the similar things.
And I think the profound realization and awareness of the reality of others can bring no other outcome than compassion. That's why I think awareness is extremely important too for living in a society and enable living in a civilization.
Operators and Things: The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic
I think you should read the above book.
Apparently it's free to read:
https://selfdefinition.org/hearing-voices/Barbara-O'Brien-Op...
Humans migrated to the Americas by at the latest 8900 BC when the land bridge disappeared, and we have evidence for migrations way before that. There's no way any kind of genetic change that occurred around 3000 BC could have made it to the Americas, and the indigenous population does not seem to exhibit such divergent modes of thought. They are essentially modern humans. So this date needs to be pushed way back.
IIRC, the bicameral mind theory speculates the change occuring ~70 kya.
No, Jaynes posits it happened as recently as 3000 BC, and bases the hypothesis on evidence from sources that are far more recent than 70 kya (not that we have any literary sources that are 70 kya old)
I’d speculatively propose the reverse: that a change occurred that led to our suppressing these “voices” to our subconscious, where they are still present but suppressed below the threshold of conscious awareness. Interestingly, in parts of the world, these voices persist (eg Ethiopia where a high percentage of people report regularly hearing voices in their heads). Also interestingly, this book you mention was one of David Bowie’s favourites - yes, he of the multiple pop personas.
Why did the schizophrenia become less common according to this theory?
The phenomenon of auditory hallucinations often attributed to schizophrenics in modern day, was, far from being an aberrant condition, in fact the normal every day condition of ancient bicameral man. There was no concept of "I" or "free will;" the gods merely issued their auditory commands, and man obeyed, not having any choice in the matter. This was simply every day life for the bicameral man, who lived in a community of other "like-minded" beings that also experienced similar auditory hallucinations, often commands or admonishments, from the same god-king ruling the civilization.
Neurologically Jaynes locates these voices, and even defines gods to be those particular neurological phenomena located in the right hemisphere of the brain, that communicated its preverbal judgements to "man," located in the left hemisphere, which interpreted such judgments as speech:
Several factors were attributed to its decline: the development of written language localizing a disembodied voice that was once omnipresent into a stele or rock carving; the emergence of trade and the contact of other societies, governed by different god-kings, leading to proto-theories of mind meant to explain the differing behaviour of the rival civilization; selective pressures against the viability of such "bicameral theocracies;" the development of free will. Reasons abound, but what followed was the collapse of bicameral mind and the disappearance of the voices, substantiated by various observations of ancient cultural artifacts: hypnotic induction of trance at the Oracle of Delphi, the practices of divination and omen reading, the production of artistic works in Mesopotamia depicting empty thrones and absent gods, or the crying out to the gods for their assistance and return, as in The Babylonian Theodicy, or the Psalms. All this in order to "re-awaken" the voices of gods that had once dispensed wisdom and now fell dormant with the emergence of modern, self-conscious, free-willed, individualistic man.The two hemispheres started to communicate (better) so wouldn't feel each other as strangers anymore. Or at least that was my understanding, in very simple words and without asking any AI :)
In market economics and evolution alike, when we posit that an organism/industry became more effective through some kind of change, we also require an explanation for "And why hadn't it already done this? What was stopping it from doing so earlier, and what was the mechanism that this constraint was removed?"
Genuinely unexploited niches and entirely novel strategies exist, but they are extraordinarily rare.
Do other primates show strong bicameral connectivity in terms of physical brain structures?
people drank a lot more alcohol back in the day.
I don't know how far back "back in the day" is, but the UK sources below seem to show that alcohol (particularly spirits)[1] seemed to be quite popular in the late 1800s[0], and that in the 1550s it was Ale, 1650s it was Gin, 1750s saw a drop during the industrial revolution.
Before that, who knows?
0: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhe... 1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890
source?
I thought it had been debunked already?
It's really a non-scientific idea, in the Popplerian sense. How would you debunk it? How would you confirm it? It's not in that class of idea.
A lot of people have been taught to read that as "therefore it's false" or "therefore it's true" or "therefore it's unimportant", but really all it means is that it is not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking. That, and nothing more. Many things are not amenable to scientific confirmation or debunking that are true and false and important and unimportant and everything else.
It is false and unimportant, thus it deserves no attention, thus we withdraw our attention from it, thus it fades and disappears.
Thus reality is carved away, leaving only the important part. Which we call "reality" of course.
Oh, you've debunked it? That's pretty cool. I look forward to your published interviews with people from the time.
You have an opinion that the hypothesis is false. I share that opinion. We probably have fairly radically different reasons for our opinions, though. Either way, they are just opinions, however well informed. We don't have proof.
That isn't a debunking, it's a description of the mechanism. For good and ill. Read it again.
Walk me through how you concluded it is false, please
By "it" I refer to reality. Not the model.
(Gotta underline everything for you people, I swear.)
Go on..
Richard Dawkins called Julian Jaynes’s 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind “either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between”
Idea or theory can be great, well constructed and intellectually interesting without being true.
Aquatic ape hypothesis is similar. It's a initially a great theory and explains many things. Only when you start to investigate other explanations, the theory starts to fall a apart. Endurance running hypothesis on the other hand seems to hold. Incidentally it explains many of the same things as aquatic ape hypothesis, and there is more supporting evidence.
With a Time Machine?
Best summary of Jaynes' theories: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
Interestingly this idea of helping people to talk to the voices in their head is not new. The basis for IFS therapy (which emerged in the 80s) actively teaches people to have dialogue with their inner "parts". It is becoming one of the gold-standard therapies for CPTSD, anxiety, and a range of other trauma related conditions.
The core discovery of the therapy is that the human mind has an inherent multiplicity. Once you accept that and go from there, the rest of the technique emerges naturally. It's really quite amazing. I highly recommend the book "No bad parts" by Dr Richard Schwartz, the discoverer of the technique.
What really excites me here is the use of a virtual avatar that personifies the voice. That is really new to me and I can see all sorts of possibilities to link with IFS.
I suspect* that every school of psychotherapy represents a different internal configuration that human brains are capable of being in.
Perhaps just as some but not all of us are aphantasic, some but not all of us may think in the IFS way, or Jungian, or Freudian.
* from my comfortable armchair, don't read too much into this
Most schools of psychotherapy are equally effective, with the very notable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders. For most patients, the school of psychotherapy only matters insofar as they buy into it - nearly all of the therapeutic benefit is totally independent of the particular methodology or even the training and experience of the therapist. Even therapeutic approaches specifically designed to be pure placebo turn out to be just as effective as everything else. If IFS or Freudian psychoanalysis are metaphors for how we think, then they just aren't useful metaphors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy....
This just isn't proven at all. And likely untrue. There is a reason the dodo bird effect is controversial.
1. Most therapies have not received the number of RCTs as CBT so it's not possible to make statements like the one you made.
2. There is wildly varying quality in therapists and the quality of the therapeutic relationship is widely accepted to be centrally important to treatment outcomes. It is thus much more likely that a good therapist with a shitty tool is better than a bad therapist with a good tool. Averaged out, this would explain the same effect.
You've inverted the burden of proof. If someone dreams up a new kind of therapy, it's their job to prove that it actually works; they can't just assert that it works based on anecdote. I'm flattering those relatively-untested therapies by assuming that they're all equally effective. In any case, the effect size over pill placebo is extremely small (again, with the honourable exception of CBT for anxiety disorders).
I can't tell from either of your comments whether you're saying CBT has proven itself or falls short of the others. Just that it's different.
I would tend to agree with you here, with a caveat.
All these theories are describing the same underlying phenomenon so there is a "blind men and the elephant" effect. They also substantially build on one another
The caveat is that what really sets these models apart is how they propose to navigate the mind. This is where I believe IFS stands out. But it would take a much longer comment to explain that. Maybe it's worth writing an article about.
I've come to the conclusion that psychodynamic therapy is harmful for neurotic depressives like myself. Dwelling in my neuroses enhances them.
I wish there was a triage psychiatrist I could see that would help me identify the most effective type of therapy for my situation and then help me find a therapist.
Well, some of these schools are also just plain bullshit.
yes, and much of the criticism as well: it's called being humans
I would hesitate to say bullshit. They are all models and very abstract relative to the complexity of the mind. But to extend the blind men and the elephant allegory, there is a practical difference between describing a leg and describing a trunk.
and some say elephants don’t exist because they can’t see one.
This reminds me of a book I loved and still love, which was mentioned recently in another topic: Peter Watts - Blindsight. Hard sf with a bit of everything, including this multiplicity you mention.
See also Genpo Roshi's Big Mind, Big Heart which has one assume the persona of various aspects of their mind and attempt to carry out a dialogue as that aspect.
>As much as 8 percent of the population reports experiencing auditory hallucinations on a regular basis (13 percent hear them at least occasionally), compared to just 1 percent who are diagnosed with schizophrenia. https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medicine-magazine/articl...
Hearing voices may be a symptom of something serious, but not always. As long as a person's grasp of reality is not in danger and voices don't stress out people, they can live with them and not even seek help. Not all people hear negative voices. Older lonely people have been known to say that voices keep them company.
> voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the U.S., the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated complete persons since childhood ,visually and everything. He discussed matters with them. In the end, he was able to get rid of them when he decided that they were not helpful anymore. It's easier to understand his weird theories and spirituality when you have read his autobiography. The guy was off the charts but not disabled by it.
> Maybe the most famous case of a high-functioning outlier was Carl Jung. He hallucinated completely people since childhood ,visually and everything.
It's maybe easier to understand his focus on individuation, or integration of the component parts of the psyche into a cohesive whole, in light of this. Jung draws from esoteric alchemy and other related traditions (see his work: Psychology and Alchemy) which, instead of viewing the mind as a singular, monolithic entity, prefer conceiving of it as an organism comprised of many parts - Hermetic Qabalah being one such example.
Fantastic piece of writing.
Looks like a really promising approach to therapy as well.. right up until they said they'd stop voicing it by a skilled psychologist and get an AI to do it, while putting the psychotic person into VR instead of over a screen.. that was a big 'fuck no'.
I see where they're coming from, though: right now you have to be certified on this very specific program, meaning you only get the benefits if you have access to one of the 38 people currently trained for it in the UK.
I would definitely want a professional to be in charge but, as the article itself points out, "Joe recently went back to his GP in search of help with his anxiety (...) The GP put him on a waiting list for NHS talking therapy, and warned that he could be in for a very long wait". Given how bad access to mental health resources is I may be willing to take "a community nurse, or a nursing assistant" now over "wait several months for a chance at a doctor who may not be the right fit for you".
I wouldn't dream of allowing an AI to roam free - as the article says patients can get more psychotic and arguably "you should end it" could very well be part of the training data. But if the AI suggests lines that a trained human can oversee... then maybe?
I think your proposal of AI therapists with human overseers would be okay if we were able to develop some kind of metrication and monitoring of the human oversight portion.
Without that control, what would inevitably happen would be that the highly-scalable part of the system (the AI) would be scaled, and the difficult-to-scale part of the system (the human) would not. We would fairly quickly end up with a situation where a single human was "overseeing" hundreds or thousands of AI conversations, at which point the oversight would become ineffective.
I don't know how to metricate and monitor human oversight of AI systems, but it feels like there are already other systems (like Air Traffic Control) where we manage to do similar things.
If they are going to get creative, perhaps apply the constructive effects of some mind altering drugs? Under AI shaman supervision of course!
I have never heard voices, but experienced two forms of dissociation for a while after a trauma. Nothing was real, was one of them. Couldn’t trust any scene I was in or the chair I was going to sit on. Unending vertigo and feelings of experiencing a fiction.
As a famous ex-newt once said: “I got better!”
I think it’s absolutely weird that the proctor is voicing the avatar
I’m imagining some Unreal Engine Skyrim deity on screen being voiced by my therapist, acting with a vocoder. Like, c’mon.
Definitely train a computer to do this part, generate your psychosis demon and have it really say the abstractions you described. Theyre already shockingly scary in realism when theyre not prompted to be.
A VR headset might be a little too immersive and triggering
But as long as its supervised I think its better
Yes you definitely want a possibly suicidal person to be talking to a "AI" engine who talks back with the avatar they normally hear. (This was sarcasm in case you missed it)
If there were some evidence that the voices people hear are generated in a readable portion of the brain and you could train the AI on specifically those parts, it could be a powerful therapy.
Hell, make it into a videogame RPG where the patient is the hero and the labyrinth they must conquer is their own mind. Their party could consist of good friends and trained psychologists who work together to probe, map, reveal, and conquer the demons in the patients mind through teamwork, collaboration, and shared experiences.
However, it probably shouldn't be done outside of a clinical setting and there should be safeguards in place. The last thing I want is for some AI trained on my most psychotic thoughts to exist in any sort of reality, even virtual.
Look at the article, people are walking out because of how ridiculous it is, not because of how triggering it is, this article is too much of a puff piece to say.
And your criticism was the exact reason the article’s therapist puppet master technique was avoided. So we are already passed that point, lets get the roleplaying puppet master out the way. I dont want some therapist that gets off on dissing me as a ventriloquist.
O Superman https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=S39NaDPNDtk&si=-lXReadJB7h...
Language Is a Virus https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=S39NaDPNDtk&si=-lXReadJB7h...
This reminds me of mirror box therapy for phantom limb syndrome. Amputees sometimes feel intense pain in the limbs that they have lost. This is measurable activity in the brain. Unfortunately all of the feedback mechanisms for that activity have been removed with the limb. By showing people a mirrored version of their remaining limb. And then stimulating that limb in a way that would remove pain say massage or touch or unclenching a cramped clenched phantom hand, the patient gets the feedback to the part of their brain via their visual system that there's nothing wrong with that limb. This activates inhibitory circuits that would otherwise be inaccessible.
In this therapy a combination of visual and audio input as well as external control over the behavior of the Voice allows for a feedback mechanism which does not exist otherwise.
This concept has been explored in the "The Outer Limits (1995)" episode 5 of season 2: "Mind Over Matter"
"A doctor uses a virtual reality A.I. device that gives him direct access inside the human mind to enter the mind of a colleague he deeply cares about and help her after she's hit by a car and slips into a coma. Things go horribly wrong."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667922/
In Ted Chiang's short story Exhalation, a person looks at his own mind's workings. Brilliant description of the process.
Kind of relevant to this, there is literature to support the notion that the 'personality' of internal voices is shaped by society -- people experiencing it in Western nations tend to have voices be very negative and violent, whereas people of other nations tend to have more friendly relationships with their auditory hallucinations. It definitely fits with this therapy, where building a relationship with the voice tends to benefit the mental health of the person [1].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24970772/
I could have told you that voicing deamons in your head gets rid of them 20 years ago. A bunch of my friends know this trick too.
I have successfully used this in therapy, i.e. helping friends on many, many occasions.
Strange that this is news in the psychiatric world: we "discovered" it by caring, and listening, and trying stuff out.
If psychiatric community is not listening to patients and conversing with them and their demons, and trying pills as a solution while knowing this doesn't work, it should be considered malpractice.
No wonder everyone hates psychiatrists.
Calling themselves doctors and the humans in front of them patients, is probably the root cause.
Jesus did the same 2000 years ago. But scientists tend to be superstitious of anything He demonstrated.
I’m glad this sort of treatment is getting more exploration and research. While I’ve never heard voices myself, childhood trauma did teach me to anthropomorphize my thoughts so I could discuss things more casually, instead of clinically; I felt more at ease verbally sparring with myself in isolation instead of cooping big, complex thoughts inside my head or onto paper. I chalked it up as a quirk until a therapist recently told me that sort of coping mechanism was quite healthy and “advanced, something it can take patients years to develop with guidance” - so I keep doing it.
Avatar therapy could have implications far beyond psychosis, I think. My “round tables” have helped me begin piecing together why certain behaviors follow seemingly unrelated events (e.g., why going for a walk often ends with my coming home with candy), and untangle the automatic decision-making processes of my own brain. It’s also helped me identify what I actually desire in my own life, as opposed to what I’m sold on during “autopilot”. Said revelations have steered me back towards therapy yet again, seeking professional guidance on my own observations, which I think is the best possible outcome for mental health quandaries.
All of which is to say, I hope to see more human to human research on this topic. The end part, where they want to place AI in command of the voices so it can scale, seems incredibly risky for all but the most “mainstream” of cases, and far too risky for those struggling with literal psychosis; then again, I’m not a Doctor, so I could be very wrong in my concerns. Guess we’ll see when the study wraps.
This trial has its own website too.
https://www.avatartherapytrial.com/what-is-avatar-therapy
The Atlantic reported on similar research in 2014. The article from The Atlantic is titled "Learning to Live with the Voices in Your Head" [0]. Here's a choice quote from that article:
>“The problem,” [Intervoice founder Dr. Marius Romme] writes, “is not hearing voices, but the inability to cope with the experience.” In 1987, after two decades of clinical work, the Dutch psychiatrist began promoting a drug-free therapy in which patients were encouraged to accept and analyze their voices.
The article linked in this post has a similar sentiment from one of the patients:
>She hadn’t expected them to go. “My aim wasn’t to get rid of them – just to get along with them,” she told me. “I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to let go. I’d never really been on my own. As abusive as it was, it’s still a relationship.”
Hopefully the therapy takes off, and we don't keep re-discovering this every 10 years.
[0]https://archive.is/pfKrC#selection-1413.89-1413.360
I know a few people that tell me they experience "voices", but not necessarily hostile ones. The common mechanism they use to organize their thoughts is to assign a name to the voice (or multiple voices) and possibly an appearance to it. I believe it's referred to as a plural system? I honestly don't know what to make of any of it since it's so unlike anything I've personally experienced. They seem to not be self-destructive, though, so whatever they're doing must be effective for themselves. I can't imagine that the mechanism behind it is too different than the one responsible for psychosis, so it makes sense that a similar approach would be effective.
There's an approach to pschotherapy called internal family systems that sounds a bit like this.
This is fascinating. What I note is that the therapist is collaborating with the patient to create "theatre". I think they should lean into this, new therapists should be explicitly trained in performance and theatre facilitation. There are a lot of solved problems with which they may otherwise struggle.
>Trial participants would create an avatar of their voice: a moving, three-dimensional digital embodiment that looks and sounds like the persecutor inside their heads
Shoulda just made a Jackie Chan tulpa instead
I've read that the voices that people with schizophrenia hear can vary depending on their cultural background (people from US hearing violent/confrontational voices, people from India hearing more playful voices / helpful voices). This case talks about affirming for those with violent voices. Wonder how that is with someone who hears pleasant voices.
The multiplicity of the mind is a subset property of the universe; the human mind is the ability of the universe to ask ‘why something, not nothing’.
It took billions of years for the seeds of the mind to flourish, and prayer is a slow reconciling with this property of the universe.
> if you ask voice-hearers to elaborate, you might engage in ‘collusion’: you may make [the voices] more real for people.
Validation therapy does exactly this, although I think the people are usually dealing with dementia, not schizophrenia.
This is incredible work. Kudos to the team who developed this!!
I wonder whether the mental inhibition of the voices ends up strengthening them. If you drop the conscious inhibition, they fade through other means.
Reading this article makes me wonder. Whenever I am too stressed, I become very self-conscious and I interpret everyday things and normal nuisances under the umbrella of "See, this is how big of a failure you are, you pathetic loser". Is almost as if there's another voice - not my voice - in my head who tells me this abusive stuff, sitting on the side and being judgemental.
Does this also count as psychosis?
That sounds a lot more like "automatic negative thoughts". I don't think it's considered a form of psychosis, even if arguably it's sort of similar (you're hearing a voice that isn't there telling you things that aren't real).
I use to have this, the book "the power of now" explains how to minimise and remove it.
remember that the internal monologue is not (the whole of) you. I managed to get rid of of my imposter syndrome by getting rid of that constant internal voice
Hallucinogenic mushrooms. When trip (it's been a while) I invariably hear voices and have conversations with them.
I call them "spirits".
They're friendly. Offer advice and such.
I've never fully understood this voice in the 'ed thing. Does anyone with internal dialogue have schizophrenia? Or is this literal, auditory voice, indistinguishable from actual voice?
Also, there's old technology in the wild capable of doing this[1] and I'd not be surprised to see it eventually become more easily available as hardware decreases in cost. It's already on the 'table' for advertisment purposes, albeit not microwave based.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect
Edit, Various Links:
https://gizmodo.com/we-will-beam-advertisements-directly-int...
https://www.holosonics.com/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/futuristic-device-from-israeli...
https://phys.org/news/2008-02-pentagon-lasers-voices.html
https://www.wired.com/2007/06/darpas-sonic-pr/
https://futurism.com/the-byte/laser-beam-speech-mit
The whole schizophrenic spectrum is a reversion to survival mode. This is what a animal hears all day- "They are out to get me, its one huge conspiracy" is the thought process of a mouse. Its low energy by default, as it does not require complex thought processes, relative little communication, very little planning for the future. Its a adaption to a warzone and economic stressors shake it loose.
I don't know if this is true. The way psychosis manifests is influenced heavily by culture. In some places, hallucinations from psychosis are largely positive rather than threatening. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
Indeed; the Oracles at Delphi were revered for their ability to divine wisdom from auditory hallucinations which were literally equated with gods. In some modern western cultures, by contrast, you even have active gaslighting of those who are vulnerable to such conditions and exacerbation of their negative qualities.
I would be careful equating the oracles of Delphi with psychosis, since religious practices can bring about visions and out of body experiences without drugs or underlying pathologies. For example, some Eurasian shamans practice "ecstatic dance" where oxygen deprivation and exhaustion result in shamanistic experiences (visions, auditory hallucinations, etc) without the use of drugs.
> The whole schizophrenic spectrum is a reversion to survival mode.
There could be some seed of truth in there, but, sweeping statements about what schizophrenia is need to be delivered with more than assertion.
> This is what a animal hears all day- "They are out to get me, its one huge conspiracy"
Not even wild animals think like this all the time. I feel confident saying they live very different inner lives to what you describe.
> is the thought process of a mouse
Comparing people with schizophrenia to terrified mice is bad. Not all schizophrenic delusions are paranoid in nature, for one thing. And for another, even if the basic mechanism were fundamentally the same (totally unproven) the differences between mouse brains and human brains, mouse culture and human culture, etc, makes the comparison rather pointless.
Add to all this, the fact that no non-human animal has been definitively shown to have schizophrenia in the same way humans experience it.
And of the animals that might have schizophrenia, like mice with a disrupted DISC1 gene, wouldn't they be different to normal, healthily anxious mice?
... Please, consider trying not to make declarations about stuff like this when your domain knowledge isn't quite up to the task.
We all have personalized profiles with little daemon AIs actually tracking and persecuting us. Torturing our every waking moment with judgmental advertising.
No wonder, then, if we are all depressed or terrified or generally mentally ill.
It’s directly caused by the lack of privacy controls and harm done by being online.