There Is No Hope Without Despair

The grace of Terry Fox is in the possibility of his failure.
It's what makes him human;
We relate to his weakness and find comfort in his strength.
Hope and despair are two sides of the same coin:
There is not one without the other;
Each is the necessary condition of both.

Day to day, we decide that not everyone's struggle is so noble,
But this is deception.  Ease is another word for practised.
We relate to Terry Fox because we struggle, not because we win.
One-in-five people suffer from a mental illness,
One-in-five that need to struggle with hidden prosthesis
One-in-five are challenged by invisible demons.

Who is the Terry Fox of schizophrenia?
Who has enough hope to survive the despair?
Who can look the label in the eye and say "Yes!"?
Who doesn't pretend it is nothing at all?
Who sees the reality and doesn't hide?
Whoever that is is a champion.

Schizophrenia and Eudaemonia

When treating mental illness, it is important to ensure that the patient remains capable of living to his full potential.  All too often, inadequate education and misdirection of the true facts of the illness causes the patient to see himself as nothing more than a patient, often unwillingly.  If the patient does not submit to the will of health professionals, the temptation is to break the patient down to a state where treatment acceptance bears a similarity with agreement.

The dictates of practical ethics, besides being prescriptive for human flourishing, should be seen as identical across the board.  There are no different, separate, ethics for the mentally unwell.  A schizophrenic can be -- indeed, should be -- a potential candidate for the exploration of eudaemonia.  There is a difference between medical suffering and human angst, but it is benefical to treat these as one and the same.

Carol Ryff's Six-Point Scale of Psychological Well-Being is a solid questionaire that measures the reported well-being of humans.  It is based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and is a quantification of his ideas about eudaemonia.  The six categories and a sample question from each are as follows:

1. Autonomy
I have confidence in my opinions, even if they are contrary to the general consensus.
2. Environmental Mastery
In general, I feel I am in charge of the situation in which I live.
3. Personal Growth
I think it is important to have new experiences that challenge how you think about yourself and the world.
4. Positive Relations with Others
People would describe me as a giving person, willing to share my time with others.
5. Purpose in Life
Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.
6. Self-Acceptance
I like most aspects of my personality.

Those without disabilities that prohibit them from working may perceive not working as a benefit to being disabled.  They may feel that the the mentally ill don't deserve to be treated well.  They believe that disability welfare is theft.  It is a catch-22.  It is exceedingly rare that the mentally ill are qualified for gainful labour, and in a labour-intensive society such as ours, nobody wants to hire the ill.

Consequently, for example, it is difficult for the mentally ill to find purpose to their life.  Something that many people derive their life's meaning from -- work -- is denied, and thus the potential to know human flourishing is denied.  This is unacceptable.  An enlightened society should recognize the suffering of its members.  Contrary answers to the big questions of life need to be recognized as valid.  A common alternative to work is religious piety.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness, not an ethical one.  It is possible to live a full and complete life while suffering from the effects of the sickness.  All it takes is an awareness of ethics beyond the scope of the symptoms of madness, as well as the keen observation that very few people, sane or insane, manage to live a life conducive to human flourishing.  Happiness is not automatic.

To measure the efficacy of a eudaemonic (happiness) focus, we need only look to cases of suicide.  Those who are unable to be happy with their diagnosis have an increased chance of suicide.  Acceptance of one's weaknesses and recognition of one's humanity leads to greater self-acceptance, and fewer suicides.

Written Word Therapy

Illustration by Emily Wright


The following is a presentation written for the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta in May 2017:


Hello, I'm Trevor.  I'm pleased to be here.

I believe that one's earliest memories shape one's entire life.

As Vladimir Nabokov said, "I think it's all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is."  It is the curse of the philosophic mind that these memories are memories of people, and people do not live forever.  In my case, my cherished memory is that of my Baba.  I remember her round belly, her sky-blue dresses that reached to the floor, and her suicide.  Even today, the room she died in makes me uneasy.

At the time, when I was four-years-old, I learned that she thought the police were after her.  That was my first encounter with schizophrenia, the disease that steals the soul.  From that moment on, I was fascinated with what I viewed as a different sort of breakdown of reason: religion.  If that's where the core of one's soul is, certainly it would be there where I could find my answers.

I may have been young, but my problem was serious.  I'll steal Albert Camus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”, I drifted through school, intentionally getting high enough grades that I could pass, but played without any stubbornness of character.  Thus, I was educated without being bothered by petty concerns.  The specter of my Baba's death lingered, and her death was a real insurmountable problem.

Within my twelfth year of school, there was a radical change.  I can blame it somewhat on the literature I was reading at the time:  Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.  It seemed that the answer was there within the confidence of these brave thinkers, and the reason I had not already found the answer was because of government scare tactics promoted so liberally in schools.

The last three months of school were hellish.  I was balancing mild drug use with school work, and the thought of another 4 years of post-secondary was not appealing at all.  I asked my grandfather to lend me the money he had earmarked me for university use to just give me the money and let me sort life out a little.  Of course, he said no.  He was a professional radiologist.

I graduated with an 87% average.

But my rational years were over.  I decided that, in the worst case scenario, participating in the tradition of drug use would cause me to have a mental breakdown, but that was still only in a minority of cases.

Drug users develop a keen sensitivity to their inner state.  It's something that cannot be learned without experience.  In certain spiritual practices, the careful controlled use of drugs pushes someone into the desired receptivity to spiritual ideas.  Outside of therapy, it's a matter of luck and experiment, which is unsafe.

I kept a log, which encompassed everything from nutmeg to cough syrup to marijuana to ecstasy to crystal methamphetamine.  Simultaneously, I kept a journal of my thoughts, a proper philosophical journal that is forever lost to time.  Within my drug journal you can see a mind desperate to hold onto sanity, but only in retrospect.  If I had known that there were treatments for my suffering, I would have skipped the experimentation.  I found solace in crystal meth, finally.  It settled me down and helped me get on track with my other spiritual pursuits.

Four months later, I was coughing up bloody chunks of lung.  That was enough to get me to stop.  I abruptly ended all contact with my drug-using friends.  That phase of my life was over. The only leftover was cigarettes, which I found a lot more difficult to quit than harder drugs.

I opened up to my Mom about my activities, and admitted that I might be depressed.  It didn't come as a surprise.  At the time, I had progressed to reading any philosophy I could get my greedy hands on, and found a spiritual message in Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.  I admit I didn't understand it all at once, but my final message is this: seek for Right Mindfulness (be in your right mind) for sanity, unblock your chakras for enlightenment, and see the necessary duality that all in the world has its opposite.  An Enlightened person is the Eastern equivalent of a Rational person.  Having been labelled insane, the quality of my sanity is important to me.

Anyway, I felt that I was being watched.  In this case, it was true.  My friends and family were all trying to figure out what was wrong with me and what to do about it.  It got to the point where I fled my house and ended up at the University of Alberta.  I disrupted classes and got sent to security.  I wasn't wearing shoes since I left by way of my window.  Security managed to get my information and they held me there until I got picked up.  When we arrived back home, a pair of nurses were waiting.  They talked to me for a while and then took me to Alberta Hospital.

By the end of the first full day in the hospital, I was locked in solitary confinement.  I had yelled at the nurses for their mistreatment of patients, and everyone sort of looked away while I had my breakdown.  Solitary is not fun.  I'd say it's like prison, but it's identical to prison.  It's not pretty being in a cage.  I rubbed faeces on the wall just to get moved to the other solitary room.  That was when I was eighteen.

I was initially diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.  Although I hadn't touched meth in over eight months, it is one of those drugs that set off alarm bells.  I thought that I was dead and was in Purgatory.  I took three months until I understood anything of anything again. My family was very supportive, and I know they know more about my illness than I do since I still have trouble with basic activities of life.  I've been admitted four times, and my current diagnosis is schizophrenia.  What this means to a regular person is anyone's guess.  I barely understand it, and sometimes I feel like I've gotten over it and then straight back to the hospital.

I've been out of hospital for three years now.

After so long, I'm so used to schizophrenia that I don't bring it up in casual conversation.  There's plenty of other things people can hate me for.  I did have a period of self-stigmatization.  It almost lead to my suicide.  It came about after I tried to go back to school and found that things that were normally easy for me were now ridiculously impossible.  Getting to school.  Staying awake in classes.  Making lunches.

Currently, I'm thirty-two years old.  I don't work, go to school, or volunteer.  For a while, I tried to check out the Mormon church, but it was not my brand of religion.  I don't need any more guilt in my life.  I do, however, practice karate and attend the SSA.  I keep good relations with my family, and I've got a few high school friends that managed to survive through my incidents.  That's the limit of my socialization.

What do I think can be changed?

I dislike when people use words like "bipolar" or "depressed", "autistic" or "schizophrenic" outside of the context of the Diagnostic Statistics Manual.  As Soren Kierkegaard said: "once you label me you negate me."The challenge of finding a way to speak openly about mental illness without stigmatizing those labeled as such is real.  Depression is not simply sadness; schizophrenia is not simply fear.  In the future, I would like to find a shared vocabulary that allows doctors and lawyers to speak intelligibly to one another without frightening those they are talking about.  It feels too much like a witch hunt and not enough like medicine.  I'm not the first to make this comparison.  As Albert Camus had said, suicide is the prime philosophic problem of philosophy.  In this sense, my problems had a spiritual solution.  I've considered using the spiritual languages of Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism to describe the same events in clearer terms.

I'll share with you how that might work.

There are seven chakras which can be blocked, and a blockage in a chakra leads to an illness.  For example, the lowest chakra, the basal one, is blocked by fear and leads to poor survivability, just as someone afflicted with schizophrenia is walled in by his or her paranoia.  It makes sense primarily because Hinduism is a meditative language, which has given names to all the different states of consciousness.  Western medicine misses a useful tool when it ignore the discoveries of the East.  Taking all seven chakras as real allows us to quantify degrees of mental unwellness, in the same way that an IQ test allows us to quantify the rarity of relative intelligences.  Living with schizophrenia is better than not living at all, and there is always the possibility that one opens the crown chakra and becomes enlightened.  But this is beyond the scope of this presentation, so I'll finish my thoughts another time.

For the moment, this image should suffice:

How do I respond to Camus' problem?

Although my medications are certainly better than meth, they still do not answer all the problems of the illness.    I suffer from excessive fatigue, sleeping 12-14 hours a day.   My hygiene could be better.  My hands quiver frequently.  No matter how often I try to focus on these, it never seems important.  I've had 4 different diagnoses with 4 different pill combinations.  There will never be a perfect one.  As it stands, I prefer the negative side-effects of my medications than the side-effects of street drugs.

But I certainly no longer have the urge to kill myself, through drugs or otherwise.  Suicide, the problem that my Baba introduced to me at an early age, is no answer.  If I could talk to her now, I could give her the ultimate advice: be patient.  Even at my worst, it was going to get better.  What I had was patience, as it took ten years for the psychiatrists to find an acceptable medication cocktail for me.  The solution meant I had to trust others to do what was best for me when I was incapable of making these decisions.  It's hard to swallow a doctor's drugs if you have a history of drug use.

My family stuck by me, and showed me by example that life was inherently worth living.  Above all, my mother always tried to reach me on the far side of consciousness.  She is able to admit me into the hospital if I stop making sense.  And others believe that what I say makes sense, which is all I really desire.  Telling the truth and being believed is important for anyone who has gone through any form of suffering.

In closing, I hope you enjoyed this journey into my mind, and appreciated the humble perspective of someone living with schizophrenia.

Contradiction and the Absolute

There are two types of beliefs: absolute and empirical.

If two beliefs are true opposites, then if x is true, then -x is false. This form of contradistinction only appears absolutely. Most opposed beliefs are not true opposites, meaning that if p is true, q can either be true or false, and vice versa.

Because it is sometimes difficult to determine if two different beliefs are true opposites, we add a couple of truth values. In total, we have: (1) x, (2) -x, (3) x and not-x, and (4) neither x nor not-x.  Thus we shift from thinking in dilemmas to thinking in tetralemmas.

If (3) or (4) are possibilities, then we are not dealing with absolute beliefs. For instance, if it is possible for theism and atheism both simultaneously to be false, then belief in God is empirical. This is alright for everyone but those obsessed with finding truth at all costs. Most truth is permanently provisional.

Another example of empirical belief is the belief in selfhood. It is possible for the self to both exist and not exist. We break formal laws of logic establishing this, but paraconsistent logic allows us to consider such true contradictions as non-explosive. The Buddhist tetralemma kills metaphysics.

One book that forms the core of Buddhist theory is the Diamond Sutra. The whole book is one extended lesson in thinking beyond dualistic dilemmas. Four-valued logic, the tetralemma, requires a bit of restructuring of the mind to apply consistently.

The advantage is that we also avoid the circular logic behind the law of non-contradiction because we get to selectively choose when it does and doesn't make sense to obey the law of non-contradiction. We can distinguish between absolute beliefs and empirical beliefs by how they measure up to the four values of the tetralemma, rather than the two values that we are trapped with in regards to dilemmas.

Draft 2.0: Hinduism and Psychiatry

The label "schizophrenic" comes with a lot of baggage, most of it negative.  The label itself is misunderstood by the patients who have to undergo the life-changing diagnosis.  One's own mind is called into question.

There needs to be a way for doctors to explain quickly and clearly to an average person, what the label actually means.

As far as I can tell, schizophrenia is all-encompassing fear.  It's like a phobia that never ends and never has any reason to be.  This fear makes it difficult to survive in as complex a world as ours.

To change gears, the Hindu religion speaks of seven primary lotuses, or chakras, along the human spine.  There are hundreds of chakra points throughout the body, but for the purposes of clear communication, only seven are relevant.

At the base of the spine lies the basal chakra.  When it is open, one is able to handle affairs of life and hygiene with competency.  Fear can block it up; the goal of psychiatry is to keep it open, with chemicals if need be.  A basal blockage is schizophrenia.

Next is the sacral chakra.  It is blocked by guilt, and when blocked, leads to difficulty dealing with pleasure.  This is major depression.

Further along is the solar plexus chakra.  It deals with the ability to choose one's own path and to be self-confident.  The block that keeps this closed is shame, which causes worry.  Psychiatrically, it is known as anxiety.

There are further illnesses, but I don't believe it is useful to treat someone medicinally after they are capable of making moral decisions.  Psychiatrically speaking, only the basal, sacral, and solar plexus chakras are relevant.

The question is whether or not someone with a blocked 4th chakra, heart, is capable of being moral.  This chakra deals with love and self-love, altruism, kindness, and respect.  It is blocked by grief.  Grief makes it difficult to be open to new love; habits become supremely important.  Lacking compassion, someone with a blocked heart chakra is sociopathic.

After sociopathy, the challenges relate to deeper spirituality.  The throat chakra, number five, deals with truth.  It is the heart of our ability to communicate, and what separates us from the lesser animals.  Learning to discern truth from lies is the primary challenge, but sometimes even learning to speak at all is overwhelmingly difficult.  Just as the heart chakra teaches us compassion, the throat chakra teaches us logic.  A miscommunication is autism.

That there is a broad spectrum of conditions known as "autistic" says something about other illnesses.  Meditating (thinking) away any mental condition is a lifetime challenge.  Medication is sometimes the only way we will get at the person under the disease.  Personally, I have a blocked basal chakra, meaning that there is no way I would have managed as much insight as I have without careful regimens of drugs.  Learning to open a chakra is like learning a whole new language, and I needed a booster.

We have traveled from the depths of the purest Physical plane, through the Astral plane of dreams, the Celestial realms, and the plane of Balance; now we are in the Human realms.

As Alexander Pope said in his Essay on Man:

"Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!"

Above the plane of humanity is the plane of austerity, signified by the third eye.  It deals with intuition, and thus is set against the falseness of illusory being.  One sees and one understands.  One's higher-level ethics (justice, fairness) sits here.

The final chakra is the crown chakra.  It is blocked by attachments.  All that has to be known is known at the sixth, brow chakra.  The crown chakra manifests when the understanding of one's oneness gifts us with an occasional feeling of infinity.  Although it is a shame that one cannot be cosmically aware at all moments, this is only because all things pass.  Even the bulk of experience will occasionally fade into the past, and enlightenment will be realized again.

Hinduism and Psychology

Everyone has some experience with the astral plane, whether or not they are aware that such is what it is when experiencing it.  It is tied to dreams and drugs, and is our capacity for an ecstatic trance.

Astral projection is our first encounter with the weird, a plane separate from the raw material plane of survival.  If it is sufficiently deep, we wallow in the abyss, terrified.  The way out of the Abyss is through the root chakra: our fear, caused by our astral movements, blocks us from grounding ourselves sufficiently.  Those who cannot of their own volition escape to the first wheel are madly paranoid, and may require medicinal intervention.

The next chakra wheel is the capacity for pleasure.  It is known as the "sacral chakra", and is blocked by feelings of guilt.  These feelings of guilt make it difficult to live in a pleasure-seeking utilitarian mode.  When one opens the sacral chakra, one experiences greater emotional range, and a deeper sense of connection with others.

There are parallels to yoga psychology in the West.  For instance, the five stages of grief mirror the seven stages of chakra development, and Maslow's hierarchy also shows growth toward a particular end.  It's difficult not to know in theory what the highest level of yoga practice is, even for a beginner.  A person can understand the highest principles of non-attachment yet still not have a complete understanding.  It takes a lot of development to go from student to yogi.

The top of the ladder, rather than hide it, should be recognized at the beginning.  The goal of opening chakras is to awake one to the infinite.  It is the loss of all attachment; a state of enlightenment if you will.  From the base of the ladder it may seem magical, but it is anything but.  To be falsely enlightened is, however, insanity.  The deeper one sinks into false enlightenment, the more lost one becomes.

Certainly, this is to say that there are more than one states that are commonly referred to as enlightenment, and that all but one of these merits the title.  Someone who is lost before opening the first chakra, that is to say someone who has never experienced any astral states (through drugs, meditation, or dreaming) lives in an incomprehensible world of schizophrenia.  Likewise, someone who has never unblocked the second chakra wheel is trapped in a world bereft of pleasure.  Medically, it is known as depression.  It is easier to escape from depression than it is from schizophrenia, but it requires a careful re-examining of one's fundamental assumptions about one's relationship to the world.

Of course, there is a world of difference between academically grasping the problems that lead to depression and so forth, and falling between the cracks into a deep understanding.  Someone who visits depression from an astral plane is tortured by their thoughts.  Someone who passively thinks about, say, suicide, may as well have never experienced suicidal thoughts.  There is something of a tragic hero in a man or woman who takes on the challenge of opening as many chakra wheels as possible, including the painful ones.

Unlike the second and first chakras, the third "solar plexus" chakra is active.  It is where we choose the life we want to live, and where we build up the confidence to express our will in personally meaningful ways.  It is where you recognize that we are all different and that the best life is one of balance, whatever that means to ourselves.  It is blocked by shame.

The fourth, "heart", is an awareness of others and our interconnectedness.  Love guides us through out lives.  What prevents love from flowing through our lives is grief.  One must be able to let love go to find new love.  Here the goal of balance is in the foreground..

The last three chakras are less physical and more spiritual.  The throat chakra expresses truth, and is blocked by lies.  One has fully left the dark night of the soul and joined the human plane. The brow chakra expresse insight and is blocked by illusions.  And the final chakra is the crown chakra: pure cosmic awareness, blocked by earthly attachments.

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