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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My Field of View

I talk on the phone with a 9-1-1 operator.  Someone is trying to kill me.  I argue that it's not my illness making me think these things, but I have no evidence.  At the end of a 30 minute conversation, the operator tells me that the best thing I can do is call up my family and tell them that I love them.

In the middle of the night, I awake.  My CPAP mask has been knocked off my face.  I can't shake the feeling that something is wrong.  Someone in this house is planning to kill me.  If they haven't already.  My bedtime medications could have been poisoned.  I sneak out the back door and go to the nearest public place, a Petro-Canada.  I call 9-1-1 and tell them I might have been poisoned.  An ambulance arrives promptly and takes me to the hospital.

I'm introduced to a room that I'll be spending the next 2 days in.  There's no electrical outlets, and there's stains on the walls.  These two facts keep me occupied.  First, the lack of electricity makes it impossible for me to plug in my CPAP machine, so when a doctor gives me some sedatives I spend a night struggling to stay awake.  The stains on the walls become my lifeline to everyone who has been in here before.  They are a reminder of the ghosts that once ate in this room.

This time, I am in the hospital voluntarily.  It is not because I think I am ill, but because I think I am in mortal danger.  A few months, I thought, would convince my would-be assassin that I am crazy, and thus not worth pursuing.  It feels like I am under Witness Protection.  All I have to do is blend in, which is fine because I know how crazy people act.

This time, I am in the hospital for three months.  Like every other time I am hospitalized, I pick up smoking.  I become highly religious.  I believe the fantastical stories of the people around me.  Here's the leader of Illuminati.  There's a Star Ship captain training for his mission.

I feel a tinge of sorrow for those who think they are religious icons, like Jesus the Messiah or Lucifer.  This sorrow comes from a deep well of subconscious experience, like the super-ego chastising the id, that these familiar faces lead to pain.  Being a Messiah means suffering under the yoke of the hospital complex.  No one would treat a real Messiah that flippantly.  I learned, therefore, not to be Jesus.  Every new time I go to the hospital, it is under a different guise.

There are four times so far, each for 3 months or more.  In the last 12 years, 10% of my life was in some institution of mental health.  I watched hospitals remove the smoking rooms.  Stress, basic everyday levels of stress, is no longer an option.  I have tried to go back to university several times, but this always leads down dark and dangerous paths. 

But where did this start?

Like so many things, it's partially coded into my genes.  My paternal grandmother committed suicide when I was four years old, a victim of bouts of depression and paranoid delusions.

But, it's also environmental.  I started to act out against my upbringing when I was in high school.  For the first two years, it was alcohol.  But alcohol was expensive, and difficult to obtain without a proper ID.  So, I graduated to pot.  Although pot is not deadly, and for most people not dangerous at all, for roughly 1% of the population, it can trigger latent psychosis.

I exploded in slow motion.  I read everything I could get my hands on about drugs.  I took chemistry incredibly seriously, and got a perfect grade in Chemistry 30.  When I did choose to use a drug, it was informed by more research than used in the propaganda of the drug war.  This is not to say that drugs are good by any means, but they can be revelatory in small doses.

I miscalculated how much I could handle and still be safe.  I overdosed on a combination of crystal meth and ecstasy.  For a week, I talked in a croak.  I coughed up blood.  My muscles spasmed uncontrollably.  It was actually pretty easy to quit, compared to cigarettes.

But the damage had been done.  Eight months later, I was trying to turn my house into a perpetual motion machine, by having it do as much stuff as possible.  I opened all the windows, turned on all the lights, turned on every faucet, and moved all the things around.  When my mom came home, she yelled at me, so I vanished and tried to think of a safe place to go.  The bus driver wouldn't let me on without money or shoes.

I eventually ended up at the University.  I was kicked out of a class for being disruptive, and someone told me to go see security.  From there, I was brought home.  I talked to a nice couple of nurses, and got in their car.  I played with my cornea the whole way out of the city to Alberta Hospital.

Everything was taken out of my hands.  It's hard to write about complete surrender.  I was powerless, led from one doctor to another, and then into a long hallway filled with people just like me.  There was excitement at first.  I flipped out after a few hours and got wrestled to the ground, injected with a muscle relaxant, and locked in a room for nearly 2 weeks while I was gradually sedated to some level of coherence.  Meanwhile, I rubbed feces on the wall.  It's prison, and prison is boring.

After I was released from solitary confinement, I was allowed visitors.  Most patients are not so lucky.  Many have long lost or never had the sort of confidantes who will visit.  I learned, instead, to relish having company, and to have as much as possible.

Other than family, there is also spirituality.  I was normally an atheist, but desperation leads to religion.  Says Friedrich Nietzsche: "a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."  Maintaining faith after the asylum is difficult, because of the intense self-critical doubt that fills the mind during recovery.

The medicine that they give me has side-effects.  One caused hypothyroidism which caused me to gain 70 pounds in 3 months.  I take a different medicine for that.  Another can lead to diabetes, and another constipation.  So I take medicines to counter that.  My evening pills fill the palm of my hand.  Every month I need to do blood work, and I get an injection.  Because of the volatility of one of my drugs, I can only withdraw one week of medication at a time.  It's all an inconvenience, and there's no room for error.  I used to do stuff like not take my evening medicine so I could stay up later.  This landed me in the hospital.  On top of this, individual body chemistry means that two people meeting the exact same diagnostic criteria may take radically different treatments.  As well, a single person will, in their lifetime, have several different medicine cocktails.  If I recall correctly, the average magic number is 3.

How does it feel to be manic?  Ironically, it feels freeing.  There are overwhelming, mystical, beautiful, destructive, and dangerous emotions with nothing to place them to.  The brain demands order, and ties these emotions to the world around you, and sometimes to a world of pure imagination.  It's a bit like dreaming, except with better retention.  These wild emotions bring to mind the electronic monk of the Douglas Adams story, a being that believes the entire world is a uniform shade of pink, despite all evidence to the contrary.

When I feel like a predator is hunting me, I am overcome with a fight-or-flight instinct.  When there is no predator in fact, I suspect everything of being mortally dangerous.  The world is pink.  I flee to the safest place I know: the hospital.  And because hospitals are for the insane, and I'm not insane, everyone implicitly knows -- in collusion with my private madness -- that they should treat me as any other patient to keep up the necessary facade.   In case one of the hospital staff plans to poison me, I refuse to eat anything not labelled on the little slip that comes with my meals.  I fly into a fit when someone thinks I should eat an apple.  The paranoia is boundless and intensely creative.  I have never had the same delusion twice, although I have had the same delusion for sleepless weeks on end.

I would like to finish on a hypothesis, brought up by the anti-psychiatry movement.  The premise of the movement is that doctors do more damage by their treatments than that done by what is being corrected.  We call the mad "patients" to fit it into the cozy box of medicine, when really what we have are "survivors" doped into something that, from the outside, vaguely resembles normalcy.  They are survivors not only of mental illness, but of the labels that come with it, and the drugs that come with those labels.  If that is a bit too harsh, perhaps the label "student" would be more useful.

However, sometimes abnormal is a third eye.  In shamanic cultures, madness plays a strong role in the psychological health of the group.  One after another, generation to generation, madmen serve as a conduit to another world, psychopomps.  The 1-in-100 schizophrenics is normal, a Darwinian imperative to assist the larger group dynamic.  Doctors are trying to treat with phamaceuticals what madmen have treated in themselves by experience.  The shaman is the mad scientist of theology.

I believe that the normal world of a schizophrenic is healthy. We live in a society; the premise that we live in an individualist world is fiction.  Shamans bring out the best of the group, often at considerable cost.  Mental hospitals, especially in countries with free health care, are proof of communal compassion. The problem is that we don't give mental patients time to do anything more than become cured; we don't transform them from students into teachers.

If we ignore all psychiatric uses of antipsychotics, what we are left with is a handful of sedatives that over time cause all manner of metabolic problems.

Thomas Szasz described psychiatry as the Science of Lying; Michel Foucault as a power struggle, here between doctors and patients.  An innately powerful group restricts the movements of confused and directionless people who are having trouble fitting in.  In this state, we are most vulnerable to labels; unfortunately, the labels doctors prescribe say nothing as to what the lived experience is like.

From a phenomenological perspective, what is it like to suffer a delusion?  I hope that my description of my own delusions helps clear up confusion in a way that outright calling myself a schizophrenic would be meaningless.  Everyone knows what panic fear feels like when danger is present; it doesn't take a huge step to figure out terror when there is no immediate threat.

I have gone through the process of hospitalization and release enough times that I fear another episode.  It took a life-or-death belief to convince myself in the last case that I needed treatment, and even then it was under the spell of a delusion.  Maybe my case is life-or-death, but by this, in no way do I mean that every schizophrenic is morbid.  Hopefully, in the future, psychiatry will evolve to be something that empowers the student and humanizes the shaman, rather than desensitizes the patient and dehumanizes the survivor.

As I have suggested, instead of doctor/patient is the teacher/student dynamic.  From the second time I was hospitalized, I insisted that if the drugs administered to me were so safe, they better be safe enough for doctors to self-medicate on them.  Never administer something to another person you are not willing to swallow yourself.  Don't trust a dealer who won't sample his product in front of you.  It should be a tenet of epistemic care that a psychiatrist must have first-hand experience with madness, if not with those drugs that mimic madness.  Nobody cares more for his fellow man than a teacher.

What psychiatry got right is the asylum.  It is healthy to lock people up together.  There, they grow like bonsai.

What it got wrong is the empowerment of the doctor.  It makes difference sound unhealthy, and not simply part of the growing process.

There are genuine spiritual and philosophical problems at work in the human mind, and a type of these problems are best tackled in a cage.  Half the men in the painting of Scuola di Atene were likely suffering from some manner of mental illness.  But what did that mean in a world without mental illness?  The philosophers of old were on a ship without a destination.  They were captains of humanity.  Presently, philosophy in universities covers topics that are palatable: minor philosophical problems are best handled in a university.  But what of the problems that get us into real trouble, that throw us back on the stormy seas?  The danger is old, but the content is new. In the end, the goal of mental health (or epistemic care, a much fairer designation) is to give the proper environment to bite down on these issues and solve them completely.

There is no panacea in medicine; sometimes even medicine itself is the wrong medicine.  Someone may be cured with a simple pill, but should they be?

To take the example of Major Depressive Disorder, 1-in-5 humans fit into that category. Given what we know about humans, that can't be an evolutionary accident. It could be the brain's way of slowing thinking down to deal with complex problems. Removing the depression before it has run its course might be harmful. A doctor should not do any harm. 

There is still room for introspection.  Let's assume that the mind is the seat of consciousness.  Someone with major depressive disorder is both death-positive and suicide-positive. These are attitudes that can lead to hospitalization. Another cure is the belief in eternal life, unless that is concurrent with belief in one's immortality.  Religious beliefs can have a significant role to play in recovery.

Our life is punctuated with crises.  Some people with more than others.  Some crises can cause mental damage.

Medication works to some degree, but we should not look to medicine to cure our humanity.  It is an escape route, which is good in case holistic methods fail to resolve the crisis.

To tie schizophrenia to Socrates' illness, the human mind can only grasp a limited set of knowledge.  Unrestrained intellectual greed leads to madness.  There are concepts that simply cannot be comprehended.  But this should not make us fear knowledge, or wisdom, or greed, or madness.  We ignore epistemology at our own peril.

Back to what we called Major Depressive disorder.  Perhaps it would be better treated by teachers, that is to say, people who know the ins and outs of Major Depressive Disorder from the inside.  Psychiatry can offer a safety net, but enlisting the skills of those who lived inside unpleasant thoughts may be the next evolution of this science.  The designation of these thoughts -- and thus the appropriate teachers for the right students -- need not be a disorder (humanity is not a disorder) but a description of which thoughts are causing the behavioural changes.  Someone who is inflicted with thoughts of death and suicide may be death-positive and suicide-positive. Resolving such afflictions may require spiritual and philosophical thoughts, such as contemplation of the afterlife.

Back up farther to where we were talking about schizophrenia.  In the primal stages of humanity, the shaman played a role as psychopomp and spiritual leader.  By collecting all the dreams and thoughts of his or her people, the shaman organized the group consciousness.  It was only with collective spirituality that we could function in larger and larger groups.  Eventually, this tendency would lead to religion, where people from across the known world would agree on various vocabularies and dogmas.  Soon, the pace of spiritualization outran the mental capacities of the shaman -- being as the shaman is only one person in a hundred -- inevitably leading her to have uncontrollable nervous breakdowns.  Empathy for all mankind is dangerous, and the nerves need to be blunted.  In smaller groups, schizophrenia is important and healthy.  The tendency toward the nervous breakdown requires genuine sympathy for the schizophrenic, not a medicinal palliative.  One who is overwhelmed with spiritual thoughts need to control these thoughts, not destroy them.