High Functioning Schizophrenics

[mallorys_camera]

Maranatha. That's the name of the umbrella agency my little youth group is sequestered under. I looked the word up in a dictionary. It's derived from the Aramaic, and means: "The Lord is come." It's found once in the Bible, at the end of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: Fuck you if you don't love Jesus. Mara natha.

Kind of like the New Testament version of "Namaste," I suppose.

I'm surrounded by a lot of religious people here. And not just religious. Really religious. They're Pentecostal Christians. They speak in tongues. Not every day, you understand. Just on special occasions.

I think of them all as high-functioning schizophrenics.

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_______ ______, my best friend in nursing school, married a guy named _______ ______ who was very handsome but a little peculiar. I forget what we were talking about the night he made his startling confession: "Oh, I hear voices all the time."

I do remember it was said in the off-the-cuff kind of way that someone else might say, "Oh, I pee in the shower," a casual admission that though this was perfectly normal behavior, there were some people who might not find it normal.

"Do the voices tell you to do bad things?" I asked, laughing.

"Sometimes,"he said.

"And what do you do when the voices tell you to do bad things?"

"I ignore them," he said.

It was at that point in the conversation that I realized, My God! He's telling me the truth. And quickly changed the subject. There are some things you'd rather not know about the husbands of friends you love dearly.

This was confirmation, though, of a theory I had already formed: Namely, that many of the maladaptive symptoms we associate with what we call "mental disease" are not organic at all but the result of the labeling process. That, in fact, it's perfectly possible to be way out there in terms of your own internal thought processes so long as you are able to maintain. You have to be able to blend in, not cause a ruckus.

In some cases – though certainly not all, and maybe not even many – I think it's the stigma attached to certain thought processes that gives rise to aberrant behaviors. I certainly think that it's within the realm of possibility that diseases like "schizophrenia" will one day be exorcised from the DSM the same way homosexuality was.

There's much more I wanted to write here about sixth senses and neurotransmitters, but I am tired, really tired, after a day spent hammering out a business plan and doing the preliminary tweaking on verbiage that has to be strong enough to buttress a grant proposal that's due September 30. So I'm gonna stop here and switch the "mindless" button on.

Comments

[millysdaughter.livejournal.com]

Falling under the heading of "cooperate and graduate" are many of those "blend in and shut up" requirements.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Ain't that the truth. :-)

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

i think this is certainly true. right now our conception of reality is one in which time is steady, static and hard. things are there until someone moves them, and you always know your place and time. people who are able to supply this version to others, or are able to manipulate this sense of unchanging substratum are favored. literally, the slow and steady win the race. at least for now. if it was as the theater of the absurd, when village shaman would play songs for days to call upon gods to descend to the earth -- then antonin artuad would never had been incarcerated in an aslyum. he would rather, be right there in the forefront.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty, but he was only intermittantly what I would call "high functioning." It's likely his particular form of insanity had neurological roots -- he had meningitis when he was a kid and my guess is that rearranged his brain circuitry in some fundamental way.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Many people hear voices. An easy means of explaining this is consistent muscle spasms. These interrupt blood flow to the ears. The brain is adapted to interpret rhythmic or staccato modulations of tone in the ears as speech. Couple this with the degree of isolation in the present culture, something unknown to history until now and hearing voices is logical. It is the brain attempting to meet its own needs by representing what the environment has not provided. There are numerous other explanations for hearing voices.

Schizophrenic's a damning label. I've known several schizophrenics. They lost contact with reality to a degree where they no longer had any perspective on their behavior. Normal inhibitions against expressing certain experiences, sometimes perfectly reasonable ones, they lost these. What if you experienced some kind of divine event, like God speaking to you? 5000 years of Judeo-Christian culture say it's possible God might speak to you. Still I'd advise against reporting the experience.

The worst schizophrenic I ever met, the one most severely disconnected from reality, recovered. Was later elected our Dartmouth Class President.

We damn a lot of people these days. I'm sick of it. No one ever chose mental illness. "Normal" has little to recommend it. Normal is arbitrary. What use is modesty, except to keep people unsure of themselves?

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

consistent muscle spasms. These interrupt blood flow to the ears. The brain is adapted to interpret rhythmic or staccato modulations of tone in the ears as speech.

Yes, I've read Oliver Sacks on this subject. The voices I'm talking about deliver a more organized message. They could be the result of neuromuscular brain spasms, I suppose. But I think that's unlikely.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

I've never read Sachs. "That's unlikely." Why?

At different times in my life, I've wondered was I hearing voices. They were never credible. How much weight you give a fever dream? pissed me off. I studied it. The speech of these voices had one cadence. Nothing positive to say. Does Sachs write about voices yelling "today's Wednesday. Tuesday was yesterday" or "holy CRAP look at that!, get her shirt off dude come on you went to business school" OK you have my attention. Otherwise if this is something you experience, ask the voice what good it's ever done you.

You might be intuition in spoken drag. That's me being kind. if I hear you, you're in the way. Score me dinner or shut up.

[robby.livejournal.com]

The speaking in tongues is an old Christian tradition. If the Voodoo cultists or Muslims did it, it might get more respect from the secular progressives. I guess Xtian is the religion of white men and George Bush.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

This would come as news to tens of millions of Hispanics and Africans, and "charismatic Christianity" is popular among many of them. Speaking in tongues, idioglossolalia is framed as something external to this world speaking through you. Since all of Christianity was defined in terms of Plato by Aquinas, speaking in tongues is to be expected.

"Bad things." This is the term Patrizia used. Bad things spoken are often described by the speaker as a release of unbidden thoughts. They most often involve cleanliness, violence and/or sexuality. This correlates with some hypotheses involving obsessions: that they are caused by disorders of the caudate nucleus, which is thought to serve a gatekeeper function in conscious thought. It keeps thought/feelings (Jung, in German it's one word) not helpful to social discourse from realization in conscious thought. These thoughts are no less active than any others; we are taught the habit of dismissing them from consciousness at a young age, by social sanction. We know the thoughts are real because they are often expressed in dreams, directly or indirectly. We've survived 150,000 years as a species, only 2000 or so of which could even distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate social expression. For 120,000 years, at least, whether schizophrenia or inappropriate speech even exists was not relevant: the distinction did not exist.

Certain genetic markers associated with schizophrenia are also believed to confer protection against malaria.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I can't agree with your contention that social controls are something new. In earlier times, the addled and dysfunctional would be a drain on the community. Individuals with serious mental illness have probably always been de-selected. I'm thinking ostracizing and banishment, and even death for those considered possessed by evil spirits.

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

There are hypotheses schizophrenics in pre-literate civilizations were used as shamans. By divining events, making sense of the inexplicable they served a social purpose, maybe were religious leaders. Can't figure out how there'd be physical evidence of this. Maybe observing the Yanomami or other Stone Age tribes still extant could give a clue.

The malaria link to me has traction. Until recently humans only lived to be around 30. The evidence sickle-cell anemia protected (protects) against malaria is strong. Some Africans have limited immunity to malaria -- met a guy the other day from Togo, he described himself this way. Most diseases or vulnerability to same have a heritable component. Unless it's contagious, and the evidence to date says it's not, natural selection should have eliminated schizophrenia thousands of years ago.

I've known at least four. It tends to show up close to age 21 and comes on strong. In many people symptoms improve over time. Some so-diagnosed schiophrenics function at a high social level and are capable of abstract reasoning and synthesis beyond the capability of most. The disease is correlated with high intelligence to the extent diagnosis over prolonged periods is easily challenged by normative social categorization. Reasoning at the far right of the bell curve has no ready audience.

[robby.livejournal.com]

The shaman also mastered the traditional mythology, genealogy, belief system and secret language of the tribe as well as its healing methods. The youth who are called to be a shaman attracts attention through their love for solitude, desire to roam in the woods or in unfrequented places, visions, and spontaneous song-making. Sometimes they enter trance-like states which make them unconscious. These signs are regarded with pleasure and awe by the tribespeople who generally believe that their soul is being carried away by spirits to a place where they are instructed, sometimes by his shaman ancestors, in the secrets of the profession.

In some cultures the behavior of the prospective shaman is described in terms that seem to indicate psychopathology. However it is precisely because they succeed in curing themselves that these individuals become shamans.


http://www.williamjames.com/History/SHAMANS.htm

[nokomisjeff.livejournal.com]

One of my best friends is a high functioning schizophrenic. His delusions are what they are, and don't minimize the fact that he is one of the nicest people I know and I enjoy being around him. Some of my friends are uncomfortable around him, and that's OK. He's also probably 50 IQ points higher than I am.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

On the whole, schitzophrenia doesn't seem to be correlated with underlying intelligence in any way. Though schitzophrenics do tend to perform less well on standardized intelligence tests because many of them can't organize their thoughts well enough to answer specific questions.

[saltdawg.livejournal.com]

I always found the consistencies of certain delusions withing those labeled "mentally ill" were fascinating and uncanny. Like messages being beamed from television sets. I can't come up with any others from the top of my head. Of course, these could be "learned" delusions, But then again, you have instances such as VALIS telling P.K. Dick exactly what was wrong with his child before any doctor could.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I knew a guy once who was perfectly rational so long as he had an open book in front of his face and could tell himself he was reading.

Take that open book away, and he became dangerously violent.