Dave Chappelle is as close as we've got. He's getting better as he gets older, and he's pretty fearless. He put his money where his mouth was when he left millions on the table and told hbo to shove it when they tried to buy his "creative freedom"
Christopher Hitchen's method was completely different, but he's another person on my "How can they be dead?!" list who would have *shredded* the current narratives.
Problem with idea and implementation thereof does not automatically equal the idea or the implementation being based on something not really existing.
Up until the early 2000s, the consensus in my coutnry was schizofrenia was due to childhood trauma and could be cured by Freudian therapy while under heavy medication. This had been the scientific consensus since the fifties, when it had replaced the older one that it was a) incurable and b) hereditary thus necessitating life-long incarceration.
Now, the consensus is that it is neurological, and thus so far not really treatable. Instead focus should be on support and managment, medication being minimalised and only as necessitated by individual needs, training the individual how to accept their illness and its delusions, and how to stay on top of it and helping them have the strength to do so. (This is the idealised non-existent principle of course, reality is mucky.)
But we wouldn't be here without the previous partly erroneous hypotheses and methods. The next step is already in formation: re-defining mental illnesses (all kinds) as only being so if they either endanger others (pedofilia f.e.) or endanger the individual (anorexia f.e.) or both. That way, the old issue of a totalist state enforcing a calipers & slide rulers universal [NORMAL] according to tables and averages, goes away too. (This is also the goals of many an organisation for those with various conditions, only they go about it bass-ackwards.)
I could be wrong but I think your country is Sweden. Correct me if I am mistaken. But at least in Sweden in medical school in Lund in the '70's the consensus was definitely not that schizophrenia was due to childhood trauma and Freudian therapy played no role in its treatment.
Brian ~ I had never heard of Thomas Szasz, so thank you for the question and the opportunity to expand my horizons. I found the official Szasz website, and actually agree with most of his manifesto.
My comment was not taking issue with those who are deemed to be "mentally ill" or different (better term?). It is with The State interfering and forcing society in general to arbitrarily change cultural norms/conventions to accommodate the different few. Dana Jumper (comment below) understood the intent of my remarks.
OMG, I had a sister with schizophrenia. Her voices said the people in her office were moving the pencils around on her desk when she was at lunch. The neighbors (whom she had never met) were saying she was not a mystic and of course, she knew she was. The priest in the middle of a sermon looked at her and told her "you sinned in 19xx". The cleaning lady at the facility she later lived in "farted in her chair" every day, so she could not sit in it. These are just a few of the many things her "voices" told her. No, it was not just an alternate reality, it was a devastating illness.
I've met a few people who would see some serious nightmares. I don't know if I can imagine a worse torture than to tell them to just accept it as their personal reality.
When the first of these brain twisters gets dismembered by a patient in a "nonconsensus reality" I think I'll pick up a bottle of champagne.
We are a society full of people openly advocating the genital mutilation and sterilization of children based on a “journey” of “feelings.” Pizza Hut is promoting a book to 5 year olds celebrating “little drag kings.”
These people already promote the idea it’s societies job to indulge the delusions of the mentally ill by affirming those delusions. This is nothing more than an expansion of the insanity.
On the flip side of this, it sounds like they are insinuating that disagreeing with what they consider to be reality is considered a "non-consensus reality." So like in a reality where people have been told that a disease has a higher death rate than it does, that masks work, and that all the non-medical treatments for the disease are effective...this is "concensus reality" and those of us who see the world as it is actually believe in a non-concensus reality.
What do you do if the voices that are actually real are the ones delivering auditory hallucinations?
Oh man, a patent for voice to skull communications. Reminds me of that episode of Gilligan's Island where Gilligan picked up radio stations in his fillings.
Hey, when your sex , oops gender, oops, identity is optional based upon your current opinion, there is no objective truth.
Seriously though, I read that full story and there was some intriguing nuance to what is almost a new 12-step approach vs. heavy drugging routinely dispensed by the psychiatric community for those hearing voices. Sufferers are probing in community with other sufferers what underlying (Freudian?) meanings there may be to these voices - parts of the psyche trying to communicate with other parts and not necessarily blocking them out automatically. Interesting stuff.
Hearing voices is very normal. There's evidence most people have such an experience in a harmless way at some point in their lives, most commonly in the semi-conscious zone between sleep and waking. It's common to hear the voice of a dead loved one as part of grieving. Those who have such experiences frequently may have the two halves of their brain less clearly divided than most, meaning external and internal voices are less easy to compartmentalise and distinguish. What you do NOT want to be doing if you have such an experience, is handing yourself over to the pharma-captured psychiatric profession...
I find it ironic that so many of us skeptics of the public health establishment are unquestioning of the "mental illness" paradigm of the psychiatric establishment.
I've heard my co-workers call my name at work a couple of times when they didn't. I was used to them calling me, because they had a question or needed something. Both times it was when I was deep in concentration. It was a little creepy, but I chalked it up to a "wiring" error. It's never happened since.
Group therapy is indeed helpful for the stabilized with serious mental illness. That is a safe environment where they can explore the meaning of the voices and how to survive in the external world. But if you encounter a truly schizophrenic person in psychosis, you will understand why these imperfect drugs are required - at least in the acute stages of the illness. Talk is not possible in the acute stage. If they could listen or talk cogently, they might not be in an acute situation.
Agree. When did looking for alternatives to a lifetime of pharmacological interventions turn into a bad thing? (Granted I'm no expert, and drugs may well be a moral necessary in acute cases.)
If I read them correctly, they're not advocating allowing so-called nonconsensus realities to supplant real reality. It's about seeing what might be learned about one's life situation by paying attention to these experiences, taking them seriously as phenomena in themselves, even though not literally in the same way as ordinary sensory impressions of the outer world.
And the Hearing Voices Movement has been around for a while, even if one is tempted to read the tweet in a very 2020s, "peak insanity" kind of way.
On the other hand, I get being suspicious of the NYT's motives in tweeting this out. There's that familiar juxtaposition between "what the conservative establishment says" and "what the enlightened change agents say," or those who are making efforts to reform a system that (we know this story well) oppresses vulnerable minorities rather than meeting them where they are and seeking to support them in their lived experience.
Expecting to find solid ground beneath your feet is only your neurotypical privilege showing. Everything you think you know to be right is only the legacy of systems of control. Consensus is violence! Illness is wellness! Everything must change!
I think that's an important point, and it gets to something that felt incomplete to me in my little comment.
I believe humanity is oppressed by the powers that be, and yet I also think that the powers that be are using a narrative of systemic oppression to divide us, even to divide each one of us within ourselves, making us suspicious of our cultural heritage and of traditional values and understandings of the world, some of which we probably need in order to be happy, grounded people.
I get very tired of hearing "here's something else wrong with the way we've been doing things, [you oppressive paternalistic Judeo-Christian white supremacist], so isn't it about time you fell in line and started affirming your support for the progressive party line before you develop a reputation as a reactionary?"
And yet. There is something inhuman about the world we have built, and I have sympathy for those who point that out. Is it an inevitability: society represses aspects of our individuality, even as it makes it possible for us to survive in this vast, dangerous world with all of our many needs and frailties? Have we got to go into the unconscious and recover the values of the father, understanding their meaning now as though for the first time, and claiming them as our own, in something of a Jordan Peterson kind of way?
Or is there something else? Have we become too left brain-dominant, as another Substack writer has put it? Is there some kind of coming home to a more enchanted cosmos of more benevolent possibilities, in a Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, kind of way? Have the lizard people who think to have this world under their dominion unduly deprived us of our potential as human beings by robbing us of some of the strands of our DNA and shutting down our crown chakras, even as they unnaturally extend their own lifespans by drinking the blood of babies sacrificed on their altars?
I don't know. I used to be a New Ager and now I am a traditional Catholic. In neither culture do I feel entirely at home, and yet I am sure there is something here, some greater story we do not entirely grasp.
We have seen in the covid response that our institutions do not, will not serve us. What are the implications of that? What are the alternatives? Can we build alternatives, a parallel society as some have suggested, with the same nuts-and-bolts understanding of reality that powered the twentieth century?
Or do we need to ask the ultradimensional beings, those who have been flying around in their UAPs, real nicely if they have any advice for us? Perhaps it's about really living the Gospel radically for the first time in five hundred years or more? Maybe the voices in some of our heads have something to contribute to the conversation? I don't know, but I am trying to live the question.
"Nonconsensus realities." Pairs nicely with "Scientific consensus."
Truth is a funny thing. It's so esoteric that, in order to lay legitimate claim to it, you need either a PhD and corporate backing, or an inscrutable, non-falsifiable delusion.
Neurotypicals with anything less than a master's degree, get outta here.
My theory as to why the libs/leftists/whatever are not in favor of dealing rationally with mental illness is because the key to mental health is being accountable and taking responsibility for oneself. This article isn't an argument against my theory.
Maybe they have been hallucinations libertate. Maybe this is a hallucination... IRL you are on the couch, eating popcorn watching Seinfeld and wearing parachute pants. All is well.
Follows the recipe quite nicely...Step 1. create an unfalsifiable, post-modernist condition/theory complete with a built-in, marginalized community whose livelihoods are triggered by reality. Step 2. Force those who live and understand reality to accept and then bend to this fringe element in order to create a new metaverse in the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity (i.e. DIE). Step 3. nihilism achieved. Optional Step 4. repeat.
Bottom line...we are normalizing mental illness. We are normalizing drug dependency. We are normalizing unhealthy physical health. We are normalizing all sorts of deviant behaviors. We are normalizing everything that is the antithesis of meritocracy and evolution (even in the economy aka free market). Should we accept people as they are and live and let live?...sure, knock yourself out. Should we work to help people who want/need it? Yes, but normalizing these aberrations is not that help and the people pushing this normalization have no interest in doing so - never did.
Wish George Carlin was still here to make fun of all the stupid sh!t going on.
me too, he was the best! Thank you GC for the famous 7 Dirty Words!
Oh how I wish he was still alive today. He was the best philosophical comedian. We need another GC type here today...like stat!
Dave Chappelle is as close as we've got. He's getting better as he gets older, and he's pretty fearless. He put his money where his mouth was when he left millions on the table and told hbo to shove it when they tried to buy his "creative freedom"
“You got to get off the bus and walk,” Chappelle said. “I’m the one that got off the bus, and left $50 million on the bus and walked.”
-----------
That's why he's the king.
DC is more of a Pryor type "social commentary comedy" than a GC "philosopher comic". Love them all.
Christopher Hitchen's method was completely different, but he's another person on my "How can they be dead?!" list who would have *shredded* the current narratives.
David Graeber RIP
Your voices protect me, my voices tell me to chop you up into pieces. Equality!
I thought it was "equity", but ok............
Isn't that discriminatory to horses?
Next do what is a woman..... 😂
Right, if you know what's good for ya!
LOL!!
It's called normalizing mental illness. Kind of like gender dysphoria has been normalized.
Martha, yes, and on purpose, with a goal in mind.
But aren't there civil libertarian problems with the idea of mental illness, as Thomas Szasz explained?
Problem with idea and implementation thereof does not automatically equal the idea or the implementation being based on something not really existing.
Up until the early 2000s, the consensus in my coutnry was schizofrenia was due to childhood trauma and could be cured by Freudian therapy while under heavy medication. This had been the scientific consensus since the fifties, when it had replaced the older one that it was a) incurable and b) hereditary thus necessitating life-long incarceration.
Now, the consensus is that it is neurological, and thus so far not really treatable. Instead focus should be on support and managment, medication being minimalised and only as necessitated by individual needs, training the individual how to accept their illness and its delusions, and how to stay on top of it and helping them have the strength to do so. (This is the idealised non-existent principle of course, reality is mucky.)
But we wouldn't be here without the previous partly erroneous hypotheses and methods. The next step is already in formation: re-defining mental illnesses (all kinds) as only being so if they either endanger others (pedofilia f.e.) or endanger the individual (anorexia f.e.) or both. That way, the old issue of a totalist state enforcing a calipers & slide rulers universal [NORMAL] according to tables and averages, goes away too. (This is also the goals of many an organisation for those with various conditions, only they go about it bass-ackwards.)
I could be wrong but I think your country is Sweden. Correct me if I am mistaken. But at least in Sweden in medical school in Lund in the '70's the consensus was definitely not that schizophrenia was due to childhood trauma and Freudian therapy played no role in its treatment.
Brian ~ I had never heard of Thomas Szasz, so thank you for the question and the opportunity to expand my horizons. I found the official Szasz website, and actually agree with most of his manifesto.
My comment was not taking issue with those who are deemed to be "mentally ill" or different (better term?). It is with The State interfering and forcing society in general to arbitrarily change cultural norms/conventions to accommodate the different few. Dana Jumper (comment below) understood the intent of my remarks.
God bless Thomas Szasz. I wish somebody would fill his shoes.
OMG, I had a sister with schizophrenia. Her voices said the people in her office were moving the pencils around on her desk when she was at lunch. The neighbors (whom she had never met) were saying she was not a mystic and of course, she knew she was. The priest in the middle of a sermon looked at her and told her "you sinned in 19xx". The cleaning lady at the facility she later lived in "farted in her chair" every day, so she could not sit in it. These are just a few of the many things her "voices" told her. No, it was not just an alternate reality, it was a devastating illness.
I've met a few people who would see some serious nightmares. I don't know if I can imagine a worse torture than to tell them to just accept it as their personal reality.
When the first of these brain twisters gets dismembered by a patient in a "nonconsensus reality" I think I'll pick up a bottle of champagne.
Oh ffs. Just when I think we’ve hit rock bottom on the insanity they go even lower.
We are a society full of people openly advocating the genital mutilation and sterilization of children based on a “journey” of “feelings.” Pizza Hut is promoting a book to 5 year olds celebrating “little drag kings.”
These people already promote the idea it’s societies job to indulge the delusions of the mentally ill by affirming those delusions. This is nothing more than an expansion of the insanity.
...because " Hold my beer"
On the flip side of this, it sounds like they are insinuating that disagreeing with what they consider to be reality is considered a "non-consensus reality." So like in a reality where people have been told that a disease has a higher death rate than it does, that masks work, and that all the non-medical treatments for the disease are effective...this is "concensus reality" and those of us who see the world as it is actually believe in a non-concensus reality.
What do you do if the voices that are actually real are the ones delivering auditory hallucinations?
I'm guessing that you're referring to the propaganda machine rather than this explanation for hearing voices? https://rense.com/general37/skull.htm
Oh man, a patent for voice to skull communications. Reminds me of that episode of Gilligan's Island where Gilligan picked up radio stations in his fillings.
That's hilarious. Good memory.
the working theory for that patent was from the 1960s... the Professor would have enjoyed it.
As my cats say, what the fluff??????
Hey, when your sex , oops gender, oops, identity is optional based upon your current opinion, there is no objective truth.
Seriously though, I read that full story and there was some intriguing nuance to what is almost a new 12-step approach vs. heavy drugging routinely dispensed by the psychiatric community for those hearing voices. Sufferers are probing in community with other sufferers what underlying (Freudian?) meanings there may be to these voices - parts of the psyche trying to communicate with other parts and not necessarily blocking them out automatically. Interesting stuff.
also, Guided by Voices was a great indie band...
Hearing voices is very normal. There's evidence most people have such an experience in a harmless way at some point in their lives, most commonly in the semi-conscious zone between sleep and waking. It's common to hear the voice of a dead loved one as part of grieving. Those who have such experiences frequently may have the two halves of their brain less clearly divided than most, meaning external and internal voices are less easy to compartmentalise and distinguish. What you do NOT want to be doing if you have such an experience, is handing yourself over to the pharma-captured psychiatric profession...
https://www.intervoiceonline.org/2195/blog/news/eleanor-longden
I find it ironic that so many of us skeptics of the public health establishment are unquestioning of the "mental illness" paradigm of the psychiatric establishment.
amen to not handing yourself over to Harma-captured psychiatry no matter what your experience.
And, are we forgetting about microchipping? New field of research to explore for Harari and his ilk.
"most commonly in the semi-conscious zone between sleep and waking. It's common to hear the voice of a dead loved one as part of grieving. "
Yes, I've heard my father's voice in that fashion. (He passed in 1985.) But when I woke, I knew he wasn't really there.
And it's only a word or 2 that I ever hear "him" say.
I've heard my co-workers call my name at work a couple of times when they didn't. I was used to them calling me, because they had a question or needed something. Both times it was when I was deep in concentration. It was a little creepy, but I chalked it up to a "wiring" error. It's never happened since.
That's one of the most common things people hear: their own name being called.
Group therapy is indeed helpful for the stabilized with serious mental illness. That is a safe environment where they can explore the meaning of the voices and how to survive in the external world. But if you encounter a truly schizophrenic person in psychosis, you will understand why these imperfect drugs are required - at least in the acute stages of the illness. Talk is not possible in the acute stage. If they could listen or talk cogently, they might not be in an acute situation.
Agree. When did looking for alternatives to a lifetime of pharmacological interventions turn into a bad thing? (Granted I'm no expert, and drugs may well be a moral necessary in acute cases.)
If I read them correctly, they're not advocating allowing so-called nonconsensus realities to supplant real reality. It's about seeing what might be learned about one's life situation by paying attention to these experiences, taking them seriously as phenomena in themselves, even though not literally in the same way as ordinary sensory impressions of the outer world.
And the Hearing Voices Movement has been around for a while, even if one is tempted to read the tweet in a very 2020s, "peak insanity" kind of way.
On the other hand, I get being suspicious of the NYT's motives in tweeting this out. There's that familiar juxtaposition between "what the conservative establishment says" and "what the enlightened change agents say," or those who are making efforts to reform a system that (we know this story well) oppresses vulnerable minorities rather than meeting them where they are and seeking to support them in their lived experience.
Expecting to find solid ground beneath your feet is only your neurotypical privilege showing. Everything you think you know to be right is only the legacy of systems of control. Consensus is violence! Illness is wellness! Everything must change!
But didn't libertarian Thomas Szasz agree in large part that those who report hearing voices are often oppressed by the therapeutic state?
Some who hear voices may be Targeted Individuals:
"Targeted Individuals as beta tests for intra-body nano network installed through Covid jabs"
https://gangstalkingmindcontrolcults.com/tis-as-beta-test-for-intra-body-nanonetwork-inside-covid-jabs-dr-eric-karlstrom-on-jeff-rense-program-may-6-2022/
I think that's an important point, and it gets to something that felt incomplete to me in my little comment.
I believe humanity is oppressed by the powers that be, and yet I also think that the powers that be are using a narrative of systemic oppression to divide us, even to divide each one of us within ourselves, making us suspicious of our cultural heritage and of traditional values and understandings of the world, some of which we probably need in order to be happy, grounded people.
I get very tired of hearing "here's something else wrong with the way we've been doing things, [you oppressive paternalistic Judeo-Christian white supremacist], so isn't it about time you fell in line and started affirming your support for the progressive party line before you develop a reputation as a reactionary?"
And yet. There is something inhuman about the world we have built, and I have sympathy for those who point that out. Is it an inevitability: society represses aspects of our individuality, even as it makes it possible for us to survive in this vast, dangerous world with all of our many needs and frailties? Have we got to go into the unconscious and recover the values of the father, understanding their meaning now as though for the first time, and claiming them as our own, in something of a Jordan Peterson kind of way?
Or is there something else? Have we become too left brain-dominant, as another Substack writer has put it? Is there some kind of coming home to a more enchanted cosmos of more benevolent possibilities, in a Richard Tarnas, Passion of the Western Mind, kind of way? Have the lizard people who think to have this world under their dominion unduly deprived us of our potential as human beings by robbing us of some of the strands of our DNA and shutting down our crown chakras, even as they unnaturally extend their own lifespans by drinking the blood of babies sacrificed on their altars?
I don't know. I used to be a New Ager and now I am a traditional Catholic. In neither culture do I feel entirely at home, and yet I am sure there is something here, some greater story we do not entirely grasp.
We have seen in the covid response that our institutions do not, will not serve us. What are the implications of that? What are the alternatives? Can we build alternatives, a parallel society as some have suggested, with the same nuts-and-bolts understanding of reality that powered the twentieth century?
Or do we need to ask the ultradimensional beings, those who have been flying around in their UAPs, real nicely if they have any advice for us? Perhaps it's about really living the Gospel radically for the first time in five hundred years or more? Maybe the voices in some of our heads have something to contribute to the conversation? I don't know, but I am trying to live the question.
"Nonconsensus realities." Pairs nicely with "Scientific consensus."
Truth is a funny thing. It's so esoteric that, in order to lay legitimate claim to it, you need either a PhD and corporate backing, or an inscrutable, non-falsifiable delusion.
Neurotypicals with anything less than a master's degree, get outta here.
Giving credence to "alternate realities"... Where have we heard this before?
Is this where the "they/them" pronouns come from.
My theory as to why the libs/leftists/whatever are not in favor of dealing rationally with mental illness is because the key to mental health is being accountable and taking responsibility for oneself. This article isn't an argument against my theory.
Dealing rationally with mental illness would end leftism.
Man, I sure wish most of the mountebank and media voices I've heard over the last two years were in fact hallucinations.
That would actually make them make sense.
Maybe they have been hallucinations libertate. Maybe this is a hallucination... IRL you are on the couch, eating popcorn watching Seinfeld and wearing parachute pants. All is well.
Who knew when we were reading "I'm OK, You're OK" that it would come to this?
I hope she doesn't hallucinate while roller skating
Follows the recipe quite nicely...Step 1. create an unfalsifiable, post-modernist condition/theory complete with a built-in, marginalized community whose livelihoods are triggered by reality. Step 2. Force those who live and understand reality to accept and then bend to this fringe element in order to create a new metaverse in the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity (i.e. DIE). Step 3. nihilism achieved. Optional Step 4. repeat.
Bottom line...we are normalizing mental illness. We are normalizing drug dependency. We are normalizing unhealthy physical health. We are normalizing all sorts of deviant behaviors. We are normalizing everything that is the antithesis of meritocracy and evolution (even in the economy aka free market). Should we accept people as they are and live and let live?...sure, knock yourself out. Should we work to help people who want/need it? Yes, but normalizing these aberrations is not that help and the people pushing this normalization have no interest in doing so - never did.