Schizoaffective

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...

The term "dementia praecox" was first used in 1887 by Emile Kraepelin. It isolated a type of "madness" that exhibited hallucinations and delusions and later became known as schizophrenia. Since the English poet and visual artist William Blake lived from 1757-1827, he could not have been so diagnosed. However, according to his biographers Peter Ackroyd and Leo Damrosch, Blake exhibited symptoms consistent with what we now call schizophrenia. He had what he called visions, heard voices, and had command hallucinations. Some others thought him "mad." In his lifetime, Blake received almost no recognition. His reputation began to be built decades after his death, and he is now considered one of the greatest of the English poets. His reputation largely rests on his "illuminated books"—engraved books that combine Blake's stunning and dramatic visual art with his poetry. You can see pictures of his longest illuminated book,  Jerusalem , at this link ....

by Jay Paul   finding myself to also be a great raven soaring over a rolling field of long grass and wildflowers and a few isolated trees with great canopies a family walked on a trail mown through the grass the father a young bearded man pushed a baby buggy and the pretty young mother walked along   suddenly realizing that man was me 25 years ago with my now adult daughter and ex-wife in a scene that never happened but is representative nonetheless because we all did love each other in our limited and limiting ways and things did seem open to vast possibilities   then seeing myself as raven floating in the sky and realizing I am also a constellation of a great bear high in the sky behind the blue veil of sky I am a bear constellation watching a soaring raven who is also me watching a man who was me a quarter century ago   this could go on who is watching the great bear perhaps the moon there is no end to the multiplication of selves across space and time   and ...

When I go looking for my self, my own personal "I," all my own, I keep finding other people. For instance, I am right this instant sitting in front of a computer typing in this blog post. Why can I do this? Why, because I can type. Why can I type? I can type because about 40 years ago in a business class in high school Mr. Moran taught me to type.  So who is typing this? me or Mr. Moran? or both of us? I am not sure of the answer to this question. Certainly, my fingertips are making contact with the keys. So on the surface, I am typing. But this typing is wholly dependent on my having learned how to type, which is Mr. Moran's doing—in that strange windowless room with 35 other students banging away on manual typewriters. I went looking for my self and found Mr. Moran and my fellow typing students. And what am I typing? I'm typing words. And where do the words come from? I don't remember my first words, but I imagine I spoke them to my parents. I assume I learned l...

by Jay Paul   The last two weeks on this blog I have discussed visions that I have when I lay down on my living room floor and follow the path of an initiatory image. Strange things happen in these visions, which are like waking dreams. Prepare yourself for what I'm about to say. In some of them, I have even been eaten by giants, traveled through their intestines, and come out alive on the other end. Interestingly, some biologists believe that fish came to populate isolated mountain lakes in a similar manner: eggs survived being eaten by waterfowl who then left the eggs in those lakes when defecating. Visions such as this one have caused me to reflect on death and immortality. I have also been helped by reading Thich Nhat Hanh on "interbeing," especially in his discussion of The Heart Sutra . I have come to believe in a kind of immortality that does not invoke a spiritual realm of any sort—no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation. I want to think through what death is by atte...

  by Jay Paul Last week on this blog I distinguished between psychiatric hallucinations and visions. The former entail a confusion between what the hallucinator sees or hears and what is commonly taken to be reality. For instance, I once hallucinated that I could converse with people who were reading my thoughts through the intermediary of a medical device I believed was put in my head during a diagnostic test. I believed I was really  communicating with people. I was not. I was making it all up. A vision, on the other hand, does recognize the bounds between what is considered conventionally real and the actions in the vision. A visionary can end the vision at any time by focusing elsewhere;  hallucinators cannot get away from their pictures or sounds because they believe them to be reality. To do so would, in the hallucinator's mind, be the same as trying to get away from gravity. On the other hand, visionaries know that their visions take place in an alternate reality f...

Can we include a number of central biblical figures, including Christ, among the severely mentally ill? Three psychiatrists in their article “ The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered ”   argue that Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul all exhibited what we would now call psychosis. As just one example, Moses reported seeing and hearing God in the form of a burning bush. These psychiatrists have a point. If someone told a psychiatrist today that they saw and heard God in a burning bush, he or she would be on their way to a diagnosis. For a couple years, these psychiatrists had me convinced. I thought there was some sort of link between schizophrenia and religion. I still do, but I doubt these figures in the Bible had what we now call psychosis. Rather, I think they had visions, and there’s a difference. I know because I have had both psychosis and visions. Based on my personal experience, they are very different. Today, I believe that when Moses saw and h...