But I don't want to just make light of this either, because I know its distress and I know it is serious and sometimes people are deeply trouble by the visions that they are having. So how does that work? Well, I am just going to read to you a little bit from a book from by a guy John Modrow. It's called 'How to Become a Schizophrenic'. So it's against biological psychiatry, John Modrow 'How to Become a Schizophrenic'.
Of course, the idea there is that you become a schizophrenic, you are not born schizophrenic. You become a schizophrenic as a result of being diagnosed schizophrenia, and you have extremes states of mind as a result of something is going on in your body or psyche at the time due to the history of experience with your body and psyche.
If you have been taking in toxic substances, and lead, and mercury, and lead, mercury for a long time to the point that you would become a highly neurotoxic, and then you start having the so called hallucinations. That's one history. On the other hand if you are severely abused and treated very badly over a long period of time, and you become disturbed and enturbulated in your psyche, that's another history that might lead to this dynamic.
But let me read you a little bit from John Modrow, because he is says is really well. My hallucinations were caused by a number of factors. These factors include splitting of my personality. That's the trauma, that's the being hurt so badly that you split off Alice Miller in her books 'The of Drama of the Gifted Child' 'Banished Knowledge', 'For Your Own Good' all this books are great books. Alice Miller, she talks about how child abuse affects people. In one way that it affects people is they split off the traumatic experiences, because they are just too unbearable, and too overwhelming and the child is not able to function with that constant trauma experience, so that gets repressed to use a psychological term and then later on it can come back to haunt you so to speak.
Splitting of the personality. Seven weeks of prolong sleep deprivation which by itself can induce hallucinations in ostensibly normal people. This is very well known this is very well known by interrogators, both that a sleep deprivation, a little bit of sense deprivation, and anybody who will start hallucinating in fairly short period of time. This is important to know about the effects of psychiatric drugs as well, especially the so called SSRIs or serotonin drugs, Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Effexor, Celexa, all those, they often induce what might be called a REM Sleep disorder. They basically start interfering sleep, then people start having their sleep images like I was talking about mine last night and start breaking through in waking time, you get those confused and you are in trouble. Think about a dream that you have, maybe a so called nightmare and imagine what that was like if you had that in your waking life and you weren't sure if it was a dream.
This is where a lot of so called images and so called experiences of senseless violence come from. This is why the FDA has been hearing from citizen after citizen after citizen and it finally had to put severe warnings on there SSRIs, because of this kind of danger. But also apart from the drugs just sleep deprivation by itself. Next one very vulnerable to this dynamic.
My drastically narrowed focus of awareness. In other words, he was afraid that he just couldn't take outside information stimulus and so it caused other things to impinge and let them to imagine things that weren't there.
My obsession with religion, so he goes on just talking about some of his own dynamics. Let me go on, that schizophrenics actively if unconsciously strive to hallucinate, and are able to exert a considerable amount of control over their hallucinations is supported by the work of Silvano Arieti and by the experimental findings of Peter Bick and Marshal Kinsbourne. So he is saying that these researchers have shown that there is a meaning and purpose to this so called hallucination dynamic. And that is not a strictly passive phenomenon that just happens to people. Let's see what else he says. The findings of Silvano Arieti like those of Bick and Kinsbourne, relate exclusively to auditory hallucinations.
We are going to see that the visual hallucinations apply also. According to the Arieti the psychological process which leads to hallucinations has three stages. First, the individual projects his own feelings of self-disparagement on to the external world. In other words, I am down on myself, I have internalized this dynamic of being told by so and so and so and so that I am bad, I am not good, I am worthless. Pretty soon I internalize it, I am doing it to myself, I am sunk in that, and I start to imagine that other people are doing that to me, which they were originally.
In this initial stage this person can almost feel hospitality in the air. Believing that others are talking about in, this individual then put himself into what Arieti calls the Listening Attitude, finally he hallucinates. He hears voices, because he expects to hear them. It's a similar phenomenon, it's like seeing a face out there and you see a face that reflects what you are doing already inside of yourself. If you were treated badly by a hostile person who is putting you down and shaming you and you are carrying result and shame and guilt from that, then you might see a face that is looking at you in a shaming guilt inducing way and saying things like that. That's the dynamic.
To sum up my hallucinations were meaningful in purpose of attempt of my part to cope with feelings of guilt and low self-esteem. It can be explained wholly in terms of the events which preceded them. Moreover, to a large extent I, myself was responsible for causing my hallucinations. Since normal people hallucinate, my hallucinations make me no different from any other normal person. In short my hallucinations were expression by humanity and not a symptom of disease.
'How to Become Schizophrenic'. He is not showing extreme states of mind anymore. You can say he is a recovered schizophrenic. You could say he is a person who is no longer involved with those who diagnosed him as schizophrenic and he has recovered from his extreme states of mind, because he gradually integrated the trauma as well as he learned how to take care of himself. So those are some thoughts about so called seeing images that aren't there and hearing voices that aren't there.
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