The Trigger of Mental
Psychosis |
Dr. Kay Jamison's Near-Death
Experience |
|
Kevin Williams' NDE and Mental illness
Research
Mental
illness can trigger religious revelations
and visions - even out-of-body and near-death experiences. On
this web page you will discover that mental illness is probably
not what you think it is and not how the movies portrays it
to be. You will read about one of the most distinguished scientists
in the mental health field and her NDE which was triggered by
a
manic-depressive psychosis.
I have also decided to share my own major psychotic experience
from a manic depressive episode I had which I call
my near-life experience.
But it is neither an out-of-body nor a near-death experience. I
will be publishing this account soon.
The Waking Dream
The term
schizophrenia
literally means "split mind" but has nothing to do with so-called
"split personalities." It refers to people who experience a
marked disorder of thought such as hallucinations, delusions
(often religious). Schizophrenia has been described as a waking
dream state - a waking, perpetual nightmare.
The Dreaming
God
Herman H. Somers
has a Ph.D. in psychology and was a Jesuit priest for forty
years. He wrote the book entitled
When God Slept, Man Wrote the Bible which explains the Bible
from the point of view of a psychologist. The following are
some of his findings:
It is interesting that one particular near-death experiencer
discovered that the Book of Revelation in the Bible is
the record of a dream
by John the Revelator. This becomes apparent when the same archetypal
images in Revelation
can be found in dream of Daniel
the prophet in the Bible. We also know from near-death accounts,
the Bible, and dream research that there is evidence that dreams,
near-death experiences, psychedelic, psychotic, and psychic
experiences are all a phenomenon of an altered level of consciousness.
Psychic or Psychotic?
With this in mind, one might
ask, "What is the difference between being mentally ill and
prophetic?" My own psychiatrist once gave me the answer:
People who
hear voices and see things that aren't there can
be classified into two groups. The first group are
people who cannot cope with these voices and are
called mentally ill. The second group are people
who can cope with the voices and are called psychic.
It is my personal belief that being psychic and
being psychotic are the same thing depending upon
how you cope with it. Society in general regards
people who talk to God as holy. But society in general
regards people whom God talks to as insane.
|
Manic depression has been called a
brilliant madness because of the expansive ideas that psychosis
can create. In days of old, people recognized how mental illness
can even be a gift. Socrates once declared, "Our greatest
blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness
is given us by divine gift." Plato referred to insanity
as: "a divine gift and the source of the chief blessings
granted to men." Native American Indians believed that
their voice hearers revealed messages that had great spiritual
significance. The idea of the mad scientist can probably be
traced to the grandiose thoughts that intelligent mentally ill
people can have.
John Nash,
a lifetime schizophrenic, received the Nobel Laureate in Economics
and his life was portrayed in the movie
A Beautiful Mind.
Other famous mentally ill people are: Beethoven, Tolstoy, Van
Gogh, Keats, Hemingway, Dickens, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Emerson,
and Woolf, to name just a few.
The nature
of schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis are still under
debate and a significant issue is the relationship between psychosis
and the mystical, or religious, experience.
An NDE Triggered By a Manic Psychosis
Dr.
Kay Redfield Jamison is the distinguished Professor of
Psychiatry at the John Hopkins School of Medicine
and co-author of the standard medical text taught
there. Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities
on manic depressive illness. She is also a manic
depressive herself. In her highly acclaimed book
entitled
An Unquiet Mind, Dr. Jamison describes a psychotic
episode she had that transported her consciousness
out of her body and into the solar system. Her near-death
experience is similar to that of
Susan Blackmore's when
she was under the influence of a psychedelic. Jamison's
consciousness traveled to Jupiter while she was
enjoying the manic phase of her mental illness.
The following is an excerpt from her excellent book
and the account of her journey.
|
"People go mad in idiosyncratic
ways. Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist's
daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion
of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again
lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars,
and across fields of ice crystals. Even now, I can
see in my mind's rather peculiar eye an extraordinary
shattering and shifting of light; inconstant but
ravishing colors laid out across miles of circling
rings; and the almost imperceptible, somehow surprisingly
pallid, moons of this Catherine wheel of a planet.
I remember singing Fly Me to the Moon as I swept
past those of Saturn, and thinking myself terribly
funny. I saw and experienced that which had been
only in dreams, or fitful fragments of aspiration.
"Was it real? Well, of course
not, not in any meaningful sense of the word real.
But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after
my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold,
it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded
by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that
extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and
its icy rings took on a elegiac beauty, and I don't
see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute
sadness at its being so far away from me, so unobtainable
in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute
assuredness of my mind's flight made it very difficult
for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness
was one I should willingly give up. Even though
I was a clinician and a scientist, and even though
I could read the research literature and see the
inevitable, bleak consequences of not taking lithium,
I for many years after my initial diagnosis was
reluctant to take take my medications as prescribed.
Why did it take having to go though more episodes
of mania, followed by long suicidal depressions,
before I would take lithium in a medically sensible
way?"
|
Dr. Jamison says she still misses Saturn
and the tremendous highs that go with manic depression; but
the lithium (a simple salt/electrolyte) keeps her level and
able to function as a normal person. One might say that this
simple mineral found in the Earth keeps manic depressives well
grounded there.
|