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:

Psychosis and religious visions have been associated with each other since the earliest recorded history. Mental illness has traditionally been related to demon possession and prophetic ability such as in the Bible. Saints such as Joan of Arc and Francis of Assisi heard multiple voices in their heads and the Church originally attacked them as being demon possessed. The Talmud suggests that the prophet Hosea in the Bible was besieged with delusions of being Moses.

 

The prophet Ezekiel has been diagnosed by psychiatrists an unmistakable schizophrenic. His life, as recorded in the Book of Ezekiel, shows a typical schizophrenic development: a deep religiosity, hallucinatory visions, increasingly bizarre behavior, isolation, and emotional collapse. He heard a voice commanding him to lie on the right side of his body for 390 days then switch to his left side for 40 more days. A voice told him to eat food cooked with human excrement. Other prophets, such as John in the Book of Revelation, see horrible monsters and devils.

 

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.

"Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness, provided the madness is given us by divine gift." - Socrates

Tell A Friend!

| Triggers Index |

Copyright © 2013 Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife