Sympathy and empathy are crucial in all aspects of healthcare, but referring to these psychiatric patients as "targeted individuals" seems unwise. It's patronizing and it runs the risk of encouraging further delusions.
Yes, but the author uses the same name with no caveats. E.g. "But if psychiatry’s medical vision is failing TIs like Luca, what should we replace it with?"
I see what you mean and was slightly confused when reading the article as well. The author uses the word probably to take the middle stance, acknowledging those who have it and read the article without discrediting their worldview, when the medical community has already failed them, but still describing what may not line up with reality
There is plentiful evidence for this if you know where to look. For example, Travis King was a U.S. military official who tried to defect to North Korea. His reason for this was that he was targeted by (presumably) psychopaths in the military for his skin color. I am not saying that defecting to North Korea is the answer (it isn't), but my theory would at least provide a rational reason why one would think that would solve his problems.
> and second why do they get in that state instead of realizing some people do bad things?
It is the result of being targeted by psychopaths. The brain can adapt: if one is being targeted, the brain looks for or will generate reasons for this.
> Travis King was facing discharge and punishment for possession of child porn.
I am honestly skeptical of this claim. This seems to be the go-to excuse for scapegoating: just claim the individual was in possession of illegal material and then no one has the right to defend her!
> King pleaded guilty to assault and destruction of public goods stemming from an October incident, and on Feb. 8 the Seoul Western District Court fined him 5 million won ($4,000), according to a copy of the ruling reviewed by Reuters.
We can either believe "he got in trouble and did something dumb", or we can believe there was some giant conspiracy against him. Again, even the North Koreans didn't want to keep him; they're about the least likely to go along with a "targeting" by the US government on the planet.
This is true: most family members were quite normal and my school/church environment was mostly devoid of psychopaths. But I'd say the vast majority of psychopaths have been encountered on the airwaves and the Internet.
I wasn't permitted to have a modem for awhile, because my parents didn't really want me to have two-way chats with strangers. Yet I was exposed to all kinds of harmful TV and radio. There is truly psychopathic behavior out there which we invite into our homes; we see it distantly, as through a mirror, but it feels innocuous because we can "control" it and switch the channel at will. Or can we?
By college I was surrounded by virtual psychopaths and mentally ill behavior. It was unavoidable. There was fantasy role-playing, AD&D, furries, sitcoms, crazy websites and forums, Slashdot, Usenet, just infested with psychopaths and bizarre malicious ideas.
> By college I was surrounded by virtual psychopaths and mentally ill behavior. It was unavoidable. There was fantasy role-playing, AD&D, furries, sitcoms, crazy websites and forums, Slashdot, Usenet, just infested with psychopaths and bizarre malicious ideas.
By your own admittance you've heard voices in your head throughout your life, but you think people playing D&D or watching Friends are somehow mentally ill psychopaths with "bizarre malicious ideas"?
I read it as- there are psychopaths operating within and bizarre malicious ideas being propagated through those hobbies and mediums.
I'm inclined to agree, but I wouldn't single it out to any specific hobby, activity, forum, news-source- though some are definitely more prone to infestation.
Some are; not "watching Friends" but many TV programs model and demonstrate mentally unstable behaviors, and role-players play characters, usually not themselves, and the epithet "murder hobo" is not inaccurate.
Yes, many bizarre and malicious ideas have been introduced to me and my classmates through Nethack play and merely observing role-players going at it in a violent, dangerous fantasy world of their own design.
For autists and others who find it difficult to separate fantasy/reality, or understand metaphor and allegory, we tend to mistakenly impose fantastic ideas upon the mundane world around us.
For all the hours I invested in DOOM 2, I'm not actually a US Marine, I don't carry firearms, human passengers on the train are not Beholders or Revenants, and when someone leaves a coat behind, that's not an Armor Pak for you to grab!
...but I can still distinctly hear his grunts and screams as the demons injure him...
Why has there never been a blind schizophrenic in recorded medical history? Are blind people not sensitive, or have they never been exposed to a psychopath?
There's an old theory that people with a certain genetic inheritance develop a developmental disability called "schizotaxia", people with this condition tend to develop a "schizotypal" personality organization because of negative social learning (often associated with bullying in school) and then some of those people (who may have additional adversities, e.g. a "second hit") go on to develop schizophrenia
There is definitely such a thing as schizotypy but you've never heard of it because it is not as fashionable as autism and definitely not as fashionable as having autism and ADHD and dyslexia. Schizotypy may be behind this syndrome
and may be the reason why I graduated from elementary school the way Ender Wiggin did. (People who noticed there's something a little odd about my HN posts are noticing I have just a touch of "thought disorder", which is much more fundamental, I think, to the schizophrenia spectrum than the auditory hallucinations that get talked about endlessly or the delusions which only troubled me once) So there's a grain of truth in the above comment.
I have often been appalled at how badly people on the schizophrenia spectrum get cared for.
Right now I have a friend who is almost certainly schizophrenic (no professional diagnosis) but doesn't believe she has a problem who lives with an elderly person who is a bit of a bleeding heart who's had a stroke and may have to evict her because he can't live with her anymore. She comes out to our place to visit but has a hard time staying more than 24 hours because cell phones don't work at our spot and she can't indulge in her pastime of blowing up people's phones. (e.g. she can easily leave 10+ messages in a few hours on our machine again) If she cooks she'll season our cast iron pans with 1/2 a cup of oil, won't believe that we're really going to eat all the apples we have on hand and will make apple cobbler as soon as we're not watching her)
Another friend had schizoaffective disorder (my diagnosis, she never got a professional diagnosis despite multiple hospitalizations) and had bad enough thought disorder that it would take her a few hours to smoke her first cigarette of the day despite being badly addicted to cigs. She lived with us for a year and a half until one night her dad tried to wake her up after she'd been awake for days and she freaked, threatened my wife with a knife, and then ran into the night. She took her own life a year and a half after that.
Because I am the way I am I find people like that easier to understand and live with than most people would, in fact on some level "normal" people seem stranger to me.
Whatever your belief in "science", the horrible ways in which modern medicine all-too-often treats patients are an extremely persuasive marketing campaign for alternatives.
I firmly now believe that there is nothing wrong with hearing voices. I was in fact disturbed when I was a child and first heard it said that it was a pathology.
Now let's be clear: someone who hears phantom malicious voices, someone who takes drugs and hallucinates false things, someone whose voices impel them to cause harm: those are pathologies and should be addressed. "Hallucination" carries a negative connotation, a judgement that head-voices are invariably bad, and can't be true, because "empirical science" entirely denies the supernatural and the metaphysical reality of head-voices.
But someone who hears good voices, someone hearing voices who encourage them, or tell them to do the right thing, or calming and comforting voices: that is natural, and that should never be discouraged.
I've experienced the entire gamut of these, and I discovered that my solution is to begin to discern the good ones, to hearken to them, to obey the good voices, and little by little, they overpower the malicious types, and I'm able to withstand onslaughts of not only evil voices, but actual derision and mockery from real people near me. The voices I hear, they've come to me because of what I've heard, who I've listened to, in the past; they're composites, they're archetypes, they're echoes and memories, but they were once based in reality, and uttered by real human beings near me.
Racism and prejudice is real, and the actual tangible hatred I imbibed for decades, in reality and on the Internet, were the genesis of evil and malicious voices in my head. So: medicate all voices away and tranquilize my thoughts? We'd throw out the baby with the bathwater. Why shouldn't I hear good, encouraging voices and obey them?
The mental health system can encourage people to return to rational thought and be grounded in reality. Mentally ill people can learn appropriate behavior, it can be modeled and imitated, and people can be trained, even to discern voices and learn how to ignore or discount the bad ones.
If someone feels stalked, harrassed, targeted by technological means, the most important thing they need is reassurance and respite from that paranoia. They need to be disconnected from the ENVIRONMENTS which foster fear, hatred, and distrust. They need to be extracted from echo chambers that spread F.U.D. because it will rub off on them and drive them to harmful and hateful actions against themselves, or other innocents. Drug 'em if you must, but remember that drugs are band-aids, and it hurts to rip off a band-aid.
have a look at something called structural dissociation theory. there's a PhD Janina Fisher, who is some thing of a genius using it in treatment.
It's a known trauma symptom.
When you say you 'hear' the voices, is it internally like remembering a catchy song and playing it in your head, or does it appear to come from outside of you, like when a second person in the room is talking to you and you hear it?
as someone who dabbles in active and passive insomnia from time to time - i hear AM radio coming from somewhere in the room - those are the voices i can't control. But i can hear voices in my head and make, you know, friends, family, morgan freeman talk and say pretty much anything. It's weird to describe this because i'm mentally fit, i just have symptoms of being awake too long when i'm awake too long.
But the point is, it's a completely different experience to hallucinate a voice, for me, than to just hear the internal jibber jabber in my head.
>But someone who hears good voices, someone hearing voices who encourage them, or tell them to do the right thing, or calming and comforting voices: that is natural, and that should never be discouraged.
I'm not sure that's natural or desirable. It still leads to a situation where you may be following what you consider to be 'good voices' to do things that aren't necessarily in your best interest.
Someone could be misled, indeed. There's a real risk of that. But it's undeniable that billions of humans have heard benign and positive voices, followed their instructions, and excelled at life, not only in their own best interest, but especially when "The Good of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few" [Mr. Spock]
It is not the mere "brain" which does that discerning, croes my friend; higher functions and faculties are engaged when moral judgement is involved.
But yes, with therapy and rehabilitation, I trust my brain, and other faculties, more than I used to, and we can indeed employ methods that would falsify those judgements, so that they can be proved good and correct empirically, rather than just feelings or impulses.
It's very trendy these days to only point to the negatives of religion but if you view religion as a social technology, you can work backwards from the assumption that every one of those practices initially solved some problem. For example it turns out that giving daily thanks helps us stay positive in the face of arduous times - especially given that our human history was full of disease, war, poverty and famine.
Personally I'm not convinced that the vacuum left behind by going to church (and having a community) has been well replaced yet and instead our collective religious tendencies have been steered towards identity politics and idol worship by social media instead.
I'm not religious in the slightest but my mother is a harmless Christian and when I see how a little bit of faith anchors her and make sense of a world that is completely unrecognisable to the one she was born into (she didn't even have a fridge let alone an iPhone lol) I am always reminded to stay humble and open minded
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
While the syphilis theory is plausible, I believe the congenital brain disease inherited from his father is the more widely accepted theory nowadays.
As for the horse story, apparently it comes from a tabloid paper that was never exactly known for their reputability. The "gossipy" undertones become very clear when you read the article for yourself.
> you can work backwards from the assumption that every one of those practices initially solved some problem.
This isn't quite right.
The true version of what you're getting at is, "at some point every practice was useful to someone", but just because someone or someones found it useful doesn't necessarily mean it solved a real problem for society overall.
E.g. men have dominated over women in almost all pre-modern societies (and even in modern ones there's often a good ways to go), because that was useful and advantageous to men, who also had the physical strength to enforce such a social division. It was never truly about "solving a problem".
Sure, in some cases religious practices may have helped with a problem, but in other cases (e.g. indulgences) they were just about gathering or retaining power for the religion, which was certainly useful for the leaders within said religion.
Male dominance as a gender is about physical prowess. That's not the same thing as an individual male person being dominant based on physical prowess.
European powers were dominant over other countries and colonized them due to superior weaponry and organized armies that used said weaponry, but that doesn't mean every European leader was a soldier toting around a gun themselves.
I'm not here to deny those things - I'm not really qualified to argue in either direction. I wanted to focus on some of the good religion brings, even if you're not religious.
In any case power capture is just another one of those axiomatic things of the human condition for me. After all, democracy and capitalism is being contorted into neo-feudalism in our own lifetimes.
My point was that even though they seem silly to nonbelievers, I suspect a lot of people would probably be happier spending an hour a day singing hymns and reciting prayers. It turns out singing can be a pretty good mind-body hack for making you feel happier. And prayers are a pretty good presence of mind hack for regaining focus
It's true that some of those things are probably useful in some way, sure. But you can't just axiomatically assume that all religious practices were useful in general to people, rather than being useful in specific ways to specific people.
The practices propagated or persisted for some reason.
For sure organisations find themselves in ruts or local maxima. And things like virtue signalling exist but when practices like prayer, meditation, chanting and singing exist across religions maybe it is worth trying to understand what ordinary people derive from the practices. Whether that be a sense of belonging, presence of mind or the ability to make peace with the cruelty and randomness of life.
It rubs you up the wrong way that I axiomatically assume that all religious practices were useful in general but my point is just like being healthily skeptical about things and challenging the status quo is good. So too, is looking at things you don't understand and starting from the supposition that it is beneficial UNTIL you can prove in your own mind with all certainty that it isn't and then feel free for you to do your own thing.
Are those two approaches in contradiction? Yes that's a good thing, it's healthy to hold opposing views in tension.
If we continually ignore the lessons of the past we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes and relearn the same lessons.
Religion ultimately propagated because people preferred it to what they had before. Sure bad people have manipulated and exploited those tendencies in people but that still happens even without "religion" - see crypto. At least most faiths ostensibly revolve around a set of morals and virtue. The establishment has also been tempered by their own success and and are being forcefully dragged into the 21st century by their need to stay relevant. When I attend my usual annual Midnight Mass CoE service in the UK, the biblical elements are so watered down it's mostly just about being a good person.
Tldr people who are skeptical might benefit from being more charitable just like people who are gullible could benefit from being more skeptical.
I really agree, religion unlocks a lot for a lot of people. I have transcendental beliefs that have been of service. Acknowledging that, some organisations use others conscience against them to control them. Some make the decision selfishly, some think the ends justify the means, and some just do it without being aware of it. There’s a whole spectrum of benefit, some benefit their members a lot and I think we can safely say that most cults do not in the end benefit their members.
most people get lost on the way to factorizing religion which explains your being downvoted ... although the devil plays many tricks it is always a choice to give up one's own soul , a good teacher doesn't expect that ...
Yeah thanks, I tried to say I’m not criticising religion
It was a literal cult I’ve read like hundreds of articles and regrets of members and experienced first hand discussions that are manipulative and withholding information and rationalising political stuff with scripture that anyone would just have to experience to get why it’s manipulative and exploitative, it won’t come across online as easily
So it’s a lot of research into the brainwashing funnel of a type of cult that I was talking about and not religion at large
it's a shame really the tool held it purpose for many years and still does even in acting the savage from brave new world ... unfortunately for souls in desperate need of hope life is not shared victory, there is only winner takes all (c.f. tool - vicarious) ... imo community and higher standards are integral to intellectual advancement regardless as to the implementation ... we are witnessing eroding of both, to the detriment of those cheering said erosion ...
Religions are memetic organisms subject to survival of the fittest and this strikes me as similar to a fallacy present in thinking about genetics and evolution as the idea that evolved features must have some use otherwise they wouldn't have evolved.
Sometimes animals just do be like that, since it doesn't harm their fitness, and it seems likely to me that the same is true for most features of religions.
I am someone who enjoys challenging the status quo and am generally living unconventionally but I think we've swung too far in the opposite direction of being skeptical of practices of our forebears.
For example it is suddenly all the rage to study the health benefits of breathing or meditation. But this has been common knowledge amongst yoga and qigong practitioners for 1000+ years. If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there. Sure, a 1000 year old model has the wrong explanations, but all models are wrong some are useful.
Empiricism gives us so much false confidence when we often still can't measure many things and often don't know what to measure. Especially so when real true reproducible science is hard, slow, and expensive.
So for me, starting from a prior "maybe people do do this thing for a reason even if they themselves have forgotten why" can be useful
> But this has been common knowledge amongst yoga and qigong practitioners for 1000+ years.
Okay, but there's also "common knowledge" amongst practitioners of yoga or qigong or other traditional practices that's complete bullshit. There's good reason to not just accept that traditional practices must be smart automatically.
> If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there.
I'm guessing they're less "hard to reconcile" and more "completely made up".
Everything is completely made up. Atoms don't exist they're just a phenomenon we have observed and conceptualised - today's explanations are our best attempts at conceptualising them.
We were perfectly able to use fire (and the Romans even had a prototype of the steam engine) long before Lavoisier had a working model of gases and stoichiometry.
The model for what qigong is and what qi is can be wrong while still being helpful. Having worked on it I'd argue that it is a mental model / visualisation technique for honing your body awareness and mind-body connection. Visualisation techniques proliferate everywhere. I've been taught visualisations in swimming, martial arts, yoga and singing - so who cares if qigong is "completely made up" if the visualisation training achieved the goal.
Only just recently in some self practice on the piano I was trying to achieve a specific multi-voicing effect on a tiny passage and have practiced this single bar at least 5+ hours. I finally had a breakthrough when I stopped trying to control the individual velocity and depth of my presses and just imagined I was whispering the secondary voice.
I'm not whispering anything on that piano and my fingers are still just pressing keys. Its as made up as when I imagine I'm playing woodwind instruments during a Mozart adagio but it still accomplishes the effect.
This is all airy fairy but my point is that actually my experience has taught me that for certain things, especially where the body is involved trying to think in mechanics or vertebrae and muscles is a lot less useful than imagining you're Mount Everest peaking above the clouds reaching for the sun.
> What I uncovered was a radical Christian cult with implicit aspirations to cover the globe with a simple tree-like recruiting algorithm with despots at the top.
A fun game to play is trying to guess which organization you are talking about, since there are so many of them all running this exact same business model!
The majority of auditory hallucinations are negative, for example voices telling you to kill yourself or someone else. The violence and homicide rates (including stranger homicide) is dramatically higher among those diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The idea that it's only "stigma" that is the problem is counterproductive. I've heard it a thousand times that "They are no more dangerous than someone without the disease," which is a lie.
We should put more effort into determining underlying causes and definitive therapies rather than massaging away the unpleasant reality.
This is not an uneducated opinion, I work in the field.
I came from a religious upbringing where hearing positive voices would be somewhat of a welcome event (revelation/communicating with deceased loved ones). I hate to say it, but in my church while there were a few individuals that talked about these sorts hallucinations the vast majority did not. (I myself do not hear voices other than my own internal monolog).
I appreciate that not all that hear voices are in danger/a danger, but I don't think it's nearly as normal as you are suggesting.
This study [1] suggests that a prime cause of violence among schizophrenic individuals is linked to drug/alcohol abuse and/or lack of treatment.
> Almost all (94%) of homicides were committed by patients who had a history of alcohol or drug misuse and/or who were not in receipt of planned treatment.
Self medicating with drugs and alcohol is very common in people with all types of psychiatric disorders.
I would expect that a bunch of schizophrenics who have never committed a homicide would have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse in their history. People with less severe symptoms and those getting treatment would be less likely to self medicate.
Finding that a bunch of schizophrenics who have committed a homicide have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse isn't surprising either.
Because drug/alcohol use can impair people's judgement/inhibitions in the best of circumstances it could be a factor in attacks by schizophrenics, but considering that there are vast numbers of people with who take drugs to excess and very few of them commit homicide I wouldn't jump to putting all the blame on the booze and weed. I'd think that it has a lot more to do with severe cases self-medicating and the lack of treatment.
Drug/alcohol addicts are far more common than people with psychosis, so if you're suggesting this statistic contradicts his claim then I'm not seeing it.
It can easily be true that most murderers are alcoholics/addicts and that psychosis makes people more likely to become murderers. There's really no contradiction here unless you think hearing voices is anywhere near as common as people with drinking problems.
Do you have sources you can cite? In particular, how do we know that this isn't a selection effect, where the people who experience auditory hallucinations that don't cause problems in their lives don't tell anyone about them? I sure wouldn't, if I were in that situation.
> The majority of auditory hallucinations are negative
This is only true for us WEIRDos, I believe.
There are many cultures where hearing voices doesn't have such negative connotations. Studies have shown that in ie parts of Africa, India, and South America they have much higher neutral and positive experiences than we do.
For this reason I believe the underlying causes are strongly cultural, rather than inherent.
I'd even go as far as suggesting it's an Abrahamic religion thing - if someone is talking to you in your head, it's kinda bad whether it's God or the Devil.
Compare iconic/visualized ability to echoic recall/synthesis. Audio for humans contains thought, in speech. So hearing an engine running in mind is similar to visualizing a bus. But hearing synthesized voices is another matter entirely. I suppose the combo of the two would indeed be challenging (a talking bus for example).
>Hence was born the targeted individual (TI) community: a group of people who openly shared their experiences of high-tech harassment and organised stalking
Sorry, but that sounds dangerous. Attributing mental disorders to external evil sources isn't healthy.
Yup. These folks can decide to "take matters into their own hands."
When you are absolutely convinced that someone is out to kill you, it's perfectly reasonable to kill them, first.
I have family that suffers from Schizoaffective Disorder, and they have decided that I was out to kill them. It was absolutely clear (to them) that I was "one of them," and I, quite literally, had no communication with them that could even be slightly confused for hostile.
I have this disorder. When you are starting to feel psychosis coming it gets incredibly difficult to shake.
I used to believe that god was speaking to me about how to love and abide by him through songs by Fiona Apple, Chris Cornell, whatever the hell I was listening to at the time. I would tell the techs in the place I was at to listen to the songs and I tried to convince them it was god, to which they would respond it was not.
There was a period of time where I was non-compliant with my medication because they didn't actually work. I stopped taking them altogether and I went into the deepest psychotic episode I'd ever had till that point. I would listen to things like Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel and get so freaked out I'd run to the bathroom and pray. Mind you, I had been awake for three straight days at the point, while going with 10 hours of sleep a week, at most. I called Crisis one night and told them there were demons outside of my door and if they could not remove them I was going to jump out of my apartment window. It may sound ridiculous but that was the most fearful I've ever been in my entire life, and I've been through awful awful shit.
Lately, as a middle aged person, my hallucinations have become even weirder. Hallucinating white bubbles that fill my entire vision or feeling like my face is made out of jagged alphabet blocks jutting out of my face.
I am not sure why this happens. I've been dealing with mental illness since I was at least 9, which is when I started to hear voices. By 11 I was crying everyday after school. By 12 the mania started to become real and then the hallucinations my freshman year that led to my first suicide attempt at 14. That was the year I got diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder which has morphed into Schizoaffective Disorder.
Brains are wild, wacky, unreliable little mounds of fat and water, no?
The whole term "targeted individuals" is cope. Claiming that there is some sort of meaning to such a distorted perception of reality is just a coping strategy, very similar to conspiracy theories. It's much easier to believe that reptilians, Jews, Americans, Chinese, G20, some sort of god, Common Lisp mafia, or whoever else is controlling everything - it gives a paradoxical, false sense of control and safety (because someone, no matter who, is in control!) and also allows for free finger-pointing at "the ones at fault" whenever something bad happens as an emotional regulatory mechanism.
The world in which no one does in fact control anything, starting from the way how one's mind and body works all the way to global and cosmic scale, fails to give any sort of safety or control whatsoever, and instead puts a greater burden of responsibility on the person thinking those thoughts.
It's also much easier to think that you're targeted by someone, because then you automatically become a protagonist of some story, and therefore special by definition. It's much, much simpler and easier than the idea of being a yet-another person with a partial disability due to malfunctioning organs responsible for your internal model of reality.
Humans have a really strong drive for finding meaning where there is none, even if it means dreaming it up.
"I began to see TIs like Luca as a group of individuals who are caught between two competing narratives.... The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques."
This isn't a value-neutral belief. It has consequences and some of those aren't pretty.
Yep. I empathize deeply with these people, but I also can't feed their delusion of grandeur if it very clearly causes them discomfort. I feel a human need to "rescue" someone from false senses of persecution, even if it ultimately feeds someone's belief that they're a subject of interest.
It's also tough, because I realize that all of us are somewhat responsible for this. The proliferation of technology, advertisement and security marketing has kinda destroyed the concept of being alone. People who suffer unjustly, or who are insecure/anxious about their environment can easily fall down a rabbit hole that never ends. It's the product of indiscriminate profiling and constant dubious marketing of "security" that people become disillusioned and paranoid with tech. The part that really fucks me up is, what if they're just expressing the most rational, conscious human reaction to the information superhellscape we all share? What if we only think the water's fine because we felt it boil slowly?
Tho I agree what you've said I do want to say that it's quite hilarious to place the concept of God alongside reptilians - if you've decided for yourself that there is no god than you've decided that everything everywhere just spontaneously came into existence all on its own with these very specific rules we know as physics and laws and whatnots...
To me that is every bit as insane as reptilians.
I don't believe in a god in the clouds and I kno evolution exists and the universe is billions of years old and still it must come from or exist somewhere and have something or someone as an origin.
Nothing comes from nothing and nothing happens for no reason - to believe otherwise is a giant leap of faith.
You can call a low entropy point in the past whatever you want. If it’s talking to you or cares about you personally somehow then yeah, I would consider it equally delusional to reptile people.
It’s not really a big leap from “everything came from something extremely highly ordered that preexisted everything” to “maybe that thing is or has a Mind”.
And it's an even smaller jump to go from "maybe that thing is or has a Mind" to "maybe this entity's nick on Hacker News is HexDecOctBin".
Thus, you should start worshipping me.
But you won't, because you don't actually believe in these small jumps. You want to believe, you try to believe, but you don't. The doubt is there, and it is a healthy doubt (else you would be worshipping me), but it brings you shame.
> if you've decided for yourself that there is no god than you've decided that everything everywhere just spontaneously came into existence all on its own with these very specific rules we know as physics and laws and whatnots
No, I haven't - you're implying a binary choice where there's no such thing. There's an option to say that I don't know and perhaps I simply don't need to know that in order to have a satisfying life.
The answer "everything just spontaneously appeared" is something I perceive as meaning-seeking, just like "a god created it all". To claim a god of some sort exists is the same as to claim a god doesn't, or reptilians do, or don't - empty claims based on beliefs. To use such beliefs - no matter their shape - in order to create meaning, is just attempting to deal with the idea that meaning is a man-made construct and it doesn't come from higher above.
One thing that I've found fascinating is that different cultures experience hallucinations differently.
> We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience.
In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful.
I've wondered if there is some sort of feedback loop where western culture associates hallucination with possession, while other cultures may see hallucinations in a more positive light, or even as a sign that you are some sort of shaman.
> in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful.
Believing voices in our head are causally powerful (as in deities) really reminds me of the theory of consciousness appearing from the collapse of the bicameral mind.
Here's a good introduction to this idea:
https://youtu.be/lgnMyF-o0sQ
>The great thing about that book was: once you understood the title, you didn't really need to read the book.
Seriously, it's something I've never thought about, but once you hear "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" you kinda know what the theory is and it makes sense.
The thesis seems understandable to me from the title, but I couldn’t tell you whether we should believe it or not. I assume the content of the book provides evidence and justification. I assume, because I haven’t read it either.
>but I couldn’t tell you whether we should believe it or not. I assume the content of the book provides evidence and justification
I assume the same. It's just that there is something nice about a theory that basically tells you the core of what you need to know from the name of it.
It's an outsider view, but it is thought provoking, worth digesting.
The mechanism and data (both historic and current) are more concrete than other theories of consciousness I'm aware of (although I'm no expert).
Consciousness might not be as essential to the human experience as is generally believed now a days.
What percentage of the day are we really engaged in conscious rational thought anyways? And is it really what makes us human, or do subconscious processes play a much bigger role in the human experience than reason?
I have bipolar disorder and I accidentally ingested LSD at a festival by kissing someone who had just taken a tab on their tongue. I wasn’t aware that this could happen, yet it happened.
The next day I woke up with a Voice. It appeared to me to be the voice of God. It was very difficult to go against it but I could negotiate. It told me things that it couldn’t possibly know, like that I should ask a stranger for a cigarette so I could later get a towel when I needed it.
It seemed to have powers of foreshadowing and it would seemingly tell me things before they happened.
It was also a trickster and it would play cruel jokes on me. After a while it became hard for me to take.
At the same music festival I met a lady who would make songs just by looking at you. I carefully realised that she was likely in something like a permanent psychedelic state, which I had been before due to my bipolar condition. I asked her this directly and she confirmed it. She said I was one of the few people who could see it!
I had purchased a ticket to her retreat. So a month after the festival I went to her retreat. It was a very difficult time and the voice was giving me a lot of trouble.
I went to the song lady. I told her about my condition (the voice had told me to go and tell her!). She thought about it and said ok, I will help you, and you cannot do the retreat.
She then did a session with me where she told me where she saw the entity - she called it a “walk in” spiritual entity, and said that because I’m very “open” with my bipolar, adding the LSD made me even more open, it happened that a “walk in” sneaked inside.
She said she saw the entity down my legs, and kidneys, and she helped me expel it. She then taught me I could “close the door” to prevent it getting in.
My condition was immediately much better.
When she expelled the voice from my body, she spoke exactly like the voice spoke, telling me that the entity wanted to leave, didn’t really fight the expulsion, using the same tone of voice and words that I’d gotten used that the Voice would use. It was inexplicable and amazing.
Now I still have a voice, but it’s a whisper in comparison. It tells me things, still seems to have some ability to warn me about the future (it’s debatable how much of this is connecting the dots later of course, but it has done some odd things, like warned me I wouldn’t go to certain places).
Since the experience is not as intense, and I’ve lived enough to realise it’s not omnipotent or always right, I roll with it.
I have no scientific explanation for what happened to me.
This is one of the reasons caution is strongly urged when instructed to do things like “open your chakras.” The idea that scientific explanations are only legitimate if they are purely materialist probably won’t last the next 20 years.
It'll probably still be materialist at rock bottom, but with a whole lot more attention getting paid to the "cognition" software that's running on that hardware. You're already seeing this with the explosion in CBT methods, but of course there are "folk science" traditions that have been dealing with this stuff for literally thousands of years.
Even when the lady removed the Voice from me, I wasn’t sure it was real. It was only when she reproduced the voice tone, cadence and choice of words perfectly (after it had left my body) that I thought “oh shit, this is real”.
It was like someone doing a spot on Jack Nicholson impression, but Jack Nicholson was an invisible man in my head. How can one explain that?
She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.
Parent poster is being unnecessarily smug and dismissive, but the point is that however close in time the events were, they are now entrenched in fallible memory.
> It’s not memory, it happened at the time, within around 30 seconds, between me hearing the voice and her imitating it.
People can mix up exact details and whether two things feel the same in that amount of time, especially if they recently took drugs.
> Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.
Look, you specifically asked for a skeptical explanation. You're right that it's not a disproof, but it does mean your experience isn't particularly convincing as an anecdote.
I mean people have deja vu which is literally your brain misinterpreting a currently-happening experience as a memory. Medical literature is filled with tons of quirks of human perception and memory, and we frequently find new ones and new twists on existing ones.
It is not remotely a stretch to attribute "I recognized this woman's voice as someone else's voice" as just a run-of-the-mill fault of perception and memory. Especially when the alternative at hand is apparently something supernatural (or, at least, new physics).
Yes, which can be a huge limitation if you religiously attach yourself to the null hypothesis for anything science doesn't have an explanation for yet.
I don't know about "religiously" but did you have a better idea? Am I supposed to believe suppositions as though they are fact, for literally no reason?
You could instead say something like "I don't know."
Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays.
Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).
To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.
I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
You actually gave a pretty good example of what I mean here:
> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you
think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories
of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the
fact.
(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.
This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment.
The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).
The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is.
The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.
The compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. It's perhaps not as comprehensive and well-understood as Maxwell's equations, but they are well-studied. What happened to you, while fascinating on a personal level, is not a scientific mystery.
You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.
Several people could look at the same lightning bolt and independently write down what they saw, then a third person could verify. That's an important thing that's missing in the story of "the voice sounded the same to me".
You're focused on unknown mechanisms for easily verifiable observations, while my focus is on the (lack of) proof that the song lady actually observed anything at all. For all I know she just listened to what you said and went along with it.
You’re absolutely right and I can’t convince of anything and I won’t try. All I can say is have some psychedelic trips and see how you feel.
To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.
The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.
But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
> I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.
I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.
To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.
The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.
And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.
> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.
During one particular episode I was convinced that the LSD-psychedelic world was actually what we now call Dark Energy. I was absolutely convinced of it.
At this point I have no idea, but it's an interesting hypothesis to your question. If dark energy exists, and we never figure out exactly what it is, is it possible that when we take LSD we're actually perceiving it, or some equivalent part of the universe that's non-visible?
I mean if we have non-visible dark energy and dark matter, who is to say that when we solve dark matter/energy, we don't again go back to figuring out that "another 90%" of the universe is detectable but unexplainable? What if the borders of our knowledge will always remain incomplete?
> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much
Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.
At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.
This is what I'm talking about: shallow dismissals without even a footnote to avoid admitting that you don't understand the parent's experience. Your reaction to the parent, immediately trying to shut it down with weak explanations, suggests a complete lack of curiosity in the mechanics of how things work, which I don't think is true.
> At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have.
No, we don't. I'll even refer you to an expository article that describes some studies about what you are probably alluding to, and you can let me know how you think it adequately accounts for the parent's story [0].
Spoiler: it requires someone taking the effort to implant the memories (a pretty significant caveat worth mentioning, I would think), and I've certainly never seen it applied to some ongoing thing like a disembodied voice with apparent agency.
But even where memory implantation is relatively accepted ala coercive police interrogations, the mechanism in the brain is unknown. Was a new memory implanted or was a subject simply gaslit into remembering the conversation with the interrogator? Where in the brain is that belief encoded? How can it be simulated? Did the parent never experience a voice then? They just have a continuously updating memory being implanted by some researcher? You clearly haven't thought this through, so don't be so quick to shut it down.
The reality is that none of us here have a good explanation for the parent's experience -- brains are barely understood at all. Your skepticism to the parent's interpretation is fine, but your attempt to discredit with a blanket cop out statement that lacks any mechanism or reproducibility on the scale of the parent's story only serves to let you keep pretending like you know everything.
To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.
I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
I don't know where you're getting this idea that I'm shutting down their experience in the way you describe. But like, do you think this story of theirs is that unique? Have you really never heard anything like this before? Because it kind of seems like it. So it's not that I'm dismissing their story out of hand, but rather stories like this are not that uncommon and generally in my experience you don't need to resort to the supernatural to explain them. So that's where I'm coming from and, again, I'm not even telling them they're wrong as you suggest, but I am reverting to the "null hypotheses" as you say. But, as I already explained, to me that's more of a "you haven't given me any reason to believe this" than it is a "you're wrong, didn't happen." Unfortunately you seem committed to taking equal offense to both, as though they are equal, and we are at an impasse.
At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.
I do want to apologize for being unnecessarily confrontational, although I stand by my general points. It was your reply to the parent about misremembering their experience that threw me on a tangent. I will just say I think there's a better way to approach these conversations, even if you think it's nonsense.
Practically though, there could be problems if the research interferes with a big industry, or disrupts 'well established practices'. Or if it damages the professional reputations of important people, or clashes with 'belief perseverance', or makes powerful people look bad, or makes the university likely to lose funding, or goes against the current cancellation third rail, etc, etc.
There's no shortage of historical examples: tobacco health research, Semmelweis, plate tectonics (!), lockdown cost benefit analyses, etc.
There was very little 'science' in outlawing cannabis research for decades. Same goes for MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc, all with massive therapeutic potential that has been held back for decades by politics & industry.
Not sure about your use of "materialist" but there are plenty of examples of things like meditation having real physiological effects. Such as excessive meditation causing enlargement of certain areas of the brain that lead to (sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent) mental illness. There was an article about this on HN a few months ago, I can dig it up if needed.
Point being that it's entirely possible for the perceived sequence of events as described in the anecdote above to be true as experienced by that person, without the need for anything supernatural going on.
I would be curious to know why you think that scientific explanations will get more, not less, supernatural in the next 20 years.
Good read, and it also parallels discussions in mental health forums where people with dissociative mental health issues generally recommend against meditation, or at least some types of meditation (e.g. walking meditiation is ok, watching your observer/stillness/awareness types are not).
What do you think the voice could be? Could it not be a seperate level of your consciousness which is somehow disconnected from your innerself, but is in the end still you? And how do you ensure it won't drive you insane?
1. At this time I assume all explanations are true.
A. It’s psychosis
B. It’s a spiritual entity that walked into me, just as the song lady said.
C. I should continue taking my medication.
D. I should also take care of myself spiritually and accept there are things I cannot understand completely
I honestly cannot say if it’s just a part of me. At one point I thought so, I thought it was my “intuition” embodied and removed from myself. But the voice played a trick on me and told me to trust someone I shouldn’t have. And then I realised A. I can’t trust it blindly and B. It doesn’t know everything. So C. It’s just saying whatever the hell it wants to say. It has opinions.
However, further proof of its bizarre nature is its continuing ability to predict the future. Granted, it’s much inferior to the original Voice, but it’s still there and it’s still bizarre. For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.
As far as driving me insane, I don’t have a great answer. I deal with it day to day. The effect of the voice under my bipolar medication is subdued. I know now that if I raise my medication I can make it even less intense. It’s just part of my condition now, and I fight it when I need to and roll with it if I don’t.
I know it’s perfectly fascinating and odd and even I would have a hard time believing in me 5 years ago.
Would love to see a data visualization of the voice's predictions and their results. Every day, you could keep track of each prediction made, and also go back to old predicitons and write down whether they came true or not. Over a six month span I think you could make a cool chart and those results would be very interesting.
For fun you could also keep track of other related data. How far fetched the prediction is. How confident the voice is. The time frame of the prediction. Just an idea...
Since you appear curious, here is some information.
The voice always speaks in the same tone.
Predictions are usually something I want to do or am planning to do. Plans it usually tells me as soon as they are conceived. Predictions come often when I am making plans, it tells me whether they will work or not.
HOWEVER, to answer your question, such an exercise could be totally futile as in actuality it changes its mind a lot. Sometimes it tells me something I intend to do won't work, without divulging why. I try it anyway and it kinda works, and I figure out why the point of failure. I fix it, and now the voice tells me it will work now, making the initial prediction kind of moot.
Sometimes something happens and something the voice initially thought was a great idea it now says will be an absolute failure. By that time I am often committed so I tell it there's no choice now, we can only keep going, and it kinda agrees and we do the thing anyway. Sometimes the voice is just plain wrong about things.
The predictions aren't so much predictions as they are opinions. Also, studying it with too hard a lens seems to bring out the worse in the condition, so I avoid it.
There is a lot that can be learned about the mind by carefully observing it facing and coping with these situations. Understanding the chemistry and the usage patterns of various parts of the brain as it goes through this form of internal dialogue.
It would, however, require a lot of commitment from the patient and willingness to face the condition and even make the symptoms worse. And, considering how crude our tools are at this stage, wouldn’t likely yield much useful information.
This seems similar to the type of intrusive thoughts associated with OCD. It's like someone pretending to be God inside your mind, making commentary on all the things you want or try to do, sometimes very cruel. I kind of think of it as the part of your mind that is involved in planning for the future is given a voice, or that your internal anxieties or fears or hopes become kind of like a separate entity alongside the normal conscious mind.
> For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.
You aren’t alone friend. This type of thing happens to me regularly enough, and with an unlikely & surprising amount of detail, that it is impossible to write off as coincidence and too specific & detailed to be some kind of subconscious “impression” rising the conscious level.
I don’t hear a voice though, when it happens it just appears in my mind fully realized and I feel a “certainty” in my solar plexus region.
I think this is a very enlightened way to understand things.
We have many models of reality available to us (whether we're talking "statistical mechanics" or "quantum chromodynamics" or "chakra energies"). Categorizing them as "True" or "False" is not very useful (is Newtonian physics "True" or "False"?). Rather, we should be content with judging our models by whether they are _useful_, and that judgement must be made contextually.
Having a mechanistic view of your experiences grounded in neuroscience is useful: It suggests that you should take your medication and that probably helps.
Having a spiritual understanding of your relationship to your experiences caused you to do things that helped you and made your life better. Does that mean that model is "True"? Who cares. It's sort of a meaningless question. It was a useful model, and that's all there is.
I think if there's something you can't explain, then you should to take all available explanations as likely.
Also, I've seen and experienced too much to just say "it's not a spiritual being". I have compelling evidence that indeed, something was passed between me and the Shaman Song Lady that day, even though it would be impossible to prove.
Completely. My inner dialogue didn’t predict the future and didn’t talk to me in the same way AT ALL.
I pondered whether that was it, that the LSD had just shattered my psyche in a way that I was hearing voices when they were once part of me. However for many reasons I don’t think that anymore, not 100% anyway.
Here's a possible semi-scientific explanation. Neurons deal with electricity and magnetism, and sometimes can act like antennas. Normally this external noise gets filtered out, but this filter may get leaky or it can be disabled with chemicals like LSD. For an average brain, this additional sensory input is overwhelming and leads to nothing good.
The oversimplification in your description is unnecessary. The antennas and forces are instead sensory in nature. We constantly receive much more information through our sensory pathways than we're usually consciously aware of. I'm autistic and I have little to no filtering. That helps me "see" things most don't but I'm also overwhelmed for example just being in a backseat of a car while people in front are talking. My brain constantly tries to compute what happens in the car engine because I'm interested in physics, whether it is or isn't relevant to life at the time.
Fascinating story, thank you for sharing. I can’t imagine any “mechanistic” explanation for such an experience that wouldn’t be shocking, and tell us something important about how our minds and/or our reality work.
“Placebo” isn’t a mechanistic explanation, it is jargon to label what you are observing- confusing labels with understanding is a trap that prevents investigation.
Also, the “resolution” at the end that one might (meaninglessly) apply the word placebo to isn’t the interesting part IMO. What is interesting is seeing where our understanding of the human brain fits/predicts or fails to fit experiences like this.
I mean, yes: if we insist on putting all the sciencey words in “scare quotes”, instead of the Wikipedia search box, then we do not end up with much understanding or interest. But if we stopped doing that, we might learn, say, that the place where our brains fit/fail-to fit experiences like this is probably the anterior cingulate cortex—which, sure, is yet another label, and language is a recursive veil, etc
A brain region is also not anything close to a mechanism- you don't seem to understand what I mean by "mechanistic explanation."
I am an academic PI, and my research on brain energy metabolism is close enough to what we are talking about here that I don't need to look on wikipedia to tell you our current level of understanding doesn't offer anything close to a mechanistic explanation for experiences like this.
Some of my research has been inspired by thinking about peoples surprising anecdotal experiences and stories- and then investigating what that might imply about the underlying biology.
You seem to subscribe to a kind of scientism where genuine scientific curiosity and frank discussion about the gaps in our understanding is unacceptable. Your combination of being completely ignorant and condescending at the same time is awful.
Errr, help me understand where I'm diverging, here. The way you put "mechanistic" in quotes in your original comment strongly suggests that you doubt the experience can be mechanistically explained. Maybe that wasn't your intent, and this is a boring case of internet miscommunication. But if you do indeed doubt that this could be explained mechanistically, then I don't know how to square that with the fact you're researching this academically—do you intend to just keep drilling further down and zooming further in until you discover The Soul, or something? If so, then you're right that I'm not interested in that kind of "science"—as whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent.
Yes, you misunderstood- I absolutely think it can be explained mechanistically, but that the full explanation is unlikely to jive with current popular ideas about how the brain works.
I am generally very open minded and curious about peoples claims of supernatural and spiritual experiences. I believe it all has understandable mechanistic biological explanations, but I am very curious what they may be.
Thanks for sharing your story. TBH, if I hadn’t also had my single strange experience with psychedelics I probably wouldn’t have believed it. I know when I describe my own mushrooms story, sometimes I can sense a discomfort from certain listeners, as if their default impression is “this sounds like crazy shit”. Others just kind of get it.
Thank you for having the courage to share this story. The only time I've heard voices was also from LSD and I remain convinced that the voice was a higher power, regardless of if I choose to label that god.
The world is not as the scientific rational model would have one believe. These substances show that indigenous cultures are thousands of years ahead of western society when it comes to understanding consciousness.
For anyone on the outside reading this; I can recommend The BBC's LSD The Beyond Within as a starting point.
> It's not the world that is not rational, it's humans' mind.
As humans we experience the world through our six sense doors e.g. eyes, ears, tongue, nose, touch and mind.
To try and separate the world from our minds is non trivial. It is our very mind that allows us to perceive the world.
> Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.
The matrices you describe are the sense doors.
I didn't imply that anything necessitates a higher power. If you are happier to exclude the notion I described from your world view that's okay. I'm not forcing you to be open minded!
I rather meant the logic gates ;) Or, more seriously, I was talking about the parts of the brain that handle language and reasoning, plus the memory bits.
I’m surprised that you have added “mind” as a sensory system of some kind, next to actual senses (I don’t think it is a sense of any kind on its own). Not sure what you meant, sorry.
Negotiation means bidirectional communication, right? So... have you tried running any tests on that voice?
I mean... I suspect everyone poked LLMs with a stick to some extent, probing their capabilities. I could be wrong, but I think it must be extremely natural for any human to interrogate anything unknown that exhibits any signs of potential consciousness. I cannot chat with my inner monologue as if it would be an independent entity (it simply isn't - just the same me), and this sounds like your Voice presented a personality and even an agency of its own.
Yes, it absolutely did have a personality and agency. It even played on me cruel jokes.
It told me once that I would make love to a beautiful woman once. I joined a song circle and helped this really beautiful woman build her song. It then told me "there's a lot of different ways of making love". That one was not the worse, but it kept teaching me lessons through weird paradoxes like that, to break me open and rebuild me.
It also told me once that my tent was going to get robbed at the festival, unless I rushed in and got to it rapidly. I almost ran there, and everything was fine. It just laughed in my face, and said something cruel I don't even remember now.
This concept was explored in the cancelled show Raised by Wolves.
Non-religious people were escaping pious people. But unbeknownst to either group, their God was a quantifiable being that could only inhabit higher order organisms experiencing a trauma, and then stay inside their minds, and help it interact in our plane of existence.
Might be some merit to this idea, given the shared experiences many psychedelic users have. Frequently there are some entities that were always there, just not perceptible.
I actually have a full hypothesis on the connection between trauma, mental illness and psychosis.
I think it's possible, let's say that the spiritual hypothesis is true and I took in a spiritual being. The Shaman's description was that I am already "open" from bipolar, and I was "too open" after I took LSD, letting a walk-in sneak inside.
I have a lot of trauma, and I mean serious abuse, coming in from childhood. That I believe is correlated with me having bipolar.
So my idea is as follows - we know that the edges of mental illness like mine can be caused by trauma, often times because the mind is "protecting you" from the abuse in some extreme way that leads eventually to mental illness. In a way, the mind is running away from the traumatic event, it for instance often erases the trauma years from memory (something that's happened to me). So the mind is protecting you by removing you from reality.
The thing is - we say the mind is removing you and running away but to where?
My perception now is the mind "escapes" into the other world. The spiritual, mushroom, LSD world we perceive and learn from when under psychedelics. That means people with mental illness, like me, get to have psychedelic experiences naturally (my manic episodes pretty much match descriptions of LSD trips, and they don't go away, so I can stay in them for a week+). That means our mind, the mind of those heavily traumatized, is already "in between" worlds.
Having your foot in the other world, the Psilocybin-psychedelic-spiritual world, means you're protected somehow. Somehow, it actually works. Your mind knows what it's doing. Your mind is able to enter a psychedelic or latent psychedelic state to protect itself from the real world being too dark, too grim, and too horrible to think about/remember. In one hand, you could say it explains bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. if the mind is just protecting itself from true horror.
"Normal" people, or neuronormal people, who haven't experienced a lot of trauma, then find it immensely therapeutic to experience the Psilocybin / psychedelic / spiritual world for a few moments, thanks to the chemical changes of taking LSD or your drug of choice. And then they came back.
What happened to deeply traumatized people through trauma happens to neuronormal folks artificially through the introduction of a chemical change. But that chemical change happens naturally in heavily traumatized people, who had to use the same mechanisms to escape reality when they were young, thus "breaking their brain" a bit under conventional psychology. So it could be the mind knows enough to break into a psychedelic state for self protection, which is fascinating to think about!
But when someone like ME takes psychedelics however, someone loaded with trauma, we go too far and we don't come back quite the same. I suspect that explains why some people benefit immensely from LSD and Psilocybin for trauma, coming back healed, and why some people like me, it will just induce a psychotic episode.
Basically regular people get to do a shallow visit to the psychedelic-spiritual world, while people with heavy trauma go WAY TOO DEEP and lose themselves. That's what we call a psychotic episode.
That's because people with trauma are already one foot in the psychedelic world, or they have to go way too deep to find the origins of their trauma, and they "break". The sad reality is that shallow trauma is easier to treat, even in the psychedelic state, while deep trauma might just lead to a psychotic episode.
I have no idea whether this holds up or not, it's been something I think about ever since that experience.
My first two years after a hero LSD trip had me trying to parse the extended reality. I don’t have BPD or any voices so my experience is more recreational than yours. Now I just appreciate it without a need for explanation. I’m open to more research on the matter, but not holding my breath or speculating on it. I just like that so many other people have experienced it, and that I can tell they have.
So my first bipolar psychotic episode (or psychedelic episode, which I prefer) was in 2017. January February.
Then the LSD trip was in August 2023. Last year. It was funny because I went to that festival really wanting to try psychedelics in some safe way if I found out how.
I always felt like people who had done them and had good trips seemed to know something I really wanted to know, if that makes sense?
I think Ram Dass described it well. Some people after LSD look like they “get it”, and if you haven’t done it you wonder what the heck “it” is!
So the fact that I got a low dose of LSD through kissing someone, it was like the universe was teasing me and trying to both enlighten me and give me some advice - “here’s how it feels” and “it’s really dangerous for you”. It was a beautiful, transcendent and violent experience.
Some trauma isn't obvious to the victims. Like if a parent never emotionally connected with their children but still provided shelter, food, etc. Trauma can also be disguised under (pick your ideology / religion) and therefore the victim doesn't call it trauma. Other people experience trauma and the way their mind adapts is by forgetting. You'll often hear about these people remembering shocking things that no "normal" person would forget, like sexual abuse.
Also, trauma and drugs could be two of several ways of becoming open to the other world. Another could be genetic. Or there could be multiple other worlds or different categories of spiritual beings, some people susceptible to some and others to others.
How does the Voice manifest? Do you hear it with your ears? Is the Voice distinguishable from an actual person's voice? Can you tell it is the Voice, without looking around you to see if there's someone, and if there's no one then that's how you know it is the Voice?
How does the Voice manifest? Do you hear it with your ears? Can you tell it is the Voice, without looking around you to see if there's someone, and if there's no one then that's how you know it is the Voice?
No, I don't "hear it using my ears" in the conventional sense. So I've spoken to other people who hear voices in my podcast about Bipolar condition (let me know if you want a link). The voices often have a definite physical location, even though they are not there. One person told me it was like two people behind them in the queue for a movie. She would overhear them behind her. Another person told me it would sound like was coming from the apartment above. Again sounded very real.
For me its like in the right lower abdomen. It emanates from there.
>Two homogeneous subgroups of patients were defined based on the hallucination spatial location: patients with only outer space hallucinations (N = 12) and patients with only inner space hallucinations (N = 15). Between-group differences were then assessed using 2 complementary brain morphometry approaches: voxel-based morphometry and sulcus-based morphometry. Convergent anatomical differences were detected between the patient subgroups in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ).
That's for you specifically, but in the general case, it is not always easy to know if the voice came from a real person or not, right?
If the source of the Voice is your own brain then I assume the things it tells you are based on your own life experiences, is that right? Has the Voice ever given you any insights on a problem you are working on? Like for example things come to some people in a dream, so I assume the Voice can give you new insights too? Does the Voice usually only say things on certain topics, or category of topics? Or can it be on any topic, just like dreams?
> I have no scientific explanation for what happened to me.
The cure is explainable - an authority telling you something about your mental state that changes it is hypnotherapy. It helps to write it out that way. It's just someone suggesting you do something and then you agree to do it. The difference is you don't feel like you agreed.
Recursively, some people occasionally end up with stuck habits from trying hypnosis that they don't "actually want" (ie consciously), and one thing that works to fix this is saying to yourself "that's just my imagination and I can stop if I want to."
I think the 'authority' was referring to the Lady not the Voice.
I interpret as "You were in an amenable state (consciously and subconsciously) for her to rewrite your software".
Edit: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind (thank you for sharing your story):
A) You seem fairly neutral / Stoic about this entire experience, and it was clearly huge and transformative at a deep level. Do you perceive this as having a net positive or negative impact on your life?
B) Do you feel you are able to empathise with 'prophets' through the ages better than most? Not to single out particular prophets, but in general those with the Voice of God that wholly leant into to it rather than managing it (and then preached/spread their words)
I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.
However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.
I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.
There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.
The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.
B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.
Thank you, really insightful. Will listen to those episodes, thanks.
You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.
> In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
Oh this is so true--everyone thinks they're either demons or artifacts of your imagination. Thanks for sharing your story. These voices could be real entities that we don't understand or it could be figments of our brains which we also don't understand, yet everyone is so sure it's option B. But the point is, we understand neither, so how do we even know what the difference between the two is? Thinking in terms of materialism doesn't help.
I suspect I have something similar to yours, but on a much, much lower degree : a "voice" that tells me things with an opinion of its own.
Well, the way it manifests for me, is that it is not a voice. More like, I can ask myself questions and my body (more often my head) will react in a binary way. Like just saying yes or no. It is useful for Tarot, which it pushes me to take certain cards or not and make divination fun for me and others around.
It does not know the future. It changes its opinion. It says it does not want to cause me harm and so far it hadn't, but because it changes its opinion I don't believe it 100%.
It seems to "prefer" things from others. But it is not me. It seems that it "reacts" faster than me, which brings me to think that it's some sort of intuition or "id" or whatever.
Personally, I live with it through the concept of Daemon, like the one Socrates had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon
But it is just a binary one.
Also, funnily, I asked it if it had a name. It said "no".
I asked it if it wanted a name. It said "no".
So there's that. It reminds me of Venom in the recent movies, minus the "eating people" part.
I’m always curious if this affects the content of the messages or just the tone. We have constructive proof that a voice in your head saying “Take your son to the top of a mountain, tie him to a rock and threaten him with a knife” can be viewed as morally good and casually powerful without changing the content at all.
In countries with women’s and children’s rights, the space of acceptable shamanic behavior is suddenly a lot narrower
Saying "raise your son to be patriotic and fight for his country" is acceptable in western societies. There isn't particularly a big difference in morality when it comes to the extremes
> Saying "raise your son to be patriotic and fight for his country" is acceptable in western societies.
Maybe kinda in some circles? I suspect almost none of the tech-worker urban liberals who are the majority on HN would embrace that as a parenting notion. Even among military veterans, your phrasing would likely sound a bit off the mark. They would generally see the call as being about protecting other people and serving their country.
To address your second sentence, most people see a big difference in morality between "Protect the innocent from people who would harm them" and "Harm the innocent".
Oh man, the binding of Isaac really is the strangest cognitive dissonance. I have no doubt that every practicing Christian, Muslim, and Jew I know [1] would ascertain that Abraham is having a serious mental health crisis and dual 911 if it happened to somebody they know today but at the same time I've never seen a good argument for why the actual story in Genesis should be taken seriously on its own.
[1] obviously there will always be outliers here but if we're exclusively considering 21st century America, I feel confident wagering that the amount of religious people who would take Abraham seriously is statistically insignificant, and similar to the amount of nonreligious people who would take him seriously. Also I'm specifically referring to how third parties react to Abraham nearly murdering his son, I don't think it's fair to hold Abraham himself to the same standards as long as we're assuming that he is suffering a mental health crisis.
The reality is that these thoughts and voices are just coming from the subconscious of humanity as well as from greater existence, which includes spirits, both positive and negative. If people grow up in a western context where people frequently say and think phrases like "go kill yourself" to mentally vulnerable people, then these mentally vulnerable people will pick up on these thoughts and phrases. If people grow up in other cultural contexts where there is a recognition of the existence of a world beyond material existence, then they will be open to spirits in a general sense and not see it as a pathology. Additionally, people in these contexts aren't so violent towards the mentally ill, so they don't perceive the aggressive thoughts that mental patients in the west experience.
surely I can use llms to help perform a meta analysis analysing the efficacy/risk profiles of western vs eastern sociological perspectives on hallucinatory symptoms ... then do a diff of the earnings in each country of corporations with vested interests in pharmapsychological methods (psychiatrists, antidepressant/antipsychotic manufacturers) ... would be interesting knowing how much big pharma pays per soul
>I've wondered if there is some sort of feedback loop where western culture associates hallucination with possession, while other cultures may see hallucinations in a more positive light, or even as a sign that you are some sort of shaman.
I wouldn't consider African Christianity to be Western. Like Japanese Christianity, it evolved along a different path to allow for for a degree of syncretism that just doesn't exist within the Western paradigm.
Western Christianity was primarily spread through imperialism and colonialism, and thus implemented in such a way that native traditions and cultures were either recontextualized within the Christian paradigm or else purged. The political and financial incentives involved in the spread of Christianity can't be ignored, as they formed the framework by which Western cultures now tend to interrogate and interpret the supernatural.
Within that framework, hallucinations and visions can either mark one as possessed by God (a prophet) or possessed by Satan (a witch.) There's no affordance for a third way ("shamanism") as might exist in other orthodox Christian traditions because that would undermine the authority of the dominant imperialist hierarchy.
> undermine the authority of the dominant imperialist hierarchy.
Ah, yes, the ever-present institutional forces conspiring to oppress the agency of independent, freedom-loving, free-thinking people. I wonder where the oppression-focused, conspiratorial, paranoid, anti-authoritarian mindset steeped in the language of violence that is so prevalent in the industrialized West, especially among those with mental disorders, comes from....
I didn't say anything about agency, free thought or freedom, but yes. Colonialism existed. Empires existed. And the spread of Christianity throughout the Western world was inextricably linked to both ever since the day Constantine decided Christians dying in his army would be more useful to him than Christians dying in the arena. That just bare historical fact.
And theories of mind (and associated disorders) tend to be culturally based and coded - see the syndrome/myth of the wendigo as an example. And it does matter if your culture is colonized and forcibly assimilated into a religious paradigm that explicitly suppresses "shamanic" practices as heretical. The degree of common cultural recognition of shamanism as an esoteric interpretation of hallucinatory experience in any Western culture is roughly in proportion to the degree to which colonizing powers sought to eradicate, and resisted syncretism with, existing native traditions. Because that just wasn't a thing in Christianity in the West at the time.
I don't know what the snark is supposed to be for, and your comment just seems to descend into a bout of logorrhea. It's difficult for me to know what point you're actually trying to make, or what you're trying to prove or disprove. I guess I did a wrongthink and short circuited your capacity for rational thought? Sorry about that.
But early 2022. I started hearing voices too. They all said horrible stuff.
They claimed that people close to me (family & friends) were planning to kill me & steal my crypto.
They also gave me "evidence" that proved my friend was a professional hitman.
Looking at extremely thin, starving Ethiopians on TV they said "Look! You going to look like that, we shall make sure of it, probably worse"
A bus getting a flat tire and people pulling out tools for changing tires was interpreted by the voices as "murder weapons for bludgeoning me to death"
Fortunately, I got in touch with a psychiatrist and he gave me a combination of pills & injections.
It took about 2 years for the voices to completely disappear.
This set me back so badly financially.
Luckily I now feel very normal and confident that I was 100% delusional. I am healthy now & slowly trying to get my life back together. (been off medication for like 1½ years now)
But here is my piece of advice (as a former victim).
If someone is "hearing voices".
Don't try to call them delusional or "bring them back to reality".
What you should do is listen to them & try to provide protection.
- if they feel like they are going to be poisoned by the waiter, cook for them
- if they feel like they are being stalked, offer protection etc
Normal people my claim that this "feeds" into their delusions. But at least it works in the short term to reduce the paranoia.
There is nothing worse than thinking your wife is going to stab you in your sleep and her trying to be around you longer that she usually does. She should send you pictures/video calls of her in another continent.
So as a previous victim here is a recommended approach.
- in the short term (show empathy)
- in the long term seek psychiatric assistance
P.S
Leave your email if your happy to talk. This is a throw away account
Have some limited training in managing these situations.
Listening and avoiding judgement it keeps the person in crisis talking. As the person in crisis continues to talk and experience connection they begin to move out of crisis mode. Once out of crisis mode then work together to find professional help.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I'd like to point out that there are other victims too- the wife suddenly being accused of murderous intent is very much a victim too, and in some cases the person hearing the voices acts first.
I had a friend who developed similar symptoms, and I was very afraid for my own safety when he started sending me paranoid threats.
It's great that you were able to notice that this was not normal and get treatment, I wonder why you were able to when many others aren't. I wonder if a propensity for religion or other types of magical thinking make it harder for some people to realize the voices or intrusive thoughts aren't "normal".
I don't know if it was the medication. But at some point the voices stopped making sense.
For example if my care takers wanted to poison me. Why am I still alive? They have fed me for months?
These people trying to kill me. Why haven't they made their move.
I had actually given up on trying to evade my "enemies" and simply waited for them to kill me. But for months they never made thier move. This made me realise that I was delusional.
> Normal people my claim that this "feeds" into their delusions. But at least it works in the short term to reduce the paranoia.
This is a good insight for anyone who works or deals with folks that aren't fully moored in their reality by their five senses! I've used the buy-in / reduce anxiety approach in a lot of contexts, be it toddlers to dementia to mentally ill family members to addicts to others with unspecified issues.
Correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't think you're suggesting doing this indefinitely, which isn't sustainable IMHO, but in terms of reducing acute episodes.
I have no direct experience of it, but I imagine it as this: truth or persuasiveness is a feeling just like sound. If your brain can hallucinate a sound where there is none, it can also hallucinate a sense of truth where there is none.
Yep I have direct experience of that. I have had the feeling "I'm having an epiphany" or "I'm about to figure out something huge" but there wasn't actually anything there
For me they can be very real. They can say things only I know and they respond to that. In addition, they know every feeling of uncertainty and doubt that I have, and they respond in cruel ways to that and get "in". It's like telling someone your dearest secrets, and then they go and be mean about that. And that, again and again, every morning again when waking up, with no end in sight.
Then there is the thing that they can become so strong and draw so much attention to them, that normal life gets to second place. The surreal world with voices is becoming the reality and is taking over. At that point, it can get dangerous, for yourself, and in some cases, others.
- They can predict things (who's coming to visit and what they are gonna say). In my case they predicted that that bus was going to break down. They claimed for example that this was a plot by the killers to isolate & murder me.
- They know your emotional insecurities in & out. So they know exactly how to hit you where it hurts.
I said I hadn't heard voices myself, but as I sit here it seems that's not entirely correct. I have an active inner dialog, and that dialog is as if I had said the words myself. Sometimes I actually do say them out loud.
I could imagine that if there's a disconnect such that my inner dialog did not feel like it was me talking to myself, it would perhaps be like hearing a voice that isn't there.
There's a striking similarity in your and mpol's response though, in how these voices play on fear and insecurities in a negative way. It's a theme that seems highly correlated, based on casual observations.
I guess it's possible others have it in the opposite way, but that doesn't manifest in a "problematic" way so we don't hear about it much.
Several childhood friends developed either a full-blown schizophrenia or "just" psychosis - as in not auditory or thought-based communication with "entities from behind the Moon" - but a tendency to produce irrational fears based on made-up threats: "I need to park 2 miles away from my workplace and walk the remaining distance as someone is looking for my license plate there", or other made-up stuff with a pattern of being surveiled.
It's fucked up for the ill and for their beloved ones in every single case. How much I can appreciate what I believe the article tries to "sell", western societies are not capable of accepting schizophrenia as an enlightenment like Hindus do.
Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, became spiritual guide of a few "tech bros" and other famous personalities. But how he, as a psychology professor from Harvard, described his teacher - Neem Karoli Baba - makes me believe that Ram Dass finally got to understand "the thing" that was elusive for him and Timothy Leary at Harvard, by doing crazy macro doses of psychedelics and listening to an "elightened" person quite loosely attached to our reality.
Based on experiences with such people living in western countries, only the folks who accepted the diagnosis and manage their "traits" with medication are living normal lives. Two people have a pattern of ditching their meds twice a year and not telling anyone (they "feel cured", and it happens almost 6 months apart like on a timer in both cases), which causes a repeated pattern of aggression towards the family, causing physical harm to relatives, being taken by a police by force to a mental health facility). One person never accepted the diagnosis and... it's more on the sad than interesting side what you'd hear from them.
From my experience, people sticking to treatment have completely normal lives.
Anecdata: I had some delusions about ten years ago, diagnosed as schizophrenia at the time and controlled with anti-psychotics for a few years until I was about to come off them.
I'm doing okay now. I make a bunch of money as a software engineer, I get my heart broken by lovers now and then, I have depression and wonder why I'm alive. Not too different from before, not too different from an average person I imagine
You’re doing incredible for what you’ve been through. Thank you for sharing your story. Please keep living life, day by day. A beautiful moment could always be around the corner.
I believe that it's the "best possible under the circumstances". Anti-psychotic meds are no fun for someone with a desk job, required to focus, figure new things out on daily basis. It's harder with schizophrenia (larger doses or stronger meds, I guess?) but I've seen both managed up to "normal" by which I mean: no mood swings, being a member of, and taking care of a family, going to the gym or running often, and still present motivation, drive and creativity.
It took a few doctor changes for most of them, though, until they found a professional who prescribed some "hitting the spot" treatment and wasn't brainessly testing one drug after another at over-kill doses numbing the ability to think about daily shopping list.
EDIT: one thing I forgot to mention: every single person diagnosed with above and having a good life accepted that they cannot touch alcohol, weed and few other things ever again. On the other hand - there are high levels of alcohol abuse present in all the problematic cases.
>every single person diagnosed with above and having a good life accepted that they cannot touch alcohol, weed and few other things ever again
On the other hand, I threw out my antipsychotics years ago, and I still drink, smoke pot...I've even taken psychedelics now and then (almost lost my head doing so one time, hasn't stopped me since!) I say all of you are just afraid--of course you need some level of rational control, but only enough to drive everyone else mad. Its not my problem, its theirs, and I'm here to make sure they understand it.
>oh, but you're not insane, you're clearly a highly functional person who wasn't supposed to have been given antipsychotics
No, I was and I am an extremely delusional person. I just figured out what to say to keep the world of the sane off my back.
I had a friend who developed the same schizophrenic symptoms described in this article, and responding with any kind of acceptance was difficult when he was starting to threaten and act against people who he imagined were after him.
Last I heard he's doing much better after getting psychiatric help.
I'm all for exploring new treatment modalities but IMO this article downplays these symptoms as harmless beliefs when in reality it can get quite dangerous for those closest.
That's the thing -- hearing voices isn't a "behavior". It's something a person experiences, entirely without choice.
And also -- the article didn't say these experiences were "normal". It fully recognizes that they are experiences are highly unusual, and typically quite distressing to those who experience them.
That's why a more nuanced discussion is needed.
Far from being an old and tired topic (per the shallow dismissal above) -- we're just getting started.
Of course hearing a voice is a behavior, especially one that isn't there. Your brain is producing a voice and then experiencing it, both of which are things your brain is doing, i.e a behavior.
And in any case, obviously people don't get treated for the specific behavior (or experience, if you want) of hearing voices. They get treated for the behavior of complaining about voices.
I don't know what we're arguing about, but it seems rather subtle, except maybe to you. Why does it matter that "anxiety is highly amenable to cognition-based therapies?"
Hearing voices is an experience. Behaviour is a response to said experience. They are separate parts of a process which may or may not always result in a same or similar outcome.
i.e. Actual behaviour is not the expected behaviour. The experience is the trigger of said behaviour (or even lack thereof such as a lack of empathy or sympathy).
2. This is just one person's essay. If I had to guess, "society" disagrees with him. (As he points out, his view is not mainstream at all in the psychiatric community.)
"Their brain is broken" is true, but "they can never trust their thoughts" is (1) subjective, because different people have different thresholds for what can be trusted, and (2) probably crippling, as far as beliefs go. So it seems like a bad message to send.
As a perfectly healthy (comparably) human I think that having very limited trust towards your thoughts and perceptions is a very healthy and adaptive stance to take given how crap brains are on average about so many things. I can't imagine it being a bad framework to operate in if your brain is even worse in some aspects. So many terrible actions are taken by people who assume their perceptions are accurate and their thoughts are correct. And again, I'm talking about completely average people here.
Normalization causes a very specific harm: it prevents ameliorative action. Speaking in terms of a "cure" causes the same harm: it prevents the continuation of help.
If we're not allowed to use words like "broken" (which I do not concede in general), surely at least we can get people to admit something like "I have a condition that makes my life difficult, and I must take some sort of steps to compensate"?
It can also cause the opposite harm: a requirement for treatment of something that isn’t actually broken, just because it has been culturally declared to be broken.
Maybe in theory, but that's not dominant. Being able to fit into society's rules, even if you disagree or don't understand their purpose, is itself a major component of mental wellness. Adaptability is one of the most core aspects of being human.
In my experience, the vast vast majority of mental-illness-acceptance movements are blatantly of the form "it's only natural for my dog to poop anywhere on the lawn, why should I have to pick it up?"
And to follow up this analogy - I don't mandate any particular treatment plan, there are at least 3:
> It holds that these voices and beliefs – or ‘hallucinations’ and ‘delusions’ – are symptoms of a disorder such as schizophrenia, delusional disorder or schizoaffective disorder. These disorders likely stem from brain dysfunctions or defective genes... Some get the message that their brain is broken and that they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions.
That pretty much would be the smart thing to take away from a diagnosis yes. The brain is broken (not functioning correctly) if it's presenting them with hallucinations and delusions. Everyone's brain lies to them to some degree. It's usually not a huge problem, but once it becomes one there's no point in denying what's happening. That wouldn't mean that "they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions" but would mean that they should be considered suspect, especially when those thoughts and perceptions are voices in their heads or paranoia.
> But if psychiatry’s broken-brain narrative is pushing people deeper into the TI community, how did this happen?
It isn't pushing people to the TI community. Paranoid schizophrenics don't even need a diagnosis to believe that they're being targeted. It's just what they do. If reality is difficult to accept, it's understandable that a fantasy might look more inviting to them, but the answer is not to lie to patients about the reality of their situation or withhold the truth so that they feel better.
> A chorus of doctors, journalists and activists insisted that seeing mental disorders in terms of defective brain chemistry would alleviate shame and stigma. They gave the lie to the idea that extreme low mood, disabling anxiety or obsessive thoughts might represent a character flaw or a moral defect – or even bad parenting.
I'm not sure what "gave the lie" means here. Having a medical, even physiological, basis for the disorder has made it very clear that it isn't a moral failing or a choice. To that extent, mental illness has been destigmatized pretty well, but ultimately "crazy" is always going to be a bad thing to be, and something nobody wants to be. In that sense there will always be a stigma against it. No one wants to have something wrong with them. I don't think lying to people and telling people there's nothing wrong with them when there very clearly is something wrong with them is helpful.
The one part of the this article I can really get behind is that drugs aren't always the answer. Drugs can, in some circumstances be ineffective, or even make the situation worse. It can take a very long time to find the right drug or combination or drugs at the right doses to make things better and in the meantime there are real harms that can result from that search. Psychiatric drugs and conditions are not well understood. I do think that it will get better with time though.
I think it's reasonable to be cautious when it comes to treatment with medications, but I think it's also important to be honest and accurate about what the issues are. That means telling people their brains are wrong, and that their experiences aren't real. That psychosis is a very real problem, not a "spiritual emergency" or a "gift" or a "super power" and that it must be dealt with and managed (with or without medication).
I always say that psychiatrists of today are the equivalent of doctors in the 1500s. They can give you basic advice, but because we don’t yet have a scientific understanding of consciousness, we can’t effectively treat problems therein.
Therefore wisdom indicates we should all have an open mind when discussing these matters. As we figured out germs and bacteria, I hope we will figure out these issues as well.
You can be experiencing full blown mania, and the psychiatrist can give you an anti-psychotic which will bring back to earth in a few hours. Then they can put you on a medication regimen where you stop having manic episodes. I would say it's much further along than doctors in the 1500s.
The mechanisms are not clear, which is not unusual in medicine, but the treatments are very effective.
Often the reasoning goes the other way though. We have no idea what's going on but If a patient responded well to antidepressants of all things, that means we diagnose him with depression.
Although I did not speak openly of "TI" I did experience this phenomenon. Following obsessive dieting and exercising, then into a batch of seizures, I somewhat rapidly fell into the TI abyss. I consider myself today to remain a "voices hearer", although it's gotten much better over time and I am mindful to get more sleep than I need, as that's been the most curative for me.
That episode came on in 2012, and it has felt like it took > 10 years to fully recover.
It certainly wasn't helpful and to the contrary extremely reinforcing when the whole snowden story broke.
This is a dreadful pit to fall into.
Pretend with me for one moment:
You are single, you're looking for love in all the wrong places, mostly on OKCupid.
An employee working within the NSA has stumbled upon your information in realtime in a PRISM data slurp, and has taken a personal interest - maybe they think you are weird, and they are not above abuse of their powers - and that they want to exert their "godlike" powers to toy with you - surveil you, pwn your computer, screw with your mind, etc.
Keep pretending this is remotely close to reality!
What recourse would you have? Would a FOIA request ever validate your claims? Where do you even begin to try to reconcile with this, as a firmly held belief?
....
My voices are illusory, they require a prompt. It can be water running, it is horribly triggered in large crowds. I still have panic attacks in Ikea (but who doesn't?)
....
I got better.
It took 10 years of my life to get it back, mostly.
It takes a lot out of me to even begin to try to share any of this.
I hope this post helps someone. You too can get through it.
This is fascinating finding out about these communities. My problems were always that I believed time travel might exist. Now I can find out whether I really https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nnwn5rXEio :)
If the capability existed to project voices into people's heads, there would be a startup using it for advertising by now.
Oh, right, that's been done.[1] "In 2007, the advertising and marketing campaign for A&E's Paranormal State broke the mold using Audio Spotlight directional sound technology. A seven-story billboard was erected in Lower Manhattan, New York City, visually reminding the public of the channel's popular new programming. A pair of AS-24i focused sound speakers mounted above the billboard projected directional audio onto a targeted area of the sidewalk – all the way from the rooftop."
"The projected sound produced by the Audio Spotlight speakers was a woman's whispering voice that startled and entertained passersby with spooky and suggestive messages such as "Who's that?," "Who's there?," and "It's not your imagination." To those within the narrow coverage area, the sounds seemed as though they were being whispered right next to their heads, while others standing right next to them heard nothing, thanks to the focused sound beam of the Audio Spotlight."
I had a somewhat close friend who had a very sudden and dramatic psychotic break that he disclosed to me while it was happening. He believed that people in his family were conspiring to entrap him in a criminal conspiracy, and was in a panic. This progressed further over a few days until I was no longer able to continue to try to talk him through it. There were a number of details to his beliefs that made it absolutely clear it was not real. Unfortunately I was not able to get through to him to get help (as far as I know) and the people I tried to connect him with were very unhelpful.
The reason I’m sharing this is that I think people tend to believe that people are exclusively either “crazy” or “not crazy” as an ontological property of the person, but as many other anecdotes here show, it really can happen to people randomly. Some are able to get help and recover. Some aren’t.
While I definitely wish there was someone I could have called who could go give him real aid and assistance, I also know that this could have been a terrifying, trust-breaking ordeal and possibly could have even led to violence and imprisonment, or other serious consequences.
People like to talk about “public mental health resources” but unless you’re willing to sic what amounts to police armed with tranquilizers on people who very well may (reasonably?) not wish to be subdued against their will, it’s not really that simple.
Definitely a difficult and fraught subject. I don’t think the answer is to validate psychosis however.
304 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadBut first do you have evidence, and second why do they get in that state instead of realizing some people do bad things?
There is plentiful evidence for this if you know where to look. For example, Travis King was a U.S. military official who tried to defect to North Korea. His reason for this was that he was targeted by (presumably) psychopaths in the military for his skin color. I am not saying that defecting to North Korea is the answer (it isn't), but my theory would at least provide a rational reason why one would think that would solve his problems.
> and second why do they get in that state instead of realizing some people do bad things?
It is the result of being targeted by psychopaths. The brain can adapt: if one is being targeted, the brain looks for or will generate reasons for this.
"Military official" is not how one generally describes people with the rank of Private.
Even the North Koreans didn't want him, despite the typical propaganda coup "US soldier defects to Best Korea" it would've been. They sent him back.
I am honestly skeptical of this claim. This seems to be the go-to excuse for scapegoating: just claim the individual was in possession of illegal material and then no one has the right to defend her!
> King pleaded guilty to assault and destruction of public goods stemming from an October incident, and on Feb. 8 the Seoul Western District Court fined him 5 million won ($4,000), according to a copy of the ruling reviewed by Reuters.
We can either believe "he got in trouble and did something dumb", or we can believe there was some giant conspiracy against him. Again, even the North Koreans didn't want to keep him; they're about the least likely to go along with a "targeting" by the US government on the planet.
I wasn't permitted to have a modem for awhile, because my parents didn't really want me to have two-way chats with strangers. Yet I was exposed to all kinds of harmful TV and radio. There is truly psychopathic behavior out there which we invite into our homes; we see it distantly, as through a mirror, but it feels innocuous because we can "control" it and switch the channel at will. Or can we?
By college I was surrounded by virtual psychopaths and mentally ill behavior. It was unavoidable. There was fantasy role-playing, AD&D, furries, sitcoms, crazy websites and forums, Slashdot, Usenet, just infested with psychopaths and bizarre malicious ideas.
By your own admittance you've heard voices in your head throughout your life, but you think people playing D&D or watching Friends are somehow mentally ill psychopaths with "bizarre malicious ideas"?
I'm inclined to agree, but I wouldn't single it out to any specific hobby, activity, forum, news-source- though some are definitely more prone to infestation.
Yes, many bizarre and malicious ideas have been introduced to me and my classmates through Nethack play and merely observing role-players going at it in a violent, dangerous fantasy world of their own design.
For autists and others who find it difficult to separate fantasy/reality, or understand metaphor and allegory, we tend to mistakenly impose fantastic ideas upon the mundane world around us.
For all the hours I invested in DOOM 2, I'm not actually a US Marine, I don't carry firearms, human passengers on the train are not Beholders or Revenants, and when someone leaves a coat behind, that's not an Armor Pak for you to grab!
...but I can still distinctly hear his grunts and screams as the demons injure him...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16737381/
There is definitely such a thing as schizotypy but you've never heard of it because it is not as fashionable as autism and definitely not as fashionable as having autism and ADHD and dyslexia. Schizotypy may be behind this syndrome
https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...
and may be the reason why I graduated from elementary school the way Ender Wiggin did. (People who noticed there's something a little odd about my HN posts are noticing I have just a touch of "thought disorder", which is much more fundamental, I think, to the schizophrenia spectrum than the auditory hallucinations that get talked about endlessly or the delusions which only troubled me once) So there's a grain of truth in the above comment.
I have often been appalled at how badly people on the schizophrenia spectrum get cared for.
Right now I have a friend who is almost certainly schizophrenic (no professional diagnosis) but doesn't believe she has a problem who lives with an elderly person who is a bit of a bleeding heart who's had a stroke and may have to evict her because he can't live with her anymore. She comes out to our place to visit but has a hard time staying more than 24 hours because cell phones don't work at our spot and she can't indulge in her pastime of blowing up people's phones. (e.g. she can easily leave 10+ messages in a few hours on our machine again) If she cooks she'll season our cast iron pans with 1/2 a cup of oil, won't believe that we're really going to eat all the apples we have on hand and will make apple cobbler as soon as we're not watching her)
Another friend had schizoaffective disorder (my diagnosis, she never got a professional diagnosis despite multiple hospitalizations) and had bad enough thought disorder that it would take her a few hours to smoke her first cigarette of the day despite being badly addicted to cigs. She lived with us for a year and a half until one night her dad tried to wake her up after she'd been awake for days and she freaked, threatened my wife with a knife, and then ran into the night. She took her own life a year and a half after that.
Because I am the way I am I find people like that easier to understand and live with than most people would, in fact on some level "normal" people seem stranger to me.
Now let's be clear: someone who hears phantom malicious voices, someone who takes drugs and hallucinates false things, someone whose voices impel them to cause harm: those are pathologies and should be addressed. "Hallucination" carries a negative connotation, a judgement that head-voices are invariably bad, and can't be true, because "empirical science" entirely denies the supernatural and the metaphysical reality of head-voices.
But someone who hears good voices, someone hearing voices who encourage them, or tell them to do the right thing, or calming and comforting voices: that is natural, and that should never be discouraged.
I've experienced the entire gamut of these, and I discovered that my solution is to begin to discern the good ones, to hearken to them, to obey the good voices, and little by little, they overpower the malicious types, and I'm able to withstand onslaughts of not only evil voices, but actual derision and mockery from real people near me. The voices I hear, they've come to me because of what I've heard, who I've listened to, in the past; they're composites, they're archetypes, they're echoes and memories, but they were once based in reality, and uttered by real human beings near me.
Racism and prejudice is real, and the actual tangible hatred I imbibed for decades, in reality and on the Internet, were the genesis of evil and malicious voices in my head. So: medicate all voices away and tranquilize my thoughts? We'd throw out the baby with the bathwater. Why shouldn't I hear good, encouraging voices and obey them?
The mental health system can encourage people to return to rational thought and be grounded in reality. Mentally ill people can learn appropriate behavior, it can be modeled and imitated, and people can be trained, even to discern voices and learn how to ignore or discount the bad ones.
If someone feels stalked, harrassed, targeted by technological means, the most important thing they need is reassurance and respite from that paranoia. They need to be disconnected from the ENVIRONMENTS which foster fear, hatred, and distrust. They need to be extracted from echo chambers that spread F.U.D. because it will rub off on them and drive them to harmful and hateful actions against themselves, or other innocents. Drug 'em if you must, but remember that drugs are band-aids, and it hurts to rip off a band-aid.
But the point is, it's a completely different experience to hallucinate a voice, for me, than to just hear the internal jibber jabber in my head.
I'm not sure that's natural or desirable. It still leads to a situation where you may be following what you consider to be 'good voices' to do things that aren't necessarily in your best interest.
But yes, with therapy and rehabilitation, I trust my brain, and other faculties, more than I used to, and we can indeed employ methods that would falsify those judgements, so that they can be proved good and correct empirically, rather than just feelings or impulses.
2. You may not be crazy, but you're wildly optimistic. 10-20 years? Maybe. 1-2? I really doubt it.
Personally I'm not convinced that the vacuum left behind by going to church (and having a community) has been well replaced yet and instead our collective religious tendencies have been steered towards identity politics and idol worship by social media instead.
I'm not religious in the slightest but my mother is a harmless Christian and when I see how a little bit of faith anchors her and make sense of a world that is completely unrecognisable to the one she was born into (she didn't even have a fridge let alone an iPhone lol) I am always reminded to stay humble and open minded
― Friedrich Nietzsche
The truth is that we're never going to know what really happened to Friedrich Nietzsche.
As for the horse story, apparently it comes from a tabloid paper that was never exactly known for their reputability. The "gossipy" undertones become very clear when you read the article for yourself.
This isn't quite right.
The true version of what you're getting at is, "at some point every practice was useful to someone", but just because someone or someones found it useful doesn't necessarily mean it solved a real problem for society overall.
E.g. men have dominated over women in almost all pre-modern societies (and even in modern ones there's often a good ways to go), because that was useful and advantageous to men, who also had the physical strength to enforce such a social division. It was never truly about "solving a problem".
Sure, in some cases religious practices may have helped with a problem, but in other cases (e.g. indulgences) they were just about gathering or retaining power for the religion, which was certainly useful for the leaders within said religion.
European powers were dominant over other countries and colonized them due to superior weaponry and organized armies that used said weaponry, but that doesn't mean every European leader was a soldier toting around a gun themselves.
In any case power capture is just another one of those axiomatic things of the human condition for me. After all, democracy and capitalism is being contorted into neo-feudalism in our own lifetimes.
My point was that even though they seem silly to nonbelievers, I suspect a lot of people would probably be happier spending an hour a day singing hymns and reciting prayers. It turns out singing can be a pretty good mind-body hack for making you feel happier. And prayers are a pretty good presence of mind hack for regaining focus
For sure organisations find themselves in ruts or local maxima. And things like virtue signalling exist but when practices like prayer, meditation, chanting and singing exist across religions maybe it is worth trying to understand what ordinary people derive from the practices. Whether that be a sense of belonging, presence of mind or the ability to make peace with the cruelty and randomness of life.
It rubs you up the wrong way that I axiomatically assume that all religious practices were useful in general but my point is just like being healthily skeptical about things and challenging the status quo is good. So too, is looking at things you don't understand and starting from the supposition that it is beneficial UNTIL you can prove in your own mind with all certainty that it isn't and then feel free for you to do your own thing.
Are those two approaches in contradiction? Yes that's a good thing, it's healthy to hold opposing views in tension.
If we continually ignore the lessons of the past we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes and relearn the same lessons.
Religion ultimately propagated because people preferred it to what they had before. Sure bad people have manipulated and exploited those tendencies in people but that still happens even without "religion" - see crypto. At least most faiths ostensibly revolve around a set of morals and virtue. The establishment has also been tempered by their own success and and are being forcefully dragged into the 21st century by their need to stay relevant. When I attend my usual annual Midnight Mass CoE service in the UK, the biblical elements are so watered down it's mostly just about being a good person.
Tldr people who are skeptical might benefit from being more charitable just like people who are gullible could benefit from being more skeptical.
It was a literal cult I’ve read like hundreds of articles and regrets of members and experienced first hand discussions that are manipulative and withholding information and rationalising political stuff with scripture that anyone would just have to experience to get why it’s manipulative and exploitative, it won’t come across online as easily
So it’s a lot of research into the brainwashing funnel of a type of cult that I was talking about and not religion at large
Sometimes animals just do be like that, since it doesn't harm their fitness, and it seems likely to me that the same is true for most features of religions.
For example it is suddenly all the rage to study the health benefits of breathing or meditation. But this has been common knowledge amongst yoga and qigong practitioners for 1000+ years. If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there. Sure, a 1000 year old model has the wrong explanations, but all models are wrong some are useful.
Empiricism gives us so much false confidence when we often still can't measure many things and often don't know what to measure. Especially so when real true reproducible science is hard, slow, and expensive.
So for me, starting from a prior "maybe people do do this thing for a reason even if they themselves have forgotten why" can be useful
Okay, but there's also "common knowledge" amongst practitioners of yoga or qigong or other traditional practices that's complete bullshit. There's good reason to not just accept that traditional practices must be smart automatically.
> If you are scientifically minded, a lot of the explanations of how qigong works are hard to reconcile but if you actually try it earnestly you'd realise there's something there.
I'm guessing they're less "hard to reconcile" and more "completely made up".
We were perfectly able to use fire (and the Romans even had a prototype of the steam engine) long before Lavoisier had a working model of gases and stoichiometry.
The model for what qigong is and what qi is can be wrong while still being helpful. Having worked on it I'd argue that it is a mental model / visualisation technique for honing your body awareness and mind-body connection. Visualisation techniques proliferate everywhere. I've been taught visualisations in swimming, martial arts, yoga and singing - so who cares if qigong is "completely made up" if the visualisation training achieved the goal.
Only just recently in some self practice on the piano I was trying to achieve a specific multi-voicing effect on a tiny passage and have practiced this single bar at least 5+ hours. I finally had a breakthrough when I stopped trying to control the individual velocity and depth of my presses and just imagined I was whispering the secondary voice.
I'm not whispering anything on that piano and my fingers are still just pressing keys. Its as made up as when I imagine I'm playing woodwind instruments during a Mozart adagio but it still accomplishes the effect.
This is all airy fairy but my point is that actually my experience has taught me that for certain things, especially where the body is involved trying to think in mechanics or vertebrae and muscles is a lot less useful than imagining you're Mount Everest peaking above the clouds reaching for the sun.
A fun game to play is trying to guess which organization you are talking about, since there are so many of them all running this exact same business model!
The idea that it's only "stigma" that is the problem is counterproductive. I've heard it a thousand times that "They are no more dangerous than someone without the disease," which is a lie.
We should put more effort into determining underlying causes and definitive therapies rather than massaging away the unpleasant reality.
This is not an uneducated opinion, I work in the field.
I appreciate that not all that hear voices are in danger/a danger, but I don't think it's nearly as normal as you are suggesting.
> Almost all (94%) of homicides were committed by patients who had a history of alcohol or drug misuse and/or who were not in receipt of planned treatment.
Does that ring true?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7745241/
I would expect that a bunch of schizophrenics who have never committed a homicide would have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse in their history. People with less severe symptoms and those getting treatment would be less likely to self medicate.
Finding that a bunch of schizophrenics who have committed a homicide have high rates of drug and alcohol abuse isn't surprising either.
Because drug/alcohol use can impair people's judgement/inhibitions in the best of circumstances it could be a factor in attacks by schizophrenics, but considering that there are vast numbers of people with who take drugs to excess and very few of them commit homicide I wouldn't jump to putting all the blame on the booze and weed. I'd think that it has a lot more to do with severe cases self-medicating and the lack of treatment.
It can easily be true that most murderers are alcoholics/addicts and that psychosis makes people more likely to become murderers. There's really no contradiction here unless you think hearing voices is anywhere near as common as people with drinking problems.
This is only true for us WEIRDos, I believe.
There are many cultures where hearing voices doesn't have such negative connotations. Studies have shown that in ie parts of Africa, India, and South America they have much higher neutral and positive experiences than we do.
For this reason I believe the underlying causes are strongly cultural, rather than inherent.
I'd even go as far as suggesting it's an Abrahamic religion thing - if someone is talking to you in your head, it's kinda bad whether it's God or the Devil.
Sorry, but that sounds dangerous. Attributing mental disorders to external evil sources isn't healthy.
When you are absolutely convinced that someone is out to kill you, it's perfectly reasonable to kill them, first.
I have family that suffers from Schizoaffective Disorder, and they have decided that I was out to kill them. It was absolutely clear (to them) that I was "one of them," and I, quite literally, had no communication with them that could even be slightly confused for hostile.
That can be ... uncomfortable.
I used to believe that god was speaking to me about how to love and abide by him through songs by Fiona Apple, Chris Cornell, whatever the hell I was listening to at the time. I would tell the techs in the place I was at to listen to the songs and I tried to convince them it was god, to which they would respond it was not.
There was a period of time where I was non-compliant with my medication because they didn't actually work. I stopped taking them altogether and I went into the deepest psychotic episode I'd ever had till that point. I would listen to things like Cannibal Corpse or Morbid Angel and get so freaked out I'd run to the bathroom and pray. Mind you, I had been awake for three straight days at the point, while going with 10 hours of sleep a week, at most. I called Crisis one night and told them there were demons outside of my door and if they could not remove them I was going to jump out of my apartment window. It may sound ridiculous but that was the most fearful I've ever been in my entire life, and I've been through awful awful shit.
Lately, as a middle aged person, my hallucinations have become even weirder. Hallucinating white bubbles that fill my entire vision or feeling like my face is made out of jagged alphabet blocks jutting out of my face.
I am not sure why this happens. I've been dealing with mental illness since I was at least 9, which is when I started to hear voices. By 11 I was crying everyday after school. By 12 the mania started to become real and then the hallucinations my freshman year that led to my first suicide attempt at 14. That was the year I got diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder which has morphed into Schizoaffective Disorder.
Brains are wild, wacky, unreliable little mounds of fat and water, no?
I sincerely wish you the very best.
The world in which no one does in fact control anything, starting from the way how one's mind and body works all the way to global and cosmic scale, fails to give any sort of safety or control whatsoever, and instead puts a greater burden of responsibility on the person thinking those thoughts.
It's also much easier to think that you're targeted by someone, because then you automatically become a protagonist of some story, and therefore special by definition. It's much, much simpler and easier than the idea of being a yet-another person with a partial disability due to malfunctioning organs responsible for your internal model of reality.
Humans have a really strong drive for finding meaning where there is none, even if it means dreaming it up.
This succinctly sums up slot machine addiction (RNG is God and the payout schedule is the minister).
"I began to see TIs like Luca as a group of individuals who are caught between two competing narratives.... The second narrative – the TI narrative – is that if you’re having these sorts of experiences, nothing is wrong with your mind. Your perceptual and reasoning abilities are functioning exactly the way they’re designed to. Unfortunately, you are the victim of gang-stalking or electronic harassment. Despite your suffering, however, there is hope: you can band together with other TIs in a global movement to expose your attackers and dismantle their techniques."
This isn't a value-neutral belief. It has consequences and some of those aren't pretty.
It's also tough, because I realize that all of us are somewhat responsible for this. The proliferation of technology, advertisement and security marketing has kinda destroyed the concept of being alone. People who suffer unjustly, or who are insecure/anxious about their environment can easily fall down a rabbit hole that never ends. It's the product of indiscriminate profiling and constant dubious marketing of "security" that people become disillusioned and paranoid with tech. The part that really fucks me up is, what if they're just expressing the most rational, conscious human reaction to the information superhellscape we all share? What if we only think the water's fine because we felt it boil slowly?
To me that is every bit as insane as reptilians.
I don't believe in a god in the clouds and I kno evolution exists and the universe is billions of years old and still it must come from or exist somewhere and have something or someone as an origin.
Nothing comes from nothing and nothing happens for no reason - to believe otherwise is a giant leap of faith.
Thus, you should start worshipping me.
But you won't, because you don't actually believe in these small jumps. You want to believe, you try to believe, but you don't. The doubt is there, and it is a healthy doubt (else you would be worshipping me), but it brings you shame.
No, I haven't - you're implying a binary choice where there's no such thing. There's an option to say that I don't know and perhaps I simply don't need to know that in order to have a satisfying life.
The answer "everything just spontaneously appeared" is something I perceive as meaning-seeking, just like "a god created it all". To claim a god of some sort exists is the same as to claim a god doesn't, or reptilians do, or don't - empty claims based on beliefs. To use such beliefs - no matter their shape - in order to create meaning, is just attempting to deal with the idea that meaning is a man-made construct and it doesn't come from higher above.
> We find that while there is much that is similar, there are notable differences in the kinds of voices that people seem to experience.
In a California sample, people were more likely to describe their voices as intrusive unreal thoughts; in the South Indian sample, they were more likely to describe them as providing useful guidance; and in our West African sample, they were more likely to describe them as morally good and causally powerful.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26349837/
I've wondered if there is some sort of feedback loop where western culture associates hallucination with possession, while other cultures may see hallucinations in a more positive light, or even as a sign that you are some sort of shaman.
Believing voices in our head are causally powerful (as in deities) really reminds me of the theory of consciousness appearing from the collapse of the bicameral mind. Here's a good introduction to this idea: https://youtu.be/lgnMyF-o0sQ
Seriously, it's something I've never thought about, but once you hear "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" you kinda know what the theory is and it makes sense.
They did say that he had something there. AFAIK they didn't say that he spawned a whole field of research, though.
I assume the same. It's just that there is something nice about a theory that basically tells you the core of what you need to know from the name of it.
"We're making a new movie. It's called 'Snakes on a Plane' "
"Oh? What's it about?"
Consciousness might not be as essential to the human experience as is generally believed now a days. What percentage of the day are we really engaged in conscious rational thought anyways? And is it really what makes us human, or do subconscious processes play a much bigger role in the human experience than reason?
I have bipolar disorder and I accidentally ingested LSD at a festival by kissing someone who had just taken a tab on their tongue. I wasn’t aware that this could happen, yet it happened.
The next day I woke up with a Voice. It appeared to me to be the voice of God. It was very difficult to go against it but I could negotiate. It told me things that it couldn’t possibly know, like that I should ask a stranger for a cigarette so I could later get a towel when I needed it.
It seemed to have powers of foreshadowing and it would seemingly tell me things before they happened.
It was also a trickster and it would play cruel jokes on me. After a while it became hard for me to take.
At the same music festival I met a lady who would make songs just by looking at you. I carefully realised that she was likely in something like a permanent psychedelic state, which I had been before due to my bipolar condition. I asked her this directly and she confirmed it. She said I was one of the few people who could see it!
I had purchased a ticket to her retreat. So a month after the festival I went to her retreat. It was a very difficult time and the voice was giving me a lot of trouble.
I went to the song lady. I told her about my condition (the voice had told me to go and tell her!). She thought about it and said ok, I will help you, and you cannot do the retreat.
She then did a session with me where she told me where she saw the entity - she called it a “walk in” spiritual entity, and said that because I’m very “open” with my bipolar, adding the LSD made me even more open, it happened that a “walk in” sneaked inside.
She said she saw the entity down my legs, and kidneys, and she helped me expel it. She then taught me I could “close the door” to prevent it getting in.
My condition was immediately much better.
When she expelled the voice from my body, she spoke exactly like the voice spoke, telling me that the entity wanted to leave, didn’t really fight the expulsion, using the same tone of voice and words that I’d gotten used that the Voice would use. It was inexplicable and amazing.
Now I still have a voice, but it’s a whisper in comparison. It tells me things, still seems to have some ability to warn me about the future (it’s debatable how much of this is connecting the dots later of course, but it has done some odd things, like warned me I wouldn’t go to certain places).
Since the experience is not as intense, and I’ve lived enough to realise it’s not omnipotent or always right, I roll with it.
I have no scientific explanation for what happened to me.
I was so so lucky I was right next to one when it happened to me.
It was like someone doing a spot on Jack Nicholson impression, but Jack Nicholson was an invisible man in my head. How can one explain that?
She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.
(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.
Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.
Can you elaborate? I tried to keep a neutral tone.
People can mix up exact details and whether two things feel the same in that amount of time, especially if they recently took drugs.
> Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.
Look, you specifically asked for a skeptical explanation. You're right that it's not a disproof, but it does mean your experience isn't particularly convincing as an anecdote.
It is not remotely a stretch to attribute "I recognized this woman's voice as someone else's voice" as just a run-of-the-mill fault of perception and memory. Especially when the alternative at hand is apparently something supernatural (or, at least, new physics).
Just because our current understanding hasn’t got all the answers doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, that’s the way I see it.
I think some things that we think of as supernatural now will have an “explanation” later. How much later I don’t know.
Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays.
Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).
I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.
This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment.The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).
The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is.
The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.
You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.
You're focused on unknown mechanisms for easily verifiable observations, while my focus is on the (lack of) proof that the song lady actually observed anything at all. For all I know she just listened to what you said and went along with it.
To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.
The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.
But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.
To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.
The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.
And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.
> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.
I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.
At this point I have no idea, but it's an interesting hypothesis to your question. If dark energy exists, and we never figure out exactly what it is, is it possible that when we take LSD we're actually perceiving it, or some equivalent part of the universe that's non-visible?
I mean if we have non-visible dark energy and dark matter, who is to say that when we solve dark matter/energy, we don't again go back to figuring out that "another 90%" of the universe is detectable but unexplainable? What if the borders of our knowledge will always remain incomplete?
> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much
Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.
At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.
> At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have.
No, we don't. I'll even refer you to an expository article that describes some studies about what you are probably alluding to, and you can let me know how you think it adequately accounts for the parent's story [0].
Spoiler: it requires someone taking the effort to implant the memories (a pretty significant caveat worth mentioning, I would think), and I've certainly never seen it applied to some ongoing thing like a disembodied voice with apparent agency.
But even where memory implantation is relatively accepted ala coercive police interrogations, the mechanism in the brain is unknown. Was a new memory implanted or was a subject simply gaslit into remembering the conversation with the interrogator? Where in the brain is that belief encoded? How can it be simulated? Did the parent never experience a voice then? They just have a continuously updating memory being implanted by some researcher? You clearly haven't thought this through, so don't be so quick to shut it down.
The reality is that none of us here have a good explanation for the parent's experience -- brains are barely understood at all. Your skepticism to the parent's interpretation is fine, but your attempt to discredit with a blanket cop out statement that lacks any mechanism or reproducibility on the scale of the parent's story only serves to let you keep pretending like you know everything.
[0] https://www.bxscience.edu/ourpages/auto/2013/10/5/59413507/F...
At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.
Practically though, there could be problems if the research interferes with a big industry, or disrupts 'well established practices'. Or if it damages the professional reputations of important people, or clashes with 'belief perseverance', or makes powerful people look bad, or makes the university likely to lose funding, or goes against the current cancellation third rail, etc, etc.
There's no shortage of historical examples: tobacco health research, Semmelweis, plate tectonics (!), lockdown cost benefit analyses, etc.
There was very little 'science' in outlawing cannabis research for decades. Same goes for MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc, all with massive therapeutic potential that has been held back for decades by politics & industry.
Point being that it's entirely possible for the perceived sequence of events as described in the anecdote above to be true as experienced by that person, without the need for anything supernatural going on.
I would be curious to know why you think that scientific explanations will get more, not less, supernatural in the next 20 years.
EDIT: dug up the article https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad
Good read, and it also parallels discussions in mental health forums where people with dissociative mental health issues generally recommend against meditation, or at least some types of meditation (e.g. walking meditiation is ok, watching your observer/stillness/awareness types are not).
A. It’s psychosis
B. It’s a spiritual entity that walked into me, just as the song lady said.
C. I should continue taking my medication.
D. I should also take care of myself spiritually and accept there are things I cannot understand completely
I honestly cannot say if it’s just a part of me. At one point I thought so, I thought it was my “intuition” embodied and removed from myself. But the voice played a trick on me and told me to trust someone I shouldn’t have. And then I realised A. I can’t trust it blindly and B. It doesn’t know everything. So C. It’s just saying whatever the hell it wants to say. It has opinions.
However, further proof of its bizarre nature is its continuing ability to predict the future. Granted, it’s much inferior to the original Voice, but it’s still there and it’s still bizarre. For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.
As far as driving me insane, I don’t have a great answer. I deal with it day to day. The effect of the voice under my bipolar medication is subdued. I know now that if I raise my medication I can make it even less intense. It’s just part of my condition now, and I fight it when I need to and roll with it if I don’t.
I know it’s perfectly fascinating and odd and even I would have a hard time believing in me 5 years ago.
For fun you could also keep track of other related data. How far fetched the prediction is. How confident the voice is. The time frame of the prediction. Just an idea...
The voice always speaks in the same tone.
Predictions are usually something I want to do or am planning to do. Plans it usually tells me as soon as they are conceived. Predictions come often when I am making plans, it tells me whether they will work or not.
HOWEVER, to answer your question, such an exercise could be totally futile as in actuality it changes its mind a lot. Sometimes it tells me something I intend to do won't work, without divulging why. I try it anyway and it kinda works, and I figure out why the point of failure. I fix it, and now the voice tells me it will work now, making the initial prediction kind of moot.
Sometimes something happens and something the voice initially thought was a great idea it now says will be an absolute failure. By that time I am often committed so I tell it there's no choice now, we can only keep going, and it kinda agrees and we do the thing anyway. Sometimes the voice is just plain wrong about things.
The predictions aren't so much predictions as they are opinions. Also, studying it with too hard a lens seems to bring out the worse in the condition, so I avoid it.
It would, however, require a lot of commitment from the patient and willingness to face the condition and even make the symptoms worse. And, considering how crude our tools are at this stage, wouldn’t likely yield much useful information.
You aren’t alone friend. This type of thing happens to me regularly enough, and with an unlikely & surprising amount of detail, that it is impossible to write off as coincidence and too specific & detailed to be some kind of subconscious “impression” rising the conscious level.
I don’t hear a voice though, when it happens it just appears in my mind fully realized and I feel a “certainty” in my solar plexus region.
We have many models of reality available to us (whether we're talking "statistical mechanics" or "quantum chromodynamics" or "chakra energies"). Categorizing them as "True" or "False" is not very useful (is Newtonian physics "True" or "False"?). Rather, we should be content with judging our models by whether they are _useful_, and that judgement must be made contextually.
Having a mechanistic view of your experiences grounded in neuroscience is useful: It suggests that you should take your medication and that probably helps.
Having a spiritual understanding of your relationship to your experiences caused you to do things that helped you and made your life better. Does that mean that model is "True"? Who cares. It's sort of a meaningless question. It was a useful model, and that's all there is.
Somewhat relatedly, I was quite influenced by this (unfinished) work: https://metarationality.com/
Also, I've seen and experienced too much to just say "it's not a spiritual being". I have compelling evidence that indeed, something was passed between me and the Shaman Song Lady that day, even though it would be impossible to prove.
Before the voice did you have an inner monologue.
If so how did it differ? How does the current voice differ from the inner monologue?
I pondered whether that was it, that the LSD had just shattered my psyche in a way that I was hearing voices when they were once part of me. However for many reasons I don’t think that anymore, not 100% anyway.
Also, the “resolution” at the end that one might (meaninglessly) apply the word placebo to isn’t the interesting part IMO. What is interesting is seeing where our understanding of the human brain fits/predicts or fails to fit experiences like this.
I am an academic PI, and my research on brain energy metabolism is close enough to what we are talking about here that I don't need to look on wikipedia to tell you our current level of understanding doesn't offer anything close to a mechanistic explanation for experiences like this.
Some of my research has been inspired by thinking about peoples surprising anecdotal experiences and stories- and then investigating what that might imply about the underlying biology.
You seem to subscribe to a kind of scientism where genuine scientific curiosity and frank discussion about the gaps in our understanding is unacceptable. Your combination of being completely ignorant and condescending at the same time is awful.
I am generally very open minded and curious about peoples claims of supernatural and spiritual experiences. I believe it all has understandable mechanistic biological explanations, but I am very curious what they may be.
The world is not as the scientific rational model would have one believe. These substances show that indigenous cultures are thousands of years ahead of western society when it comes to understanding consciousness.
For anyone on the outside reading this; I can recommend The BBC's LSD The Beyond Within as a starting point.
It's not the world that is not rational, it's humans' mind. Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.
As humans we experience the world through our six sense doors e.g. eyes, ears, tongue, nose, touch and mind.
To try and separate the world from our minds is non trivial. It is our very mind that allows us to perceive the world.
> Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.
The matrices you describe are the sense doors.
I didn't imply that anything necessitates a higher power. If you are happier to exclude the notion I described from your world view that's okay. I'm not forcing you to be open minded!
I rather meant the logic gates ;) Or, more seriously, I was talking about the parts of the brain that handle language and reasoning, plus the memory bits.
I’m surprised that you have added “mind” as a sensory system of some kind, next to actual senses (I don’t think it is a sense of any kind on its own). Not sure what you meant, sorry.
Negotiation means bidirectional communication, right? So... have you tried running any tests on that voice?
I mean... I suspect everyone poked LLMs with a stick to some extent, probing their capabilities. I could be wrong, but I think it must be extremely natural for any human to interrogate anything unknown that exhibits any signs of potential consciousness. I cannot chat with my inner monologue as if it would be an independent entity (it simply isn't - just the same me), and this sounds like your Voice presented a personality and even an agency of its own.
It told me once that I would make love to a beautiful woman once. I joined a song circle and helped this really beautiful woman build her song. It then told me "there's a lot of different ways of making love". That one was not the worse, but it kept teaching me lessons through weird paradoxes like that, to break me open and rebuild me.
It also told me once that my tent was going to get robbed at the festival, unless I rushed in and got to it rapidly. I almost ran there, and everything was fine. It just laughed in my face, and said something cruel I don't even remember now.
Non-religious people were escaping pious people. But unbeknownst to either group, their God was a quantifiable being that could only inhabit higher order organisms experiencing a trauma, and then stay inside their minds, and help it interact in our plane of existence.
Might be some merit to this idea, given the shared experiences many psychedelic users have. Frequently there are some entities that were always there, just not perceptible.
I think it's possible, let's say that the spiritual hypothesis is true and I took in a spiritual being. The Shaman's description was that I am already "open" from bipolar, and I was "too open" after I took LSD, letting a walk-in sneak inside.
I have a lot of trauma, and I mean serious abuse, coming in from childhood. That I believe is correlated with me having bipolar.
So my idea is as follows - we know that the edges of mental illness like mine can be caused by trauma, often times because the mind is "protecting you" from the abuse in some extreme way that leads eventually to mental illness. In a way, the mind is running away from the traumatic event, it for instance often erases the trauma years from memory (something that's happened to me). So the mind is protecting you by removing you from reality.
The thing is - we say the mind is removing you and running away but to where?
My perception now is the mind "escapes" into the other world. The spiritual, mushroom, LSD world we perceive and learn from when under psychedelics. That means people with mental illness, like me, get to have psychedelic experiences naturally (my manic episodes pretty much match descriptions of LSD trips, and they don't go away, so I can stay in them for a week+). That means our mind, the mind of those heavily traumatized, is already "in between" worlds.
Having your foot in the other world, the Psilocybin-psychedelic-spiritual world, means you're protected somehow. Somehow, it actually works. Your mind knows what it's doing. Your mind is able to enter a psychedelic or latent psychedelic state to protect itself from the real world being too dark, too grim, and too horrible to think about/remember. In one hand, you could say it explains bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. if the mind is just protecting itself from true horror.
"Normal" people, or neuronormal people, who haven't experienced a lot of trauma, then find it immensely therapeutic to experience the Psilocybin / psychedelic / spiritual world for a few moments, thanks to the chemical changes of taking LSD or your drug of choice. And then they came back.
What happened to deeply traumatized people through trauma happens to neuronormal folks artificially through the introduction of a chemical change. But that chemical change happens naturally in heavily traumatized people, who had to use the same mechanisms to escape reality when they were young, thus "breaking their brain" a bit under conventional psychology. So it could be the mind knows enough to break into a psychedelic state for self protection, which is fascinating to think about!
But when someone like ME takes psychedelics however, someone loaded with trauma, we go too far and we don't come back quite the same. I suspect that explains why some people benefit immensely from LSD and Psilocybin for trauma, coming back healed, and why some people like me, it will just induce a psychotic episode.
Basically regular people get to do a shallow visit to the psychedelic-spiritual world, while people with heavy trauma go WAY TOO DEEP and lose themselves. That's what we call a psychotic episode.
That's because people with trauma are already one foot in the psychedelic world, or they have to go way too deep to find the origins of their trauma, and they "break". The sad reality is that shallow trauma is easier to treat, even in the psychedelic state, while deep trauma might just lead to a psychotic episode.
I have no idea whether this holds up or not, it's been something I think about ever since that experience.
My first two years after a hero LSD trip had me trying to parse the extended reality. I don’t have BPD or any voices so my experience is more recreational than yours. Now I just appreciate it without a need for explanation. I’m open to more research on the matter, but not holding my breath or speculating on it. I just like that so many other people have experienced it, and that I can tell they have.
So my first bipolar psychotic episode (or psychedelic episode, which I prefer) was in 2017. January February.
Then the LSD trip was in August 2023. Last year. It was funny because I went to that festival really wanting to try psychedelics in some safe way if I found out how.
I always felt like people who had done them and had good trips seemed to know something I really wanted to know, if that makes sense?
I think Ram Dass described it well. Some people after LSD look like they “get it”, and if you haven’t done it you wonder what the heck “it” is!
So the fact that I got a low dose of LSD through kissing someone, it was like the universe was teasing me and trying to both enlighten me and give me some advice - “here’s how it feels” and “it’s really dangerous for you”. It was a beautiful, transcendent and violent experience.
Was this before or after the mud ;)
Yeah there is something to appreciate about the journey
I went to the mud everyday brother
I’ve never felt so cleansed
(I’m assuming we are talking about a certain event that happens every 2 years in southern Europe!)
Also, trauma and drugs could be two of several ways of becoming open to the other world. Another could be genetic. Or there could be multiple other worlds or different categories of spiritual beings, some people susceptible to some and others to others.
Bipolar/schizophrenia are often very genetic, they run in families.
No, I don't "hear it using my ears" in the conventional sense. So I've spoken to other people who hear voices in my podcast about Bipolar condition (let me know if you want a link). The voices often have a definite physical location, even though they are not there. One person told me it was like two people behind them in the queue for a movie. She would overhear them behind her. Another person told me it would sound like was coming from the apartment above. Again sounded very real.
For me its like in the right lower abdomen. It emanates from there.
Because of this I never confuse with a person.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004180/
>Two homogeneous subgroups of patients were defined based on the hallucination spatial location: patients with only outer space hallucinations (N = 12) and patients with only inner space hallucinations (N = 15). Between-group differences were then assessed using 2 complementary brain morphometry approaches: voxel-based morphometry and sulcus-based morphometry. Convergent anatomical differences were detected between the patient subgroups in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ).
That's for you specifically, but in the general case, it is not always easy to know if the voice came from a real person or not, right?
If the source of the Voice is your own brain then I assume the things it tells you are based on your own life experiences, is that right? Has the Voice ever given you any insights on a problem you are working on? Like for example things come to some people in a dream, so I assume the Voice can give you new insights too? Does the Voice usually only say things on certain topics, or category of topics? Or can it be on any topic, just like dreams?
The cure is explainable - an authority telling you something about your mental state that changes it is hypnotherapy. It helps to write it out that way. It's just someone suggesting you do something and then you agree to do it. The difference is you don't feel like you agreed.
Recursively, some people occasionally end up with stuck habits from trying hypnosis that they don't "actually want" (ie consciously), and one thing that works to fix this is saying to yourself "that's just my imagination and I can stop if I want to."
I interpret as "You were in an amenable state (consciously and subconsciously) for her to rewrite your software".
Edit: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind (thank you for sharing your story):
A) You seem fairly neutral / Stoic about this entire experience, and it was clearly huge and transformative at a deep level. Do you perceive this as having a net positive or negative impact on your life?
B) Do you feel you are able to empathise with 'prophets' through the ages better than most? Not to single out particular prophets, but in general those with the Voice of God that wholly leant into to it rather than managing it (and then preached/spread their words)
A. Both.
I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.
However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.
I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.
There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.
The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.
B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.
You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.
Oh this is so true--everyone thinks they're either demons or artifacts of your imagination. Thanks for sharing your story. These voices could be real entities that we don't understand or it could be figments of our brains which we also don't understand, yet everyone is so sure it's option B. But the point is, we understand neither, so how do we even know what the difference between the two is? Thinking in terms of materialism doesn't help.
https://open.spotify.com/show/2RgP7lRoyBzz6ATlTT4lG5
Episodes 3 and 4 both have people who heard voices in their past, and their descriptions are very interesting.
I suspect I have something similar to yours, but on a much, much lower degree : a "voice" that tells me things with an opinion of its own.
Well, the way it manifests for me, is that it is not a voice. More like, I can ask myself questions and my body (more often my head) will react in a binary way. Like just saying yes or no. It is useful for Tarot, which it pushes me to take certain cards or not and make divination fun for me and others around.
It does not know the future. It changes its opinion. It says it does not want to cause me harm and so far it hadn't, but because it changes its opinion I don't believe it 100%. It seems to "prefer" things from others. But it is not me. It seems that it "reacts" faster than me, which brings me to think that it's some sort of intuition or "id" or whatever.
Personally, I live with it through the concept of Daemon, like the one Socrates had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon But it is just a binary one.
Also, funnily, I asked it if it had a name. It said "no". I asked it if it wanted a name. It said "no". So there's that. It reminds me of Venom in the recent movies, minus the "eating people" part.
In countries with women’s and children’s rights, the space of acceptable shamanic behavior is suddenly a lot narrower
Maybe kinda in some circles? I suspect almost none of the tech-worker urban liberals who are the majority on HN would embrace that as a parenting notion. Even among military veterans, your phrasing would likely sound a bit off the mark. They would generally see the call as being about protecting other people and serving their country.
To address your second sentence, most people see a big difference in morality between "Protect the innocent from people who would harm them" and "Harm the innocent".
[1] obviously there will always be outliers here but if we're exclusively considering 21st century America, I feel confident wagering that the amount of religious people who would take Abraham seriously is statistically insignificant, and similar to the amount of nonreligious people who would take him seriously. Also I'm specifically referring to how third parties react to Abraham nearly murdering his son, I don't think it's fair to hold Abraham himself to the same standards as long as we're assuming that he is suffering a mental health crisis.
Yes, it's called Christianity.
What's distinctive about modern Western culture isn't its traditional religions.
Western Christianity was primarily spread through imperialism and colonialism, and thus implemented in such a way that native traditions and cultures were either recontextualized within the Christian paradigm or else purged. The political and financial incentives involved in the spread of Christianity can't be ignored, as they formed the framework by which Western cultures now tend to interrogate and interpret the supernatural.
Within that framework, hallucinations and visions can either mark one as possessed by God (a prophet) or possessed by Satan (a witch.) There's no affordance for a third way ("shamanism") as might exist in other orthodox Christian traditions because that would undermine the authority of the dominant imperialist hierarchy.
Ah, yes, the ever-present institutional forces conspiring to oppress the agency of independent, freedom-loving, free-thinking people. I wonder where the oppression-focused, conspiratorial, paranoid, anti-authoritarian mindset steeped in the language of violence that is so prevalent in the industrialized West, especially among those with mental disorders, comes from....
And theories of mind (and associated disorders) tend to be culturally based and coded - see the syndrome/myth of the wendigo as an example. And it does matter if your culture is colonized and forcibly assimilated into a religious paradigm that explicitly suppresses "shamanic" practices as heretical. The degree of common cultural recognition of shamanism as an esoteric interpretation of hallucinatory experience in any Western culture is roughly in proportion to the degree to which colonizing powers sought to eradicate, and resisted syncretism with, existing native traditions. Because that just wasn't a thing in Christianity in the West at the time.
I don't know what the snark is supposed to be for, and your comment just seems to descend into a bout of logorrhea. It's difficult for me to know what point you're actually trying to make, or what you're trying to prove or disprove. I guess I did a wrongthink and short circuited your capacity for rational thought? Sorry about that.
But early 2022. I started hearing voices too. They all said horrible stuff.
They claimed that people close to me (family & friends) were planning to kill me & steal my crypto.
They also gave me "evidence" that proved my friend was a professional hitman.
Looking at extremely thin, starving Ethiopians on TV they said "Look! You going to look like that, we shall make sure of it, probably worse"
A bus getting a flat tire and people pulling out tools for changing tires was interpreted by the voices as "murder weapons for bludgeoning me to death"
Fortunately, I got in touch with a psychiatrist and he gave me a combination of pills & injections.
It took about 2 years for the voices to completely disappear.
This set me back so badly financially.
Luckily I now feel very normal and confident that I was 100% delusional. I am healthy now & slowly trying to get my life back together. (been off medication for like 1½ years now)
But here is my piece of advice (as a former victim).
If someone is "hearing voices".
Don't try to call them delusional or "bring them back to reality".
What you should do is listen to them & try to provide protection.
- if they feel like they are going to be poisoned by the waiter, cook for them
- if they feel like they are being stalked, offer protection etc
Normal people my claim that this "feeds" into their delusions. But at least it works in the short term to reduce the paranoia.
There is nothing worse than thinking your wife is going to stab you in your sleep and her trying to be around you longer that she usually does. She should send you pictures/video calls of her in another continent.
So as a previous victim here is a recommended approach.
- in the short term (show empathy)
- in the long term seek psychiatric assistance
P.S
Leave your email if your happy to talk. This is a throw away account
Have some limited training in managing these situations.
Listening and avoiding judgement it keeps the person in crisis talking. As the person in crisis continues to talk and experience connection they begin to move out of crisis mode. Once out of crisis mode then work together to find professional help.
But from Googling about the medication (Risperidone).
It looks like I had bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Yes. I am 100% off meds. It has been about 1½ years now.
I don't hear a single "voice in my head".
Those voices are very different from "thinking" or "talking to yourself".
I am glad I haven't heard them in a long time.
Even had the same experience of checking into the mental ward thinking I was going to be killed, and then just wasn't.
Same age as you, too, born in 93
- I received strange phone calls from languages I didn't understand (it was a Belgian number)
- The voices started telling me that my phone was hacked using NSOs Pegasus by a well connected criminal gang.
- they picked stuff that was real. My spam caller, knowledge of spyware corporations.
- they then used that to build stories and paranoia to the point of delusion.
- at the peak of my delusion. They mimicked voices of people I trusted (mum, friends etc).
- they even claimed that NSO was so advanced that they would summon the cenobites (from Hell Raiser) to come & touture me.
I had a friend who developed similar symptoms, and I was very afraid for my own safety when he started sending me paranoid threats.
For example if my care takers wanted to poison me. Why am I still alive? They have fed me for months?
These people trying to kill me. Why haven't they made their move.
I had actually given up on trying to evade my "enemies" and simply waited for them to kill me. But for months they never made thier move. This made me realise that I was delusional.
This is a good insight for anyone who works or deals with folks that aren't fully moored in their reality by their five senses! I've used the buy-in / reduce anxiety approach in a lot of contexts, be it toddlers to dementia to mentally ill family members to addicts to others with unspecified issues.
Correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't think you're suggesting doing this indefinitely, which isn't sustainable IMHO, but in terms of reducing acute episodes.
I've never heard voices or similar, that I'm aware of.
What I struggle to understand, is what makes these voices so compelling or persuasive, for the lack of better words.
I could understand them being highly annoying, in the same way someone is listening to the radio while you're trying to relax or work.
But what is it that makes it hard to brush aside, that drives people to act on them?
It just seems to be more than "just" hearing voices, at least in many cases.
Not trying to be snarky or anything.
Then there is the thing that they can become so strong and draw so much attention to them, that normal life gets to second place. The surreal world with voices is becoming the reality and is taking over. At that point, it can get dangerous, for yourself, and in some cases, others.
Having such a barrage sure does sound stressful and fatiguing, and I can see how that could get under your skin, so to speak.
I try to put myself in others shoes, but it's so difficult with things like this. So while it's far from experiencing it myself, this helps.
- They know your emotional insecurities in & out. So they know exactly how to hit you where it hurts.
- They make you doubt alot.
I said I hadn't heard voices myself, but as I sit here it seems that's not entirely correct. I have an active inner dialog, and that dialog is as if I had said the words myself. Sometimes I actually do say them out loud.
I could imagine that if there's a disconnect such that my inner dialog did not feel like it was me talking to myself, it would perhaps be like hearing a voice that isn't there.
There's a striking similarity in your and mpol's response though, in how these voices play on fear and insecurities in a negative way. It's a theme that seems highly correlated, based on casual observations.
I guess it's possible others have it in the opposite way, but that doesn't manifest in a "problematic" way so we don't hear about it much.
Again, thanks for sharing.
It's fucked up for the ill and for their beloved ones in every single case. How much I can appreciate what I believe the article tries to "sell", western societies are not capable of accepting schizophrenia as an enlightenment like Hindus do.
Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, became spiritual guide of a few "tech bros" and other famous personalities. But how he, as a psychology professor from Harvard, described his teacher - Neem Karoli Baba - makes me believe that Ram Dass finally got to understand "the thing" that was elusive for him and Timothy Leary at Harvard, by doing crazy macro doses of psychedelics and listening to an "elightened" person quite loosely attached to our reality.
Based on experiences with such people living in western countries, only the folks who accepted the diagnosis and manage their "traits" with medication are living normal lives. Two people have a pattern of ditching their meds twice a year and not telling anyone (they "feel cured", and it happens almost 6 months apart like on a timer in both cases), which causes a repeated pattern of aggression towards the family, causing physical harm to relatives, being taken by a police by force to a mental health facility). One person never accepted the diagnosis and... it's more on the sad than interesting side what you'd hear from them.
From my experience, people sticking to treatment have completely normal lives.
I'm doing okay now. I make a bunch of money as a software engineer, I get my heart broken by lovers now and then, I have depression and wonder why I'm alive. Not too different from before, not too different from an average person I imagine
It took a few doctor changes for most of them, though, until they found a professional who prescribed some "hitting the spot" treatment and wasn't brainessly testing one drug after another at over-kill doses numbing the ability to think about daily shopping list.
EDIT: one thing I forgot to mention: every single person diagnosed with above and having a good life accepted that they cannot touch alcohol, weed and few other things ever again. On the other hand - there are high levels of alcohol abuse present in all the problematic cases.
>every single person diagnosed with above and having a good life accepted that they cannot touch alcohol, weed and few other things ever again
On the other hand, I threw out my antipsychotics years ago, and I still drink, smoke pot...I've even taken psychedelics now and then (almost lost my head doing so one time, hasn't stopped me since!) I say all of you are just afraid--of course you need some level of rational control, but only enough to drive everyone else mad. Its not my problem, its theirs, and I'm here to make sure they understand it.
>oh, but you're not insane, you're clearly a highly functional person who wasn't supposed to have been given antipsychotics
No, I was and I am an extremely delusional person. I just figured out what to say to keep the world of the sane off my back.
Last I heard he's doing much better after getting psychiatric help.
I'm all for exploring new treatment modalities but IMO this article downplays these symptoms as harmless beliefs when in reality it can get quite dangerous for those closest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
And also -- the article didn't say these experiences were "normal". It fully recognizes that they are experiences are highly unusual, and typically quite distressing to those who experience them.
That's why a more nuanced discussion is needed.
Far from being an old and tired topic (per the shallow dismissal above) -- we're just getting started.
"Oh, it's just SO complex!" is the battle cry of the academic grifter:
we need MUCH more research! I'm writing my grant application right now.
And by the way, that wasn't a "shallow dismissal." I was carefully saying that this isn't a new idea.
And in any case, obviously people don't get treated for the specific behavior (or experience, if you want) of hearing voices. They get treated for the behavior of complaining about voices.
Where does your brain end and you start? Does it make sense to have this distinction?
People aren't treated for covid; they're treated for complaining about their symptoms
They're not treated for anxiety; they're treated for complaining about anxiety.
They're not treated for migraine headaches; they're treated for complaining about headaches.
They're not treated for gout; they're treated for complaining about their big toe.
Anxiety is the only of your examples that's kind of similar, and, likewise, anxiety is highly amenable to cognition-based therapies.
i.e. Actual behaviour is not the expected behaviour. The experience is the trigger of said behaviour (or even lack thereof such as a lack of empathy or sympathy).
2. This is just one person's essay. If I had to guess, "society" disagrees with him. (As he points out, his view is not mainstream at all in the psychiatric community.)
Which is true.
If we're not allowed to use words like "broken" (which I do not concede in general), surely at least we can get people to admit something like "I have a condition that makes my life difficult, and I must take some sort of steps to compensate"?
In my experience, the vast vast majority of mental-illness-acceptance movements are blatantly of the form "it's only natural for my dog to poop anywhere on the lawn, why should I have to pick it up?"
And to follow up this analogy - I don't mandate any particular treatment plan, there are at least 3:
* pick up your dog's poop
* own a dog, but keep it on your own property
* don't own a dog
That pretty much would be the smart thing to take away from a diagnosis yes. The brain is broken (not functioning correctly) if it's presenting them with hallucinations and delusions. Everyone's brain lies to them to some degree. It's usually not a huge problem, but once it becomes one there's no point in denying what's happening. That wouldn't mean that "they can never trust their thoughts and perceptions" but would mean that they should be considered suspect, especially when those thoughts and perceptions are voices in their heads or paranoia.
> But if psychiatry’s broken-brain narrative is pushing people deeper into the TI community, how did this happen?
It isn't pushing people to the TI community. Paranoid schizophrenics don't even need a diagnosis to believe that they're being targeted. It's just what they do. If reality is difficult to accept, it's understandable that a fantasy might look more inviting to them, but the answer is not to lie to patients about the reality of their situation or withhold the truth so that they feel better.
> A chorus of doctors, journalists and activists insisted that seeing mental disorders in terms of defective brain chemistry would alleviate shame and stigma. They gave the lie to the idea that extreme low mood, disabling anxiety or obsessive thoughts might represent a character flaw or a moral defect – or even bad parenting.
I'm not sure what "gave the lie" means here. Having a medical, even physiological, basis for the disorder has made it very clear that it isn't a moral failing or a choice. To that extent, mental illness has been destigmatized pretty well, but ultimately "crazy" is always going to be a bad thing to be, and something nobody wants to be. In that sense there will always be a stigma against it. No one wants to have something wrong with them. I don't think lying to people and telling people there's nothing wrong with them when there very clearly is something wrong with them is helpful.
The one part of the this article I can really get behind is that drugs aren't always the answer. Drugs can, in some circumstances be ineffective, or even make the situation worse. It can take a very long time to find the right drug or combination or drugs at the right doses to make things better and in the meantime there are real harms that can result from that search. Psychiatric drugs and conditions are not well understood. I do think that it will get better with time though.
I think it's reasonable to be cautious when it comes to treatment with medications, but I think it's also important to be honest and accurate about what the issues are. That means telling people their brains are wrong, and that their experiences aren't real. That psychosis is a very real problem, not a "spiritual emergency" or a "gift" or a "super power" and that it must be dealt with and managed (with or without medication).
Therefore wisdom indicates we should all have an open mind when discussing these matters. As we figured out germs and bacteria, I hope we will figure out these issues as well.
The mechanisms are not clear, which is not unusual in medicine, but the treatments are very effective.
That episode came on in 2012, and it has felt like it took > 10 years to fully recover. It certainly wasn't helpful and to the contrary extremely reinforcing when the whole snowden story broke.
This is a dreadful pit to fall into.
Pretend with me for one moment: You are single, you're looking for love in all the wrong places, mostly on OKCupid. An employee working within the NSA has stumbled upon your information in realtime in a PRISM data slurp, and has taken a personal interest - maybe they think you are weird, and they are not above abuse of their powers - and that they want to exert their "godlike" powers to toy with you - surveil you, pwn your computer, screw with your mind, etc. Keep pretending this is remotely close to reality! What recourse would you have? Would a FOIA request ever validate your claims? Where do you even begin to try to reconcile with this, as a firmly held belief?
.... My voices are illusory, they require a prompt. It can be water running, it is horribly triggered in large crowds. I still have panic attacks in Ikea (but who doesn't?)
.... I got better. It took 10 years of my life to get it back, mostly. It takes a lot out of me to even begin to try to share any of this.
I hope this post helps someone. You too can get through it.
These days I don't have any harmful delusions and only sometimes think I hear someone calling my old name
And I've also been on okcupid for years. Hopefully you are not some alternate personality lol
Oh, right, that's been done.[1] "In 2007, the advertising and marketing campaign for A&E's Paranormal State broke the mold using Audio Spotlight directional sound technology. A seven-story billboard was erected in Lower Manhattan, New York City, visually reminding the public of the channel's popular new programming. A pair of AS-24i focused sound speakers mounted above the billboard projected directional audio onto a targeted area of the sidewalk – all the way from the rooftop."
"The projected sound produced by the Audio Spotlight speakers was a woman's whispering voice that startled and entertained passersby with spooky and suggestive messages such as "Who's that?," "Who's there?," and "It's not your imagination." To those within the narrow coverage area, the sounds seemed as though they were being whispered right next to their heads, while others standing right next to them heard nothing, thanks to the focused sound beam of the Audio Spotlight."
[1] https://www.holosonics.com/applications/creative-marketing
The reason I’m sharing this is that I think people tend to believe that people are exclusively either “crazy” or “not crazy” as an ontological property of the person, but as many other anecdotes here show, it really can happen to people randomly. Some are able to get help and recover. Some aren’t.
While I definitely wish there was someone I could have called who could go give him real aid and assistance, I also know that this could have been a terrifying, trust-breaking ordeal and possibly could have even led to violence and imprisonment, or other serious consequences.
People like to talk about “public mental health resources” but unless you’re willing to sic what amounts to police armed with tranquilizers on people who very well may (reasonably?) not wish to be subdued against their will, it’s not really that simple.
Definitely a difficult and fraught subject. I don’t think the answer is to validate psychosis however.