It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Originally posted by dzonatas
Psychosis is not a mental illness like schizophrenia or like. Psychosis is more like a warning sign before any permanent damage. Someone that gets overly drunk experiences psychosis before they experience alcohol poisoning, for example.
At a glance from your read, that psychosis maybe someone who talks silly for a duration of time. It is temporary. It is a way for the physical brain to protect itself from damage.
The word itself seems often confused with more permanent states, so this is my 2 cents worth to help fix that.
Terence Mckenna talk about a phenomena that is quite amazing and proves what I have said. He said that if you leave a “sane” person with a schizophrenic and you leave them together to talk you come back to 2 people that are psychotic. I don’t remember the name of this condition but it is reality. And this is basicicly what I said. The sane person jumped into the world of the schizo and symptoms of mental illness begin to occur. Thought is a dangerous world, and one needs to be very strong to contain it.
Originally posted by SpectreDC
Terence Mckenna talk about a phenomena that is quite amazing and proves what I have said. He said that if you leave a “sane” person with a schizophrenic and you leave them together to talk you come back to 2 people that are psychotic. I don’t remember the name of this condition but it is reality. And this is basicicly what I said. The sane person jumped into the world of the schizo and symptoms of mental illness begin to occur. Thought is a dangerous world, and one needs to be very strong to contain it.
McKenna actually talks about schizophrenia quite a bit.
McKenna argues that schizophrenics are shamans essentially. The difference being is that whole schizophrenics are demonized, pushed to the fringe of society, hopped up on many drugs that we don't even understand, and constantly told that they are useless, nothing, and only stop our progress. In sharp contrast, the shaman from a young age was told that they would be leading their people, that they have a special gift, that they can do things few others can do. While schizophrenics are locked in a loony bin and stuck in their own reality, shamans have hundreds, even thousands of years of traditions and training they go through to understand and utilize their gift.
I'm certainly a believer that schizophrenia is not truly a mental illness, but something we just don't understand. In fact, the term itself tells us we don't understand it. You'll never find two schizophrenics with the same condition, each is unique in their own. McKenna talks about how in the 19th and early 20th century, the term "Melancholia" was used to describe everything from clinical depression, to bi polar disorder, and everything in between. Schizophrenia is the same; it's a catch all term in which we label individuals who are certainly not normal mentally, but in truth the individuals labeled such have few things in common.