PSYCHOSCAPES: Occupy Delusion

I had an “aha moment” while reading a piece in today’s NYT by Benedict Carey: Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion.

Carey's article is about people with schizophrenia who are now arguing that their delusions are not solely from a biological illness “but also in fears, longings and psychological wounds” stemming from their environment. Now, he writes, these psychiatric veterans are coming together in increasing numbers.

It struck me that Finding Purpose After Living With Delusion is a perfect metaphor for the Occupy Wall Street Movement which is also people coming together, much like a huge support group, to validate each other while disputing the prevailing attitude that their problems are due solely to personal failure and incompetence.

“It’s a thrilling time,because people with lived experience are beginning to collaborate in large numbers,” says Gail Hornstein, author of Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meaning of Madness. “They are developing their own theories, their own language about what their experiences mean from the inside.”

Just like the Occupy Movement: people coming together to share their own felt experience about what it actually feels like to be poor, hungry, uninsured, unemployed, homeless and hopeless.

And more than that, what it feels like to have society turn its back on them and call them losers because they no longer play the only game that counts in America: Buying things. Shopping until you drop.