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| Untitled, oil on canvas* Hannah Yata © 2012 (used with the artist's permission) |
How we treat
schizophrenia in America highlights two glaring deficiencies in our culture:
The first centers on how we, as Americans, are loath to access or acknowledge
our repressed, hidden parts and the second centers on the undeniable fact that
we are the most violent people on earth.
By way of
example, let us start by looking at how we treat schizophrenia in this country
as opposed other countries around the world. First, we deny that such inner
voices are “real” and, second, we are afraid of people who have them. We
justify our fear because “schizophrenics are prone to violence” – although the
vast majority are not – just
as we fear people who are different because of skin color,
religion, language or anything that feels foreign to us.
Because we deny
the reality of such voices and are petrified of them – fearing deep down that
we might also have such voices lurking inside of us – we attempt to banish them
with heavy duty drugs that may help some to gain a degree of control over their lives but at the
expense of serious side effects. In the end, we create a self-fulfilling
prophecy: By treating “schizophrenia” as a terrible disease – a lifetime incurable condition – that, indeed, is what happens!
Many indigenous
societies use a different approach. They believe that the inner voices people
hear are real, voices of spirits, and that when the spirit’s task is completed,
the voices will go away. And they usually do, often with the help of the local
shaman. In Europe there is a new patient-driven movement called Hearing Voices1 that uses a similar approach of treating the unseen voices with
dignity and respect.
Hearing
Voices encourages people who hear distressing voices to
identify them, to learn about them, and then to negotiate with them – just as
the shaman does in indigenous societies. This approach so far has shown
excellent results. Many of the people using the “Hearing Voices” approach have
had “their voices diminish, become kinder and sometimes disappear altogether –
independent of any use of drugs.”2
But the problem
in American goes deeper than that.
Not only do we
treat “schizophrenic” voices differently than other cultures, but the voices
themselves are different: The inner voices Americans hear tend to be violent,
often command hallucinations telling people to kill; whereas in other,
more peaceful countries like India the images are more benign, telling folks to
do domestic cores like cook or clean or rarely, at the worst, to do some
disgusting act like drink out of a toilet bowl.
I firmly believe
these two variables I have discussed are related on a society level as well as
an individual one. The more our society denies its shadow side – the more we deny our negative inner voices – the more they mutate and metastasize, infecting us as individuals and as a society in pathological, and in our case, violent ways.
This topic extends far
beyond how we treat schizophrenia. It offers a novel understanding into how we
understand violence and war in our society. I wrote about this in two recent blogs.
A Terrible Love of War talks about, among other things, how we have increasingly normalized violence and
war in Amerika, indeed, one can argue that WAR has become the leading metaphor
of our times. Think how different our society would be if our leading metaphor was not war and survival-of-the-fittest but dancing?
A Terrible Loveof War: Another Loss, A Sequel makes the case for why we need to access and acknowledge our inner voices if we hope to live a conscious life of balance and harmony, When we start that journey, we find that the god of love and the god of war are both real and not mutually exclusive but in intimate relationship with one another.
1 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/opinion/luhrmann-the-violence-in-our-heads.html?
2 The Violence in Our Heads by
T. M. Luhrmann, 9/19/13, NYT
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