schizophrenia and the spiritual crisis

[Jhanananda]

While searching the internet for a movie about a neurological disorder that I saw depicted in a movie I found these movie reviews, which came from Psychiatry in the Cinema Edited by Professor Ben Green.  Since their is a parallel between schizophrenia and the religious experience I thought some of you might gain some value out of seeing some of these movies.

As a mystic I have often reflected upon the symptoms of schizophrenia and it being a misdiagnosis of the spiritual crisis.  When I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind I saw within it a possible example of a misdiagnosis of the spiritual crisis. 

I highly recommend my fellow mystic see this movie.  It is worth noting that according to the narrative, the mathematician John Nash, who the movie was about, had later practiced TM meditation, which may have helped him marginally; however, TM meditation and their fraudulent guru, the so-called Maharishi, clearly had no understanding of the religious experience, which is required to understand the spiritual crisis as separate from schizophrenia.

Another movie that might be worth seeing, but I have not seen it is

'Proof' (2005) is not exactly a sequel to A Beautiful Mind (2002), but does
appear somehow intended to reflect the experiences of a child of a prize-winning mathematician amd so echoes the earlier film. The child, a daughter, is also a
mathematician (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) and has problems with low mood and
apathy. The film implies that she has hallucinations (or pseudohallucinations) of her father immediately after his death. She battles with self doubt and wonders if a revolutionary methematical proof is hers or her father's. Since her father's writings from around taht time were thought disordered it is finally established ('proof' again) that she, and not he, was the author.

I might have seen this movie it it is about an Australian pianist, which I thought was quite good.

Scott Hicks' film Shine (1996) depicts the psychosocial decline of a talented pianist, David Helfgott with what appears to be schizophrenia. The film spends a considerable time detailing how work and social relationships are eroded as the illness takes hold. What is similarly remarkable is that it shows a marked return to positive functioning with treatment, as in the later A Beautiful Mind.

I am not sure if I have seen this movie, but I think I would like to

Rather less comforting is Through a Glass, Darkly, the 1961 film by Ingmar Bergman. The film comes from an era when schizophrenia was seen as a 'functional illness' - an era when  R.D. Laing and others pointed to the Family as the cause of mental  illness. In this film the analysis of the family concerns the girl's relationship with  her father, a writer who is "using" his daughters illness for "artistic  inspiration". The film, set on a bleak island and filmed in black and  white, does not sink into sentimentality or melodrama and provides us with some insight into the aetiology of a condition that even now is not  fully understood. At the end of the  film the girl is taken away to the mainland to be "cured", but it is  difficult to imagine a happy ending because the unrelenting pessimistic atmosphere of the whole film has, by this time, affected everybody watching  it.

From the same liberal era when schizophrenia was 'functional' not 'organic' came the 1971 film by Ken Loach, Family Life. It again shows the Family as being responsible for the mental collapse  of a sensitive young girl. The film is, like all of Loach's work, shot in a  very realistic, almost documentary style which serves to try and convince us that these people are real and not fictional creations. The film is based on a play  entitled In Two Minds, which was televised in the Sixties, causing some  controversy in its condemnation of the parental figures. The film version is  more effective because of its direction and the acting of Sandy Ratcliffe (as the girl) and Grace Cave ( as her mother ). The final scene, depicting a  group of doctors and psychiatrists discussing the girl is very unsettling in  its almost casual atmosphere. Highly recommended.

Anthony Page's I Never Promised you a Rose Garden is a 1977 film taken from Hannah Green's book,  which has a  reputation for being one of the most effective  descriptions of schizophrenia. The film version also has much to recommend  it, not least being the central performances of Kathleen Quinlan (as a 16  year old girl struggling to distinguish between fantasy/reality) and Bibi Andersson (as the doctor who tries to communicate with her). There are some convincing portrayals of other female asylum inmates, plus some brilliantly directed sequences of life in a psychiatric institution.

Roman Polanski directed Repulsion in 1964, a London-based film that introduced him to the English speaking cinema. He directed Catherine Denueve as a beautiful, but sexually avoidant young woman, Carol. Living in her sister Helen's flat she works by day as a manicurist in beauty salon. From the outset Carol appears preoccupied and early on appears to be suffering with visual hallucinations brushing imaginary objects from her face and shoulders.

Her beauty attracts, but she is appears unable to cope with their advances and unsure of her own desires. At best she is ambivalent towards males. A final scene focuses on a family photograph in which Carol as a young girl is eyeing her father with vengeful eyes. One could speculate on the origins of her discomfort with her own sexuality and whether she is a survivor of sexual abuse.

Her descent into psychosis coincides with her sister Helen leaving for holiday with her boyfriend, played by Ian Hendry. Carol becomes withdrawn and unable to care for herself. A skinned rabbit is left to rot on a living room table, potatoes are left to sprout on the draining board. She wanders round London with hair awry and forgets to go to work.

When she does return to work, the sympathetic owner of the beauty salon is horrified when Carol injures a customer whilst preoccupied.


Sent home from work Carol is tortured by hallucinatory experiences where walls crack, hands project from walls to feel her, and in bed phantom lovers come to sexually assault her.
The film portrays the psychotic process fairly authentically, and Carol's perplexity, self-neglect, asocial speech and disordered thought processes are really well done. The potentially contentious portion of the film involves Carol's violence towards men who approach her in the empty flat. A concerned suitor is clubbed to death with a candlestick and left in the bath. The landlord arrives to a boarded up flat, meets the dishevelled and partially dressed Carol and makes advances to her. He is dispatched with a cut throat razor. Carol then becomes catatonic and settles under her sister's bed for her distraught sister and boy friend to discover when they return from Italy.
It's a brilliant black and white film, in fact a masterpiece, depicting paranoid schizophrenia. The violence in the film is atypical of schizophrenia however, and the sexual theme could be open to misinterpretation.

My son was deeply affected by the fight club.  I never saw it, because there just seemed to be too much gratuitous violence; however, I might still see it just to understand my son better.

What are we to make of Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)? On the surface it is a film about male aggression and male discontentment with today's society. It could be a seen about a violent reaction to the emasculation of modern day man. This was very much how the trailers portrayed the film. The twists in the film however reveal that the main protagonist hallucinates his way through the film, inventing and interacting with the other main character (Tyler Durden) played by Brad Pitt. The film does not pretend to be a portrayal of paranoid schizophrenia and yet this could be the only explanation for the bizarre behaviour of Edward Norton's character. It could also be contended that the civil disobedience group created by Edward Norton's character could be seen as a mass induced psychosis - folie a deux on a massive scale.

Black Swan (directed by Aronofsky, 2011) is a tale of a new production of the traditional ballet Swan Lake and the personal conflicts suffered by its young star Nina, (played by Natalie Portman), as she struggles to dance both the perfect and virginal white swan and the erotically charged, deceitful black swan. The desire to be perfection itself and the rejection of her burgeoning sexuality are fostered by her mother (played by Barbara Hershey) who suppresses her daughter’s development by smothering her in an exclusively close dyad where it is made clear she has over-invested in her daughter’s career in place of her own. The scene is set for a massive internal psychic conflict for which manifests as bulimic vomiting in toilets everywhere followed by some violent affect driven illusions where paintings move and shadows threaten. The film rushes through a gamut of eating disorder psychopathology and explores the symbolic and actual nature of deliberate self harm, boundary violations, domestic violence and blood itself. Towards the end the star hallucinates a murder of her rival, which may represent a stress induced psychosis, perhaps fuelled by drugs surreptitiously adminstred by her rival/friend. At times the visuals threaten to descend into the worst of grand-guignol, but overall the film is something of a triumph and food for therapeutic discussion.

Vincent Van Gogh seems to have had  episodes of psychotic depression, although it is difficult to retrospectively allocate contemporary diagnoses. Some writers have wondered whether Van Gogh suffered from bipolar affective disorder or even an organic disorder such as porphyria, These two films, Pialat's Van Gogh (1992) and Cox's 1989 film Vincent (The Life and Death of Van Gogh) are two of the most recent attempts to portray the tortured artist's life.

Felix Post, Prof. Emeritus at the Institute of Psychiatry postulated that Van Gogh suffered from absinthe misuse and affective disorder. (Post F. Creativity and psychopathology. A study of 291 world-famous men. British Journal of Psychiatry. 165(2):22-34, 1994 Jul.

In The Snake Pit (1948 directed by Anatole Litvak), Olivia deHaviland (as Mrs Cunningham) portrays a woman with a depressive psychosis and amnesia. The fim revolves around her past relationships with her husband, mother and boyfriend. Ambivalent feeings about her father and boyfriend are followed by their deaths and a subsequent guiity feleing that she is unable to (or should not) love. This results in problems with her later relationship with husband Robert and a lengthy admission to a State Hospital. There is a quite brilliant evocation of the 1940s State Hospital system with a rounded portrayal of the psychiatric system.There are depictions of psychotherapy, electroshock and narcosynthesis. The state hospital is burdened by more than twice the number of patients than it was designed for (718 patients compared with 312) and the stress on staff is evident with nursing staff themselves becoming mentally ill. A hierarchy of wards is depicted with the aim bing a progress up through the numbers towards ward one from which discharge can ocur. At one point Mrs Cunningham falls fou of the bitter nurse in charge of ward one and is pummeted down the hellish ward 33 (the Snake Pit of the title). Here there are very good depicitions of mania, sterotypies and thought disorder. The film stands up fairly well to the passage of time and the viewer has the sense that the depiction of the 1940s hospital system is fairly accurate, especially when viewed alongside asylum footage from contemporary documentaries.

[Jhanananda]

Iris (2001) depicted the true story of the decline of author Iris Murdoch. Murdoch's husband wrote the book on which the film is based and so the account is practically an eye witness account of the tragic effects of dementia on a brilliant mind and in turn the effects on her husband/carer.

Rupert Wainwright's 1999 film Stigmata featuring Patricia Arquette features an intriguing story of a young hairdresser/body artist who develops four of the five stigmata - lesions on her wrists, feet and forehead. The film eventually settles on a supernatural explanation, but not before involving doctors in a medical quest to construct a differential,diagnosis which included Borderline personality disorder, self-cutting, deliberate self-harm, and epilepsy. For while the film runs with the idea that Arquette's character, Frankie Paige, has convulsions and visual hallucinations and this necessitates a round CT/MRI scans and a fearsome sounding EEG involving electrodes 'inserted into the neocortex', a very dramatic investigation! EEG electrodes are most usually applied to the scalp.

There are parallels with the CT investigations of the girl in The Exorcist (1973), after her supposed auditory hallucinations.

In another parallel between the two films, the investigator following the story through is a priest. In The Exorcist it is a psychiatrist/priest. In Stigmata it is an organic scientist /priest. Both have doubts about their scientific and religious vocations. At an artistic level Stigmata is a visually beautiful film with glorious symbolic treatments of water, blood and the Madonna/Whore. The score including songs by the Smashing Pumpkin's Billy Corgan, Sinead O'Connor, David Bowie and Bjork is also a sumptuous treat.

Hytner's 1994 film The Madness of King George is a fair rendition of Alan Bennett's play which depicts the decline of George III into an organic psychosis. Bennett's play strongly implies that George III suffered from the effects of acute intermittent porphyria.

The movie, Awakenings, is what I was looking for, because I recalled from the very well directed and acted movie that one of the triggers for the chronic catatonic states exhibited by these patience was patterns, such as the patterns made by differing colored tiles on the floor.  I speculate that, since fluorescent lighting is common in institutions, and these patience came down with their symptom in the 20s, then possibly one of the triggers for their illness is an extreme reaction to 60hz EMF.

Oliver Sacks' books on the psychiatric aspects of neurology make good reading. Awakenings is Penny William's 1990 film of  Sack's first bestseller. The film gives an account of middle aged and elderly patients incarcerated by a lifelong illness. The illness is portrayed as a chronic catatonic state triggered during the early 20th century influenza outbreak: so-called encephalitis lethargica. The Awakenings that the title refers to are the returns to consciousness that the patients wake after Sacks (played by Robin Williams) administers a new drug . Sadly the effects are short-lived and the victims return to their twilight state. Interestingly this is not William's only foray into playing physicians. He plays a consultant psychotherapist in Good Will Hunting and makes a convincing one, but in the film Patch Adams, although based on a true story he seems altogether more unlikely.

I have seen the movie Regarding Henry Ford several times.  I found each time it was well worth watching, and provides some rather intriguing parallels to the experience of enlightenment and living in the extreme present.

Harrison Ford plays a successful and driven lawyer in a 1991 film directed by Mike Nichols. In Regarding Henry Ford suffers from amnestic syndrome and has to re-evaluate his private and professional life.

I saw One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest when it came out, and several times since.  I had the reviewer's response every time I have seen the movie; however, disruptive personality disorder who mocked and abused the system does not deserve a lobotomy.  To me the story is classic in how people who do not fit the mainstream lifestyle are inclined to be abused by the system.

The major film in this sub-genre has to be Milos Forman's 1975 film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest starring Jack Nicholson. I saw the film twice - at the beginning of my career as a student doctor and again after a gap of two years as a consultant psychiatrist. My impressions of the film had completely altered with my standpoint. At one point I thought Nicholson the victim of an oppressive madness machine and at the other point I saw him as a disruptive personality disorder who mocked and abused the system.

I saw Anthony Hopkins in both Silence of the Lambs and Instinct.  I found both movies far better than I expected, and I enjoyed seeing them both, for their critique of dysfunctional mainstream society.

Instinct (1999) was directed by John Turtletaub and features Anthony Hopkins who seems to have developed a recent predilection for playing psychotic doctors. In this case it is not the (supposedly criminally insane) Dr Hannibal Lecter but an anthropologist, Ethan Powell, who has undergone trauma whilst observing gorillas in the field.  The anthropologist is put into a state hospital for the criminally insane - which resembles the crumbling environment of the brilliant sixties US documentary Titicut Follies about such a hospital in Massachusetts. The abusive system  of the total institution makes Hopkins' character observe that his fellow man is worth less than the gorillas he befriended in the wild. He is seen as a special patient and a catch by the psychiatrists because he is a case of elective mutism. Powell's assigned psychiatrist is played by Cuba Gooding Jr. and initially sees Powell as someone who will help his career in that his case might generate a publication or two. Donald Sutherland features as a creatively psychopathic Professor of psychiatry who counsels his junior and mentors his career. The film is about freedom and morality and although Ethan Powell longs for freedom, he sees himself as less trapped than his psychiatrist, enmeshed in a system of patronage and required behaviour. Having seen The Silence of the Lambs it is difficult to separate the characters played by Anthony Hopkins in both films. Instinct provides an interesting comment on psychiatry and a counterpoint to Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

Shutter Island

Shutter Island (2010) is director Martin Scorsese’s take on the gothic asylum horror film. It has visual quotes from other asylum films like Gothika (lightning bursts), Titicut Follies (depiction of inhumane militaristic care), and The Snake Pit (depiction of sociology/stigmatisation). Unlike many 20th century films about mental illness in this 21st century film there is no optimism about he advent of new psychotherapeutic methods (compared to say The Snake Pit). This is a bleak vision of mental illness where the illness equals danger and incurablilty and the patient equals monster. No-one could accuse Scorsese of having a liberal agenda. The fort-ike asylum of Shutter Island merely suggests the containment of violence and the main character (Leonardo di Caprio) asserts that the mentally ill offender deserves no ‘calm.’

The story revolves around a rare and precious opportunity on the island to see if psychotherapy, not drugs, can penetrate the defences of a insightless traumatised survivor of WWII who has liberated the concentration camp of Dachau and murdered his bipolar wife in revenge for her killing of his three children. It’s a bleak complex plot that is as paranoid as it gets. It melds together twists about Nazis, communists, Hoover’s CIA, LSD mind experiments, and the Institution – this takes some doing. The result is a success, but only just. The film’s plot just about avoids some plot loopholes, but is overwrought, bloody and so graphic as to leave some audience members laughing nervously. It would be improved by judicious editing to rein in the gore. This is a distinct case of a film where the 'less would be more'.

Over the course of the plot various character arcs and twists take the lead psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley) from evil mastermind genius (in audience eyes) to fallible, altruistic, heroic psychotherapist. His vision argues against the new drugs – chlorpromazine – and psychosurgery (lobotomy). The arc of German psychiatrist (Max von Sydow) is from Nazi experimenter to pragmatic psychosurgeon. The lead character’s arc is from Federal agent to paranoid PTSD sufferer – with flashbacks, nightmares and a drink problem. Kingsley’s psychiatrist is shown to fail and I wondered if this film sounds a 21st century retreat from optimism about CBT, Psychotherapy etc and a much more cynical, sceptical view of the mentally ill.

It’s a well made, carefully thought out film with good period detail. Those who have worked in total institutions (a la Goffman) will recognise the asylum of Shutter Island with its tension between the sometimes opposing aims of care and security. Despite all his however the target audience of this film will go away from the cinema with even less sympathy for people with mental illness.

[Jhanananda]

I saw Rain Man when it came out.  At one time I worked as a psychiatric technician in a mental hospital, where we had a few older people with autism.  I found the movie and Dustin Hoffman portrayal of autism authentic.

Dustin Hoffman portrays an adult (Raymond) with autism in Rain Man (1988) who has been effectively institutionalised. His brother, Charlie, a car salesman (Tom Cruise) realises that he has this autistic brother only after his father dies. Because Raymond has inherited the bulk of a fortune, Charlie effectively kidnaps him and exposes Raymond to the outside world with life changing results for both of them. Hoffman's portrayal shows the conservative and obsessional features of the disorder together with the 'islands' of extraordinary ability sometimes  seen in autistic sufferers. In this case Raymond's skills are mathematical.

I also saw K-Pax when it came out.  I enjoyed the movie, which reminded me of an earlier South American movie "Man facing southwest."

The patient portrayed by Kevin Spacey in K-Pax (2001) is a case in point. There is the possibility that he is grossly deluded (because he is absolutely convinced that he is an alien called Prot). There is also the possibility that he has a hysterical amnesia brought on by the murder of his immediate family. The former symptom (a grandiose delusion) would imply a psychotic disorder and the latter some form of neurosis. The film also teases the viewer with the possibility that Prot is actually an alien and he is able to give various astrophysicists a run for their money as he describes exactly where his solar system might be in the night sky. They are almost convinced and so is his psychiatrist Dr Powell, convincingly played by Jeff Bridges. Dr Powell's keen attachment to his work produces some alienation from his own wife and family which is a nicely observed counterpoint and will be a familiar theme to many doctor's families.

Jacob's Ladder (1990) directed by Adrian Lyne and written by Bruce Joel Rubin could be summarised in psychiatric terms as 'PTSD or not PTSD' . The hero, Jacob Singer (played by Tim Robbins), appears to be a survivor of the Vietnam war. There are graphic scenes (earning an 18 certificate in the UK) depicting his war traumas in which his platoon is destroyed and he is bayoneted in the stomach. The next portion of the film describes his new life as a divorced postal worker, living with a new woman, Jezebel. He suffers with recurrent nightmares derived from his experiences, seems hypervigilant, has flashbacks during the day, is irritable and distant from others and in many ways is a classic case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The memory of his dead son, (acted by a very young Macaulay Culkin) haunts him, and these include horrid images of his son being run over.

The literal interpretation of Vietnam PTSD is thrown into disarray however by other levels within the plot. A psychic at a party hints that Jacob's palm shows he is already dead. His chiropractor has an angelic quality. He and his Vietnam compatriots feel that they have been experimented on. Jacob's paranoid imaginings become reality as his psychiatrist is exploded in a car and a fellow vet with similar symptoms suffers the same fate. There are allusions to demons and witchcraft and a variety of other 'red herrings'.

The last scenes suggest that Jacob has been, as the palmist at the party suggested, dead all through the film. In some ways Jacob's Ladder prefigures the 1999 film The Sixth Sense, (reviewed below). His presence is as some ghost or lost soul attached to the earth by his personal demons. Once he begins to 'let go' as his healer/chiropractor Louis suggests, he can leave the earth. One of the final scenes sees Singer climbing the stairs towards a brilliant light, his hand being held by his dead son, who in Jungian terms might just symbolise the puer aeternus.

It is a moving film with some disturbing imagery, but ultimately inspired by a more hopeful spiritual philosophy- a kind of afterlife psychotherapy movie!

I saw this movie, and thoroughly enjoyed it, and was especially pleased with the surprise ending.

The 1999 film Sixth Sense, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is a superior ghost story starring Bruce Willis and with a compelling performance by child actor Joel Osment. Willis puts in a surprisingly sensitive performance as a leading Child Psychologist with an apparently failing marriage. He tries to help a young boy who is troubled by visual hallucinations, which in the story are actually ghosts of people who need help from him. The child is, in effect a medium, and being approached by troubled spirits for help. Why is it good? Well, the therapeutic relationship between Willis and the boy is touchingly portrayed and the twist at the end is genuinely surprising. I suppose the film best shows the importance of gaining a therapeutic alliance with child patients.

Virgin Suicides (1999) directed by Sofia Coppola and starring James Woods and Kathleen Turner is a story is based on the suicides of five girls belonging to a strict religious North American couple. The film was almost universally panned by the critics and yet is a poignant and well-observed account of an almost unbearable tragedy. Woods plays a passive father to Turner's strongly religious mother. Turner's mother effectively suppresses her very beautiful daughters' blossoming sexuality and closets them from the outside world. The psychiatrist in the film describes the suicidal gestures of the first daughter as a 'cry for help' perhaps showing the risks inherent in this kind of labeling of self-injurious behaviour.

As to why the film was disliked by the critics? Well the subject is an inherently unpleasant one, although Coppola does treat it with some nice ironic flourishes, but the suicides appear fundamentally non-understandable - which is their very nature - and I suppose that this is what the critics could not adjust themselves to, rather than the film itself. The soundtrack, by Air, is pleasant and dreamy.

[Michel]

While searching the internet for a movie about a neurological disorder that I saw depicted in a movie I found these movie reviews, which came from Psychiatry in the Cinema

I have seen most of the films mentioned here. I have also known four people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Two of them were close friends of mine.

As a mystic I have often reflected upon the symptoms of schizophrenia and it being a misdiagnosis of the spiritual crisis.  When I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind I saw within it a possible example of a misdiagnosis of the spiritual crisis. 

I highly recommend my fellow mystic see this movie.  It is worth noting that according to the narrative, the mathematician John Nash, who the movie was about, had later practiced TM meditation, which may have helped him marginally; however, TM meditation and their fraudulent guru, the so-called Maharishi, clearly had no understanding of the religious experience, which is required to understand the spiritual crisis as separate from schizophrenia.

One of my schizophrenic friends refused to see this film after being urged by his social case worker to do so because, I think, he thought it would type cast him into having to overcome his schizophrenic illness in the same way John Nash overcame his. He saw the trailer and disliked it intensely. John Nash turned into a productive member of society, a beacon of hope, and a roll model - for "the fallen." I can understand how patronizing this film may of been to my friend.  What is markedly different to all the schizophrenic people I have known is that the character of John Nash in the film did not think ill of his world.  He worked well with the doctors and people who were trying to help him. The schizophrenics I knew had a very deep contempt for our contemporary western world. They were deeply wounded people. They were ostracized, shunned, feared and humiliated by their social milieu, by their psychiatric care workers, all the way down the line. The story of John Nash in  A Beautiful Mind is not the story that is typical of schizophrenia, in my view. My other schizophrenic friend dismissed the film laughingly when told about it. From being around both of them, I got the feeling that the only people who hadn't seen A Beautiful Mind were the schizophrenics. That crowd doesn't think much of Hollywood. But it is good to see that some schizophrenics gain a certain measure of functionality, as in the case of John Nash. But I think most do not overcome this horrible, debilitating illness. They need competent help.

Both of my schizophrenic friends were very interested in all things mystical. Both of them didn't pursue this interest in any depth because they could not read up on the subject since the drugs made them very restless. Typical after a first schizophrenic breakdown is that one stops learning anything new. They've got too many things to handle: the doctors, the social workers, the rent, the pills, the side effects, loss of employment, poverty, paranoia, voices, hallucinations, social marginalization, etc. Both were gifted musicians. One was also a poet, the other also a painter. I think that if my friends would have had good therapists and community support they would have improved their lot. They had so much potential for growth, so much they could have given. But there were no good competent mental care workers around, no community support.

I might have seen this movie it it is about an Australian pianist, which I thought was quite good.

Scott Hicks' film Shine (1996) depicts the psychosocial decline of a talented pianist, David Helfgott with what appears to be schizophrenia. The film spends a considerable time detailing how work and social relationships are eroded as the illness takes hold. What is similarly remarkable is that it shows a marked return to positive functioning with treatment, as in the later A Beautiful Mind.

I am not sure if I have seen this movie, but I think I would like to.

I've seen this film. It's great.

Excerpt from the film Shine, Flight of the Bumble Bee:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_p6-cAMr_g

The real David Helfgott playing Flight of the Bumble Bee:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1K-wUXCH_c

[Jhanananda]

He saw the trailer and disliked it intensely. John Nash turned into a productive member of society, a beacon of hope, and a roll model - for "the fallen." I can understand how patronizing this film may of been to my friend... They were deeply wounded people. They were ostracized, shunned, feared and humiliated by their social milieu, by their psychiatric care workers, all the way down the line. The story of John Nash in  A Beautiful Mind is not the story that is typical of schizophrenia, in my view. My other schizophrenic friend dismissed the film laughingly when told about it. From being around both of them, I got the feeling that the only people who hadn't seen A Beautiful Mind were the schizophrenics. That crowd doesn't think much of Hollywood. But it is good to see that some schizophrenics gain a certain measure of functionality, as in the case of John Nash. But I think most do not overcome this horrible, debilitating illness. They need competent help.

Both of my schizophrenic friends were very interested in all things mystical. Both of them didn't pursue this interest in any depth because they could not read up on the subject since the drugs made them very restless. Typical after a first schizophrenic breakdown is that one stops learning anything new. They've got too many things to handle: the doctors, the social workers, the rent, the pills, the side effects, loss of employment, poverty, paranoia, voices, hallucinations, social marginalization, etc. Both were gifted musicians. One was also a poet, the other also a painter. I think that if my friends would have had good therapists and community support they would have improved their lot. They had so much potential for growth, so much they could have given. But there were no good competent mental care workers around, no community support.

Yes, I have known many schizophrenic, and others "suffering" from other "mental illnesses."  It is clear to me that the psychiatric community is completely clueless as to the spiritual experience, and the spiritual crisis, and therefore mental illness, because a great deal of mental illness I found to be misdiagnosed spiritual experience or spiritual crisis, so I can see why those labeled and medicated would find the world at best patronizing.

I've seen this film. It's great.

Excerpt from the film Shine, Flight of the Bumble Bee:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_p6-cAMr_g

The real David Helfgott playing Flight of the Bumble Bee:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1K-wUXCH_c

Thanks, yes, it was the film that I saw, and thanks for the links.  I particularly liked seeing the real David Helfgott playing Flight of the Bumble Bee.

[Michel]

This is an interesting video about David Helfgott:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vBkwpqoGeE

[Michel]

I thought this to be a rather interesting article on so-called mental illness and spiritual awakening. I agree with most of what is said based on my experience and research over the years.
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Dr. Seth Faber says mental illness maybe a spiritual gift            July 31, 2012

Anti-psychotic medications do far more harm than good, according to Dr. Seth Farber who appeared during the middle two hours of Coast to Coast AM on Monday, July 31, 2012. Dr. Farber, author of “The Spiritual Gift of Madness”, says that people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorders may not have a mental illness at all. Instead, they may be experiencing a spiritual awakening.
Dr. Farber believes that a lot of people have been wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and once they start taking psychiatric medications they enter a downward spiral from which they may never recover.
Psychiatrists, he says, neglect to tell their patients that these drugs are addictive so if the patient tries to wean himself he experiences severe symptoms of withdrawal. These symptoms, says Dr. Farber, make the patient believe he truly is sick and can't live a normal life without the medications.
Dr. Farber had an interesting tale to tell about the American Psychological Association (APA) and the pharmaceutical companies. According to Farber, in 1978 psychiatrists were losing money. Remember, at that time there a lot of negative images surrounding the field, like the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest”, and some of the strange experimental therapies, like lobotomoies, that had emerged during the 1960s.
So the American Psychological Association (APA) appointed a commission to determine what would happen if they stopped taking kickbacks from the drug companies and focus on ethical treatment. Of course, it was determined that the results would be disastrous, and instead, they decided to solicit even more money from Big Pharma.
Dr. Farber quoted Dr. Peter Breggin, who also recently appeared on Coast to Coast AM:
“Whatever function the APA had ever fulfilled as a professional organization was now superseded by it's function as a political advocate for the advancement of psychiatric and pharmaceutical interest.”
According to Dr. Farber, in there were only 16,000 cases of bipolar disorders diagnosed in the United States. Currently, there are more than 16 million.
“It's greed. They (psychiatrists) are doing anything to build more market.”
Psychiatric medications, especially the anti-psychotics, says Dr. Farber, do nothing to help cure a patient who's been diagnosed with a mental illness. Instead, they act like tranquilizers, causing the brain to disengage. The patient may no longer be experiencing mental problems but he's also no longer experiencing life.
According to Dr. Farber, a lot of people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder really don't have a mental illness. What they're really experiencing is a spiritual awakening. As proof, Paul Levy appeared alongside Dr. Farber to tell listeners about his own experiences of spiritual awakening.
In 1981 Levy had a life changing spiritual awakening. During the first year of his emergence he was hospitalized at least 4 times and diagnosed with having a severe psychotic break. He was also told that he had a chemical imbalance, he was manic depressive and he'd have to take anti-psychotic medications for the rest of his life.
Fortunately, Levy was able to pull himself up from the psychiatric quagmire, but not before some very interesting things happened.
As a young adult, Levy had suffered severe emotional abuse by his father and by 1981 he was having difficulty figuring out how to rise above the situation. The only thing that helped was meditation so he could step back and watch what was happening in his mind.
At a certain point, says Levy, it was like his mind was struck by a lightning bolt. He suddenly realized that he was part of a mass consciousness, that we're all interconnected and interdependent. If he thought of a friend or relative he would immediately feel what that person was feeling, and he was even able to connect with the universal consciousness.
He was fully able to function in this altered state of consciousness but his friends, fearing for his mental health, checked him into a mental hospital. Immediately upon entering the hospital he noticed a female patient who was quite obviously blind, standing on the other side of the patient lounge and he found himself drawn to her.
As Levy drew closer to the woman, in his altered state of consciousness, he subconsciously began chanting, “All you have to do to see is open your eyes and look”, Over and over again he chanted and within a minute the woman had regained her sight.
Dr. Farber believes there are thousands of people like Levy, scattered in psychiatric hospitals across the country. People who aren't psychotic at all, they're simply experiencing a spiritual awakening. Some people, he says, are more sensitive to the changes in consciousness than others and they or their families may think they're having a psychotic break from reality. But he quoted R. D. Laing, a famous British psychiatrist:
“A break down is the prelude to a break through.”
Dr. Farber believes that psychiatry is only getting worse because it's destroying the lives of more and more people. Because of their greed they're even getting children hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.
“It's mythology to say that an 8-year old is going to grow up to be a crazy demented killer,” says Farber, and children all progress mentally and emotionally at different rates. If you notice your child is having some type of difficulty it's much better to address it as a family than it is to put your kids on life-destroying anti-psychotic drugs.
Dr. Farber also warns those patients who want to stop taking their prescribed medications to taper off very gradually to avoid severe withdrawal symptoms. He says that many psychiatrists will tell you to taper off over a week's time and then stop taking them completely. However, that's not slow enough, so the patient starts experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms, they think they really are mentally ill, and they go back to the drugs.
Dr. Farber says it's clear that there are people out there who are really suffering and really sick. But we're in the middle of a collective psychosis, so people who are sensitive are going to be feeling that.
“We're at a time now where humanity is either going to take the next step in our spiritual evolution or the whole planet is going to be destroyed.”

Source: http://www.examiner.com/article/seth-farber-says-mental-illness-may-actually-be-a-spiritual-gift

[Michel]

Really interesting link on: "Schizophrenia may be considered a pre-mystical state. Some schizophrenics if guided by therapists who have experienced ASCs and in an appropriate setting, may become mystics - the therapist as guru."

So-called 'Schizophrenia' as Intense Transpersonal or Spiritual Experience: Transformation Process, Spiritual Awakening or 'Spiritual Emergence':

http://www.holisticeducator.com/spiritualemergence.htm

[Jhanananda]

Thank-you, Michel for the links.  I especially enjoyed seeing the YouTube video of David Helfgott. Would you say that Schizophrenia seems to come to those with genius?  Or is it just a coincidence that the Schizophrenics whom I have met were all geniuses, as David Helfgott surely is.  I think that the herd are mostly idiots and proof of that is what the do to their geniuses, like David Helfgott et al.

On the links suggesting that Schizophrenia' is a Transformation Process, that can lead to Spiritual Awakening.  I believe that this is reasonable.  So, it seems that the links you have provided are getting warm.  They would; however, half to understand the 8 stages of the religious experience, as well as the other fruit (phala) of the contemplative life.

Every day I am more sure that the person who suffers from mental illness must learn the mental disciplines of: mindful-self-awareness, critical thinking, tranquility and equanimity.

[Michel]

Thank-you, Michel for the links.  I especially enjoyed seeing the YouTube video of David Helfgott.

David Helfgott was diagnosed with having a "schizoaffective disorder ", which is a combination of both bipolar and schizophrenic symptoms.

Would you say that Schizophrenia seems to come to those with genius?  Or is it just a coincidence that the Schizophrenics whom I have met were all geniuses, as David Helfgott surely is.  I think that the herd are mostly idiots and proof of that is what the do to their geniuses, like David Helfgott et al.

Both of my schizophrenic friends had some qualities of genius. They were both highly original and creative people before they experienced their first psychotic breakdown. Unfortunately the psychiatric drugs had a severe impact on their creativity. Both had unique insights and views about the world, and were extremely adept at figuring people out, very intuitive by nature. They were more evolved in some ways than most people. Both of them were very much afraid of going psychotic again.

I would say that not all schizophrenics are geniuses. But one of my psychiatrists, who must have dealt with schizophrenics on a daily basis, thought that "most" of the schizophrenic patients he knew were "extremely intelligent."

Every day I am more sure that the person who suffers from mental illness must learn the mental disciplines of: mindful-self-awareness, critical thinking, tranquility and equanimity.

A full blown psychotic manic episode is like being a leaf blown about by hurricane force winds.  Full blown mania is such a high energy state: Your thoughts are racing, rapidly changing; you're talking at a million miles an hour; you're overcome with long bouts of hysterical laughter; and to top it all - you're completely psychotic. I can't see how it can be subdued. I really wonder if a full blown manic state can be brought under control by "just" mindful-self-awareness, critical thinking, tranquility and equanimity.

[Jhanananda]

Both of my schizophrenic friends had some qualities of genius. They were both highly original and creative people before they experienced their first psychotic breakdown. Unfortunately the psychiatric drugs had a severe impact on their creativity. Both had unique insights and views about the world, and were extremely adept at figuring people out, very intuitive by nature. They were more evolved in some ways than most people. Both of them were very much afraid of going psychotic again.

I would say that not all schizophrenics are geniuses. But one of my psychiatrists, who must have dealt with schizophrenics on a daily basis, thought that "most" of the schizophrenic patients he knew were "extremely intelligent."

The property of being intuitive is like a 2-edged sword.  One can be directed by the insight, but the insight into the people around us can drive us insane.

A full blown psychotic manic episode is like being a leaf blown about by hurricane force winds.  Full blown mania is such a high energy state: Your thoughts are racing, rapidly changing; you're talking at a million miles an hour; you're overcome with long bouts of hysterical laughter; and to top it all - you're completely psychotic. I can't see how it can be subdued. I really wonder if a full blown manic state can be brought under control by "just" mindful-self-awareness, critical thinking, tranquility and equanimity.

Well, your description of the full blown psychotic manic episode is a little like the full-blown kundalini experience, except deep meditation produces tranquility and equanimity before the powerful energy.  So, if the psychotic had developed a rigorous, mindfully-self-aware, contemplative life, which included: critical thinking, tranquility and equanimity, then they would have been able to sustain the energy of the manic episode and would have had a very fine religious experience.

[Jhanananda]

"Beautiful Mind" John Nash's Schizophrenia "Disappeared" as He Aged

Mathematician John Nash, who died May 23 in a car accident, was known for his decades-long battle with schizophrenia—a struggle famously depicted in the 2001 Oscar-winning film "A Beautiful Mind." Nash had apparently recovered from the disease later in life, which he said was done without medication...

Nash developed symptoms of schizophrenia in the late 1950s, when he was around age 30, after he made groundbreaking contributions to the field of mathematics, including the extension of game theory, or the math of decision making. He began to exhibit bizarre behavior and experience paranoia and delusions, according to The New York Times. Over the next several decades, he was hospitalized several times, and was on and off anti-psychotic medications...

But in the 1980s, when Nash was in his 50s, his condition began to improve. In an email to a colleague in the mid-1990s, Nash said, "I emerged from irrational thinking, ultimately, without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging," ..

"When you have a schizophrenic who has had the multiple psychotic breaks, there is a downward path," Moreno said. Patients suffer financially because they can't work, physically because they can't take care of themselves, and socially because their bizarre behaviors distance them from others, Moreno said.

It may be that the people who have supportive environments are the ones who are able to live to an older age, and have a better outcome, Moreno said.

I recall seeing the movie.  In the movie he had supposedly taken up meditation, which supposedly helped him. I recall wondering at the time if he understood that deep meditation can be misdiagnosed as schizophrenia; although from the movie it appeared he had schizophrenia.  Nonetheless, another aspect of his case suggests that he might have been a sensitive, who would have been aided by a well guided contemplative life.

[bodhimind]

Nice share.

Just to add on, I remember watching a documentary about people living in shaman villages. One of them was being interviewed and he (I think it was the shaman head) explained that mental disorders were more prevalent in modern society because modern people did not know how to deal with them, having suppressed spirituality. Since the villagers were educated about their own spirituality, mental disorders seemed non-existent. I think they acknowledged the spiritual crisis as part of the process of rehabilitation.

[Alexander]

Modern culture itself also breeds mental illness. Human beings should never be well-adapted to the demands put on them by "normal" society. Society forces the creation of all kinds of maladaptations that make people dysfunctional.

[Jhanananda]

I agree with both of you.