Written by: Lake Angela, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
For those of us on the schizophrenia spectrum, if we can pass undetected in daily life, we might be allowed to live relatively autonomously. However, it is often only possible to do so if we have become adept at play-acting or masking to appear more neurotypical. But does this carefully studied and stylized method of fitting in actually do us a disservice, not only in the vast effort and amounts of energy masking requires but also in the longer-term truth that we will not change our societal context if we maintain the status quo by playing the part of neurotypicals? It is time to fight to influence the contemporary context, as context can change everything from how we are perceived to what we are allowed to accomplish!
In part 1 of this article, I provided basic background on what makes our current context prejudiced against psychotic thinkers. In this second part dedicated to context, we can gain some insight into influencing attitudes towards psychotic thinking by examining specific examples of the reception of schizophrenia spectrum ideas in other contexts. For example, in a historical Western context, it was once quite common to hear the words of God or a god through a medium considered to be a prophet or a saint in medieval Europe or an oracle in ancient times. Such seers fulfilled valuable functions in Western society, spiritually and often politically, wielding decision-making power on a whole region or group’s behalf based on their direct access to divine knowledge. Where are the current-day prophets? It is simply untrue that no one comes forward anymore to share divine knowledge they have received. Instead, contemporary visionaries rarely are taken seriously. I have met some of those dismissed as “crazy” and admitted to “behavioral health” institutions where they are medicated into silence if not submission.
Outspoken schizophrenic people in medieval times were upheld as prophets or saints because their contemporaries took for granted that their voices and visions came from heaven, or else they were burned for heresy if their powers were deemed a result of satanic possession. In both cases, it was common knowledge that these oracles commanded superhuman powers of knowledge and intuition. Now potential prophets, or unusually creative thinkers, are institutionalized and discouraged, their unique ideas and expressions suppressed with discipline, isolation, and drugs. Even their loved ones and supposed support systems are frightened of their delusions, call their visions or voices hallucinations, and follow the doctors’ advice in grasping for the neuroleptic drugs euphemistically uplifted as medicines. In this way and simply because of widespread attitudes of fear and misunderstanding, our neurotypical contemporaries do us a terrible and damning disservice for their own comfort even when the motive is not selfish. Very few of us on the schizophrenia spectrum have adequate support, even if we have families and friends, for the simple reason that our context is skewed against us.
Consider the great herbalist, scientist, musician, writer, and creator Hildegard of Bingen. At least partly because of her neurodivergent powers, she wielded spiritual and political authority. She was revered in her context and sought after for advice by such dignitaries as the king and pope. Even despite the extreme sexism of her patriarchal religious order, her visions afforded her autonomous power and the opportunity to achieve and create within her environment. Now, historians take an interest in diagnosing luminaries like Hildegard retrospectively with conditions like epilepsy or psychotic thinking and then present her visionary work as the product of an illness that only emerged centuries later. Such retrospective diagnosis and dismissal of her achievements is highly biased and completely unwarranted. Why should anyone use current stigma against the so-called mentally ill to devalue revelations that improved scientific and spiritual understanding in their original context? This bias becomes especially apparent when we consider that whole groups of people, Friends of Hildegard, still consult her herbal remedies and follow her dietary and healing advice. Her most famous work, Scivias, remains an important Western spiritual document, and her musical compositions, including the first Western morality play or operatic work (depending on which expert you ask), are still performed around the world.
Denouncing psychotic thinking from a current religious perspective is equally hypocritical. I often hear the phrase “God works in mysterious ways” from the religious who truly believe in the merit of their suggestion that through medical compliance I could be made normal. It is implied that God allowed modern science the discovery of neuroleptics, a class of drugs whose exact relationship to psychosis remains a mystery, to heal so-called imbalances like mine. Consider an alternative application of the phrase, “God works in mysterious ways,” though: what could be more mysterious to such neurotypical critics than the workings of epilepsy or psychosis? Who is to say for that matter that the voice of God is not schizoaffective, that God itself is not schizophrenic—or autistic, perhaps with a few creative schizophrenic traits? To remain instated as God after all, God has to have superhuman qualities, doesn’t it? Hildegard’s visions came together from her intuitive grasp of sacred knowledge around her, of truths inherent in actions. Those who appreciate the value of her work can state surely that her revelations are true and holy in context precisely because they come from the creative principle all around and within rather than from the Biblical God of Logic and Man who gives such commands as “If your daughter has acted promiscuously, you must stone her to death” (Deuteronomy 22:21).
Real qualities of God in the medieval context or creation in the current context are at least slightly schizophrenic. We, the fully schizophrenic, are not ill! We are blessed with the neuro-connections conducive to seeing through the all-consuming logic that is a constant source of prejudice and injustice in our context. In the U.S., it seems Americans love to remove others from their meaningful contexts to make them more acceptable to contemporary sensibilities. For example, I find it striking that the favorite poet of the U.S.A. is Rumi. What makes the 13th-century Muslim mystic who addressed love poems to the men he idolized, particularly Shams, and to his God the best-selling poet among contemporary Americans? Americans purchase and read terribly little poetry, much less in translation and especially not from the Persian. A major part of the answer is that Rumi severed from his context makes for a nice recitation of the vaguely romantic at weddings and other events for which Americans have use of him. By contrast, most Americans do not popularize, let alone read at all, the parallel mystic sensibilities of poets such as Hadewijch of Brabant or Mechthild of Magdeburg, perhaps in part because these poets are women and come too close to American religious ideas of heresy in describing their love affairs with God. At the same time, it seems just as likely too difficult to sever these poets from a European context that comes closer, uncomfortably so, to many Americans’ inherited Western views. Consider that just as America’s favorite poet is Rumi, the most popular prophet is a Galilean Jew who somehow becomes a white European in popular representation.
When even the most revered figures must be idealized by being made familiar before they can be worshipped properly, it stands to reason that contemporary psychotic thinkers have much less opportunity to exist and contribute in our own capacities. We are not figures of reverence and therefore are not only plucked from our inner contexts in which schizophrenia spectrum associations make their own sense but also taken out of context completely: removed from the whole and placed in the institution in which the body becomes a thing to be restrained and the mind a commodity to be drugged.
Lake Angela, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of verbal language and movement. As Director of the international multimedia group Companyia Lake Angela, they offer sessions in guided healing through poetry and movement and provide a platform for schizophrenia spectrum creativity. Their full-length books of poetry, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are published by FutureCycle Press. As poetry editor for Punt Volat, they select and publish innovative new poetry in four languages with co-founder Kevin Richard Kaiser. As co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing Services, they help aspiring writers polish their manuscripts for publication. Lake holds a PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas for their intersemiotic translations of German Expressionist poetry into dance and their MFA in poetry.
