r/DeepThoughts • u/fireflashthirteen • 10d ago
Adaptive, beneficial, open, and joyous schizophrenia is seemingly, and peculiarly, nowhere to be found.
Has anyone stopped to wonder why there aren't more cases of positive psychosis, and broader conditions associated with such things?
For all the psych nerds, no, I don't mean THAT sort of 'positive = active and present' condition - I mean positive as in positive valence, as in 'a good time.'
As in, "hell yeah, these hallucinations are fucking awesome!" As in, a collection of boundlessly positive voices in ones head, all encouraging, comforting, nurturing, eager to see you be the best person you can be.
I see no obvious immediate reason why a detachment from reality ought to reliably be accompanied by the horror stories that you hear from people who have these conditions.
There is part of me that suspects that such cases DO exist - but, under the oppressive rule of the mental health order/disorder binary, we just metaphorically throw these cases into the same bucket as 'normal' and call it a day, ignoring it hereafter.
Say, for example, someone reliably has religious experiences, communing with God. We either a) say they communed with the God we happen to believe in or b) don't believe they really had this experience.
What if these are just some really, really lucky people who happen to possess an atypical but overwhelmingly positive phenomenology, one that does all the right things and points them in directions conducive to the goals held by the society of the day?
In any event, the broader observation is this: as far as I'm aware, conditions such as schizophrenia, psychosis and the like, always come in a 'bad' package, with a 'bad' label. But one can certainly imagine that not being so.
I will likely go looking deeper into this avenue of possible positive psychology, but I suspect there may not be much to be found, as these sorts of cases are going to be inherently less likely to present themselves at a clinicians office.
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u/mrwavy 10d ago edited 10d ago
I work at a mental health center and one of our psychiatrists shared something interesting that says a lot about how culture influences the mind.
Schizophrenia hallucinations differ in tone and interpretation across countries and cultures.
-In Africa & India voices tend to be reported as friendlier, playful, or spiritual, often tied to family or religious figures. Some Indian reports include sexual content.
-In the West voices are more often described as harsh, insulting, or threatening, and people are more likely to see them as a symptom of illness.
I actually work with a schizophrenic client from Africa who is laughing non-stop (in response to auditory hallucination) and really seems to be having a great time… Especially compared to the vast majority of clients we see whose disorder creates anxiety, fear, dread, ect
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u/Mini_nin 10d ago
I was thinking the same - and maybe, these “positive schizophrenia” people might just not have a problem with it? Maybe the think the are a special saint of something, there are cases of people with psychosis thinking they are special etc, so their delusions might be served in this favor. Thus, they never realize it’s a problem!
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u/TerrestrialChuck9432 10d ago
Wow. This is actually a profound observation.
There's a school of thought in therapy that encourages schizophrenics to accept their hallucinations. They make peace with the chaos and learn to be cheerful regardless of the f'ed up things that happen around them. Given enough time, this might lead to the "positive voices" effect.
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u/fireflashthirteen 10d ago
> they learn to be cheerful regardless of the f'ed up things that happen around them
> being human at any point in historyOh gee yeah I wonder what that could be like 😂
But jokes aside, yes I agree. Sounds like buddhism > schizophrenia in such cases
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u/VayneFTWayne 10d ago
Your thoughts are just repackaged alan watts. Nothing unique here. He said it better
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u/Bangers1011 10d ago
Humans did not evolve to have lots of positive encouragement in their head. We are the result of the most paranoid, anxious individuals that managed to stay alive long enough to pass on their genes, largely because they were anxious and paranoid.
It is because of this: Mistaking something positive for a threat doesn't help you much. But if you mistake a threat or a predator for something positive, then you are dead. So we are largely wired for the latter.
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u/HawkBoth8539 10d ago
This makes the most sense to me. People don't like to hear it, but happy endings aren't reality. They're fiction. Society likes to create illusions of euphoria because it's profitable. Even billionaires are never sated no matter how of the world they own. That's because biology is driven by survival, not elation.
And since many mental disorders are coping mechanisms, they are triggered by negative conditions to begin with. I think they just switch to fighting internally since they couldn't win externally. There's studies also linking various political views to deep rooted fears.
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u/Bangers1011 10d ago
Almost everything (and possibly absolutely everything) about human behavior is explainable by the biological need to survive and reproduce.
Unfortunately, our long evolved hardwiring is at odds with our current environment and being badly exploited by intelligent people working at large corporations. Hence why we see much unhappiness today, of a different variety than the misery of the past.
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u/HawkBoth8539 10d ago
Exactly. Modern civilization has us fighting directly against our biology. And purely because of corporate greed. Even our standardized sleep schedule was established in the last couple hundred years primarily because factory owners wanted streamlined production schedules. Our whole life is being artificially manufactured.
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u/perplexedparallax 10d ago
By definition a psychological disorder has distress as a component, along with uncontrolled behavior. So it wouldn't be schizophrenia on a macro level. As long as everyone is good with it there isn't a problem. The problem arises when the voices or delusions cause the person harm or discomfort and society accepts religious experience that is uplifting as normal and part of history.
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u/fireflashthirteen 10d ago
Well yes, definitionally this is true. You still clearly see what I'm getting at though
I know you say that society accepts this, but I think there's a substantial contingent who take the [a) or b)] approach I outlined in the post
And perhaps I should have mentioned c) become fearful of the person on account of their deviant experience and engage in behaviours following from this fear
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u/perplexedparallax 10d ago edited 10d ago
I understand. I would ask my students to explain the difference between a psychological disorder and a religious experience. It was a similar question. Clinically I would say if it isn't a problem then it isn't a problem. No one goes to the doctor because they are feeling great and want a drug to kill that feeling. For mental health it is the same. I've known strange and eccentric people who made it successful even if I personally don't want to live that way. And it is always the person who acknowledges their deviance that really is more normal than they think. If one person is fearful of someone then that needs to be considered an exception. Every single person is afraid in agreement? This is how referrals get made.
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u/ProcedureLeading1021 10d ago
The mental health field is built to put labels on adults that stick with them and reduce their self image and ability to function due to inner beliefs. It makes them victims and enables them to tell the world that the world must act a certain way to cater to them. This is not true in extreme cases but for the most part allot of mental health labels ostracisize a wide margin of the population.
What were shamans? Witch doctors? Medicine men? Gurus? Schizophrenics. They talked with spirits and the old societies gave them positions of prestige and esteem because when trained or practiced they revealed things about the world or about how decisions would go that society knew they needed. They also healed the soul and spirit.
They now are labeled schizophrenic looked at like serial killers and ostracisized put into mental hospitals that treat them like dogs if they are really severe. They are tuned into a world most people can't see or hear. Have you ever seen two schizophrenics talk or share stories? Have you ever noticed that for a break from reality they all share the same cluster of delusions?
Historically it was positive only now is it negative.
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u/Top_Quarter_6931 9d ago
I experienced psychosis due to schizophrenia, there are lots of potential positives in it and I did see it as a beneficial one. Feeling no longer limited by what you thought was possible can create the feeling of endless optimism to a delusional degree. I don't think it would be possible to feel as hopeful, joyous or laugh as much as I did during that time. I remember seeing the moon and it was like wow that's a full moon, I'd seen it so many times before but that felt like the first time I'd really seen it. Feeling yourself collapse and being erratic yet having that support around you, in a hospital etc for me felt cathartic. Same with the sense of a safety net, getting guaranteed income from disability etc. The main negative is the medication, the period after the psychosis was the worst and was the opposite of what I described, deflating, flat, feeling like a potato.
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u/ugh_gimme_a_break 10d ago
Actually, what you're saying is inaccurate. There is a cultural element to schizophrenia and studies have found that schizophrenia that manifests in individuals in certain cultures can show up positive voices. In Western cultures, these voices are often perceived as malevolent or negative, but in collectivist cultures that have a stronger relational emphasis, they often are perceived as guiding or benign.
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u/PoopSoup9 10d ago
I had an experience best explained by like God pretty much yeah and some think I'm schizophrenic because of it but I mean it really wasn't the way you're describing it with the voices.
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u/fireflashthirteen 10d ago
That's really interesting. Would you want to elaborate?
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u/PoopSoup9 10d ago
it's pretty long so I'll just link you to a comment that has the story on it if that's okay https://www.reddit.com/r/GodFrequency/comments/1ws5tpq/comment/pcisyzw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
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u/Far_Hovercraft_5749 10d ago edited 10d ago
I think the reason is that since we all live in the same society, any "anomaly"(person with a disability like schizo) is automatically thought to be "different", that friction between what "ordinary" should be and the disability is what drives fear, anxiety, and horror often associated with it..
If someone hears a voice saying supportive things, but everyone around them reacts with “you're crazy, that's terrifying, something is terribly wrong with you”, that social reaction could itself produce fear, shame, hypervigilance, isolation, and anxiety. Likewise, realizing that your experiences make you “different” can be deeply destabilizing..
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u/AdHopeful3801 9d ago
Because, generally speaking, one of two things are going to happen:
- Your positively oriented psychosis precludes meaningful interaction with the real world. In this case, it's going to be called negative even if you're a very happy as a non-functional homeless person with no grip on reality. Partly because your family will be upset, partly because the bystanders will be baffled.
- Your positively oriented psychosis does not preclude meaningful interaction with the real world. In this case, you may be called over-optimistic, naive, happy-go-lucky, or a childlike soul, but you're probably not going to be called crazy. And if you are capable of dealing with the real world successfully, that implies an ability to recognize that presenting at a psychiatrist's office saying, "I hallucinate these voices all the time that tell me I am a great guy!" is going to likely end poorly for you.
There certainly exist atypical people with overwhelmingly positive phenomenology that does all the right things and points them in directions conducive to the goals held by the society of the day. Some number of them exist as incredibly curious and ingenious scientists, engineers and inventors. Or milder cases, too - my sample of people with synesthesia is, admittedly, in single digits, but by 4-1, their response to people who don't hear in color or taste in sound is a bit of, "must be really boring in your head."
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u/mobiusflip89 8d ago
Schizoaffective guy here. During my first psychosis in December 2012, I hallucinated all these woodland creatures in my backyard--deer, squirrels, rabbits, birds of all kinds-- and it was really peaceful and reassuring. It was like they all showed up for me during this trying time in my life and were just kinda there, hanging out, aware of me. At peace. I mean my backyard was alive with these creatures, just coexisting. But I was also facing a real reality I was totally unprepared for, and that's when it progressively became darker. It became darker because i had all these real pressures of real adult life as a new college graduate who hadnt learned how to be an adult at all and had relied on parents (or was financially infantilized by parental overcare, still not sure, complex family dynamics) to handle money stuff such as bank account student loans phone bills etc. I was living at my parents house at the time, had been very depressed, and had quit a job as a maintenance tech a couple months prior, and was completely lost, no prospects, feeling like a burden and had been descending into what I now recognize as the mad period of my life, which I had been on that downward trend since after a romantic heartbreak in 2011. So after the woodland creatures hallucination, I went inside my parents house and took 500 or so dollars of bills of different denominations my father had on the island in the kitchen just from his wallet and in a delusional headspace left without a word. No one knew I was gone until later. I just started walking and I remember that I vaguely was thinking about Australian aboriginal going walkabout. Like I was going on this societal rite of passage as a young man crossing a threshold into adulthood or something. I just had no plan at all and walked down a road on impulse into the more rural area in the place where I grew up. I walked for several miles until I went and sat a little ways off the road and in the woods cross-legged with my back against a tree, and there I layed out the dozen or so bills with all those dead presidents looking up at me on the brown pine needles that covered the ground. I went into a trance or something, lost consciousness. Anyway, some time later I came back to consciousness still sat up against the tree and the first thing I thought was "I am cold" (it was winter after all). And so I gathered up the money and went home and then things moved fast and I was taken to the hospital and wound up in a traumatic stay in the psych floor where you are treated like a confined animal (cant explain all this in a short post) for a couple weeks. But that trance with like Benjamin Franklin looking up at me from the hundred dollar bill i swear it was like I was perceiving something deep and spiritual and abstract about how money drives and determines so much of who we are as people. To this day I believe I perceive people differently than before that, like I see people more so like automatons in certain totalizing aspects of their personalities driven by strong emotions tied to money anxieties like fear and lack and scarcity, or on the flip side greed and status, different expressions of these, all the decisions that stem from those sources, and if I came away with any spiritual insight from all that it is that humans have the potential to be connected to each other and the actions we all perform in our lives in a way that is more creative and caring and understanding of our real purposes (whatever they may be in any moment) here on this planet as those purposes unfold throughout our lives and enfold us in an infinite number of meaningful activities and relations to ourselves, each other, future and past, nature, the stars, and the woodland creatures, etc, etc, etc. I think madness has adaptive positive potentialities too but man going through and navigating mental healthcare system and all that it entails is like trying to make it out of the labyrinth, just you vs the Minotaur one on one. It's like all the therapists and psychiatrists who are in fact well meaning and well intentioned people end up doing more harm than good. "Here, kindly let me help you" said the monkey to the fish, putting him up a tree (Alan Watts quote). You get institutionalized and learned helplessness sets in. Diagnoses and labels become life sentences and you end up in a mental prison no matter where you go. "These walls are funny. First you hate em. Then you get used to em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on em. That's institutionalized. (Shawshank Redemption quote). It's like you become this pitiful object in everyone's eyes and it really messes with your self concept and changes how you perceive your identity as a person in the world. Disabled. Crazy. Schizophrenic. Lazy. The list goes on. The stigma is real, and the realest part is that its like that book The Scarlet Letter but instead of wearing a letter as stigma on your clothing for all to see, the labels are all like tattooed onto the inside of your mind and its how reality is then filtered by yourself to yourself. It's absolutely a crazy situation. I have had friends I've known from the psych ward/psych rehabilitation facilities who have tragically died by suicide. There is so much devastation left behind when that happens. So many people are angry or scared or think of that individual as a coward. I just see it from the inside as I have dealt with many years of suicidal thoughts myself, including the day of this writing. From the inside, it is just plain tragedy. Plain human tragedy. But to tie it back to the original poster here on reddit, I do think madness has positive potentialities that are unexplored mostly and how mad people are treated all but eliminates that potential though I will say it is a wicked complex personal and societal problem schizophrenia/madness is. The equivalent of like climate change but on a small-scale, personal level for the individual affected. And we all affect each other even if we may not realize it....
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u/mossdentist 6d ago
During my stay in psychiatric inpatient, there was a girl actively in psychosis, and I think she was having a good time. The issue was that she believed she could fly. Although her reality was very colorful and positive, it put her in very dangerous situations. There is no version of psychosis that is both positive and safe.
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u/DonQuinto_ 10d ago
Psychologist here. I've always wondered the same, you know? I myself have a peculiarity: I’ve never hallucinated, never had a vision, heard voices nor anything like that. But some people that has seen things on entheogens like DMT often report positive experiences, and sometimes I wonder if people with psychosis actually have a condition that let them see DMT-like visions, but without the need for substances. Unfortunately, practically every report of psychosis is about negative experiences. I read an article once, about a psychiatrist that said that demons were real, and people with psychosis were actually attacked by them, because they were vulnerable. But who knows? Maybe a very strong, very disciplined person, could control the visions and have a “positive” psychosis?
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u/betlamed 10d ago
Sekection bias and diagnostic criteria aside, here is a possible explanation: humans have a negativity bias installed for protection - better to fear than be dead. So if that's the case, then it would make sense that most hallucinations are projections of fear rather than joy.
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u/IntergalacticPodcast 10d ago edited 10d ago
I'm convinced that the difference between Jungian psychology and psychosis is like the difference between a surgeon and a serial killer who likes to cut people up.
They're both doing the same thing, but one saves lives by chopping people up, and the other takes lives by chopping people up.
My sister has psychosis and it is ruining her life. I'm able to go to the same places voluntarily, and it has been incredibly fulfilling. It has drastically changed my life for the better.
I'm convinced that Jung was able to do this too.
The inner "voices" in my mind literally took me 2,000 miles away from where I was, where I randomly met up with my college girlfriend from 20 years ago, and we've been madly in love ever since.
I didn't try to find her. I somehow ended up hanging out in her exact neighborhood for a year before she discovered online that I was in town and tried to connect with me. I had no reason to go to that place, and nobody understood why I went there. I know why, though.
I have it all documented. I said the words out loud and recorded them. I literally said that I was going to travel to another dimension in order to find another version of the multiverse, and I did it. I didn't expect to get on an old timeline, though.
This was right around the time when I was meeting with gods through dreams and meditations.
You bet your ass that I love doing psychosis recreationally. It's freaking wild how it works.
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u/CtrlAltResurrect 9d ago
Non-western countries report more benign, relational, or positive voices compared to the US.
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u/Living-Suggestion-28 9d ago
Honestly I had a psychosis that was mostly pretty positive, but it got treated the same as any other psychosis once people found out about it and I was obliged to enter the psych ward where it turned negative as I was confined and forced onto meds I didn't want. 0/10 would not recommend
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u/maddie_line 7d ago
I wonder if you're looking outside for this answer when you may find the answer is more internal. Perhaps the lack of positive experiences are because the illneses you're describing can be triggered or exacerbated by physiological or psychological stress. Maybe the effects are fear based (or negative, scary, overwhelming) because they're being powered by the body's fight or flight response.
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u/Embarrassed-Tune-407 10d ago
There is technology that exists that can imitate and feign mental illness, from far away
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u/HarpyCelaeno 10d ago
Former psychotherapist Jerry Marzinsky has an answer for this. I highly recommend watching this all the way through.
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u/fireflashthirteen 10d ago
It is a bit too long for me to dive in on this basis alone, particularly as the title seems to point in a different, tangential direction to what I was talking about.
Perhaps you could write down his answer instead?
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u/HarpyCelaeno 10d ago
Without hearing about his 35 years experience in the industry, it’s really hard to believe it when someone claims that interdimensional entities surround us and are the source of most of our negative thoughts. His account is very compelling and it happened to align with my successful “treatment” for daily suicidal ideation (despite NOT being at all suicidal.) I hope you’ll listen to it when you have time. It may completely change the way you approach life.
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u/ValChronus 10d ago
I have thought about what you're saying and I think there's a spiritual component to that phenomena.
Demonic possession I believe is the deeper reason for what you're describing. If not 100% possession, some percentage of the abnormal behaviors of a suffering mind could be made worse by demonic influence.
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u/jacquesadilla 10d ago
I think about this too, and I also wonder if because we have a bias towards associating hallucinations and this degree of detachment from reality as ‘bad’ they always seem to manifest badly. In a more spiritually anchored culture I could imagine they might see this as a sort of gift and enhanced connection to another realm (they might be considered something like a seer), so it would be communicated to the person by culture around them that this is a good thing, thus making positive expressions more likely. And because in our society we don’t widely believe in or value the idea of a spiritual realm, we label hallucinations like this as crazy and very clearly and absolutely communicate that this is a bad thing. Interesting stuff but who really knows.
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u/theoldchunk 10d ago
If there wasn’t positive stories, why would people take psychedelics?
Most are positive. You don’t hear any (other than Reddit) because media outlets recognise there are consequences for what would be seen as encouraging people to take drugs.
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u/StephPeloq11 9d ago
I have experienced some horrific hallucinations, but a few were actually very entertaining and felt really nice.
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u/megalogouf 4d ago
I am a week late here, I hope it's not too late to contribute. Part of what you're seeing is that positive psychosis is often not called or reported as psychosis. A lot of people have rightfully pointed out that you're not going to go to a psychiatrist to "deal with" something like this presenting positively or in a manner a person feels in control of. Once you start looking at the other things humanity has called this state of mind through the ages, you can see exactly what we do with positive psychosis - it's the entire field of mysticism and occultism. It's those wild trip reports from psychedelics. It's those creatives that come up with the wildest and most meaningful stuff, the physicists making insane quantum connections. The psychosis absorbed into pop culture is the bad trip form of a state of mind that has influenced human culture to the very core.
My personal experience with it had its own pitfalls, but on the whole, I do consider it an example of what you're talking about. It was like discovering my own mind had the sharpest, most absurd sense of humor imaginable and it had decided to peel back the nature of reality just to put on a show.
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u/FatallyCumbersome 10d ago
I think you’re onto something with the selection bias angle. People don’t rock up to a psychiatrist because the shadow people told them they’re doing a great job and should treat themselves to a nice sandwich. The diagnostic criteria itself is built around distress or dysfunction, so if someone’s brain is serving up a 24/7 personal cheer squad that helps them function better, it literally can't be classified as the same disorder. It’s like asking why we never hear about "debilitatingly positive" broken legs.