I lived in a student housing cooperative for 3 years during my undergrad experience. These were non-rationalists. I lived with 14 people, then 35, then 35 (somewhat overlapping) people.
In these 3 years I saw 3 people go through a period of psychosis.
Once it was because of whippets, basically, and updated me very very strongly away from nitrous oxide being safe (it potentiates response to itself, so there’s a positive feedback loop, and positive feedback loops in biology are intrinsically scary). Another time it was because the young man was almost too autistic to function in social environments and then feared that he’d insulted a woman and would be cast out of polite society for “that action and also for overreacting to the repercussions of the action”. The last person was a mixture of marijuana and having his Christianity fall apart after being away from the social environment of his upbringing.
A striking thing about psychosis is that up close it really seems more like a biological problem rather than a philosophic one, whereas I had always theorized naively that there would be something philosophically interesting about it, with opportunities to learn or teach in a way that connected to the altered “so-called mental state”.
I saw two of the three cases somewhat closely, and it wasn’t “this person believes something false, in a way that maybe they could be talked out of” (which was my previous model of “being crazy”). It was more like “this human body has a brain that is executing microinstructions that might be part of a human-like performance of some coherent motion of the soul, if it progressed statefully, but instead it is a highly stuttering, almost stateless loop of nearly pure distress, repeating words over and over, and forgetting things within 2 seconds of hearing them, and calming itself, but then forgetting why it calmed itself, and then forgetting that it forgot, and so on, with very very obvious dysfunction”.
I rarely talk about any of it out of respect for their privacy, but this is so long ago that anyone who can figure out who I’m talking about at this point (from what I’ve said) probably also knows the events in question.
It seemed almost indecent to have observed it, and it feels wrong to discuss, out of respect for their personhood. Which maybe doesn’t make sense, but that is simply part of the tone of these memories. Two of the three left college and never came back, and another took a week off in perhaps a hotel or something, with parental support. People who were there spoke of it in hushed tones. It was spiritually scary.
My understanding is that base rates for schizophrenia are roughly 1% or 2% cross culturally, and are often on the introverted side of things. Also I think that many people rarely talk about the experiences (that they saw others go though, or that they went through), so you could know people who saw or experienced such things… and they might be very unlikely to ever volunteer their observations.
it wasn’t “this person believes something false, in a way that maybe they could be talked out of” (which was my previous model of “being crazy”). It was more like “this human body has a brain that is executing microinstructions
Feels like there’s more to the story here. Two of the cases you gave do sound like they had some mental thing (Christianity, social fear) that precipitated the psychosis, even if the psychosis itself was non-mental.
I lived in a student housing cooperative for 3 years during my undergrad experience. These were non-rationalists. I lived with 14 people, then 35, then 35 (somewhat overlapping) people.
In these 3 years I saw 3 people go through a period of psychosis.
Once it was because of whippets, basically, and updated me very very strongly away from nitrous oxide being safe (it potentiates response to itself, so there’s a positive feedback loop, and positive feedback loops in biology are intrinsically scary). Another time it was because the young man was almost too autistic to function in social environments and then feared that he’d insulted a woman and would be cast out of polite society for “that action and also for overreacting to the repercussions of the action”. The last person was a mixture of marijuana and having his Christianity fall apart after being away from the social environment of his upbringing.
A striking thing about psychosis is that up close it really seems more like a biological problem rather than a philosophic one, whereas I had always theorized naively that there would be something philosophically interesting about it, with opportunities to learn or teach in a way that connected to the altered “so-called mental state”.
I saw two of the three cases somewhat closely, and it wasn’t “this person believes something false, in a way that maybe they could be talked out of” (which was my previous model of “being crazy”). It was more like “this human body has a brain that is executing microinstructions that might be part of a human-like performance of some coherent motion of the soul, if it progressed statefully, but instead it is a highly stuttering, almost stateless loop of nearly pure distress, repeating words over and over, and forgetting things within 2 seconds of hearing them, and calming itself, but then forgetting why it calmed itself, and then forgetting that it forgot, and so on, with very very obvious dysfunction”.
I rarely talk about any of it out of respect for their privacy, but this is so long ago that anyone who can figure out who I’m talking about at this point (from what I’ve said) probably also knows the events in question.
It seemed almost indecent to have observed it, and it feels wrong to discuss, out of respect for their personhood. Which maybe doesn’t make sense, but that is simply part of the tone of these memories. Two of the three left college and never came back, and another took a week off in perhaps a hotel or something, with parental support. People who were there spoke of it in hushed tones. It was spiritually scary.
My understanding is that base rates for schizophrenia are roughly 1% or 2% cross culturally, and are often on the introverted side of things. Also I think that many people rarely talk about the experiences (that they saw others go though, or that they went through), so you could know people who saw or experienced such things… and they might be very unlikely to ever volunteer their observations.
Thanks for this account.
Feels like there’s more to the story here. Two of the cases you gave do sound like they had some mental thing (Christianity, social fear) that precipitated the psychosis, even if the psychosis itself was non-mental.