alt Hacker NewsHaving dealt with a few people with schizophrenia, either diagnosed, or clearly exhibiting many of the symptoms and refusing to engage with medical professionals until I cut off relationships for my own safety. I think something really sad was happening here.
In fact, in a bout of lucidness, he tried to take his own life because "Elijah had left him". That's horrid.
The people I have known have hurt themselves and took actions that were designed to hurt others - physically, emotionally, in one case financially - because they believed in a higher order. Sometimes, that higher order was, errr, me. [1]
If the story of saving his son's life is true, that's marvellous and mysterious and wonderful. But the surgery referred to at the start of the surgery sounds like it introduced an infection and/or change in brain function somehow, and he suffered with the consequences the rest of his life.
As an aside, it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles. Perhaps its popularity, or because it was a step change in how music was written and produced, but I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album. Now this with Strawberry fields. Don't know what to make of it, just an odd data point.
[1] These people felt I was controlling their mind, I could read their mind, I was instructing them, and so on. I was just having a chat down the pub with them, nothing more (but then, if I were a mystic being trying to do my work through others I would say that, wouldn't I?). The common factor in all these men (and they were all men < 35 years old at the time), was heavy cannabis use, particularly in teen years. This is now well documented in literature as being linked to schizophrenia.
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The surgery was just the extraction of a wisdom tooth. If Philip K. Dick was brain damaged, it probably wasn't from that, but from the years of heavy drug use (he praised/romanticized LSD, but by most accounts he didn't take it more than a few times - meth was his drug).
>I was watching something the other night that mentioned just how obsessed Manson was with the White album
IIRC Manson thought the song "Helter Skelter" referred to some sort of apocalypse. In fact, it is just a name for a children's helical slide that used to be popular in British fairgrounds!
I have close family with schizoaffective disorder. It sucks.
A big part of it, is seeing “connections,” in everything.
Every newspaper article, every radio ad, every person glancing your way, is a “message.” Sometimes, it’s good, but usually, it’s bad. They’re “plotting to kill me,” or “spying on me.”
People like that, are uniquely susceptible to suggestions from sycophantic LLMs, which can be disastrous.
I used up my quota of acid, before I was 18. It’s basically “temporary schizophrenia.”
PKD remained surprisingly lucid and self aware of the likelihood of suffering from some sort of mental illness. He went back and forth the rest of his life trying to figure out whether he was insane or whether he'd had "real" spiritual experiences. But as the characters in his books learn, there may not even be a clear distinction between the two.
From VALIS (which was largely based on his experiences):
> What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
> Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese finger trap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.
> People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.
> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.
> it's weird how many stories of mental hallucinations are tied to the music of the Beatles
I think Lennon once made the claim that he had taken acid 1000 times. So it lines up.
Having experienced a temporary period like this as a result of cannabis use, it really doesn't help when people you know who didn't previously talk start sharing their concerns with each other. Filtering out the 'connections' in ordinary everyday stuff described by another poster is hard enough without having to speculate whether something you said to one person is causing someone else to act weird. It also makes it hard to seek out mental health resources, because you stop trusting them too.