Schizophrenia Love Quotes

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.

Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.

It's a very strange reality when you can't trust yourself. There's no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can't possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it's empty because you're not actually sure if it is or not. To never feel completely alone even when you are.

Kiss me twice, I am schizophrenic .. Kiss me ten times, I am obsessive!

According to Charles Olsen, the best poetry is a kind of schizophrenia. The poem does not "express" the poet's thoughts or feelings. It is "a transfer of energy between the poet and the reader".

Look, I owe you a kind of explanation. I know you probably think I’m a horrid bitch from the plant Schizophrenia, but I’m honestly not trying to mess with your head. I’m just messing with my own head and I seem to have dragged you along the ride. I think you’re nice to me and that scares the fuck out of me. Because when a guy’s a jerk or an asshole, it’s easier because you know exactly where you stand. Since trust isn’t an option, you don’t have to get all freaked out about maybe having to trust him. Right now I am thinking about ten things at the same time, and at least four of those things have to do with you. If you want to leave right now and drive home and forget my name and forget what I look like, I wouldn’t blame you in the least. But what I’m trying to say is that if you did that I would be sorry. And not just sorry in an I-apologize-I’m-so-sorry way, but sorry in a sad-that-something-that-could’ve-happened-didn’t way. That’s it. You can go now. Or we could stay for Where’s Fluffy when Toni’s set is over. I think they’re playing a surprise show here tonight.

And in every one of us, there's a war going on. It's a civil war. I don't care who you are, I don't care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life. And every time you set out to be good, there's something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It's going on in your life. Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them. There's a civil war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us. And there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us...There's a tension at the heart of human nature. And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it.

Love me, hate me, hurt me or kill me. I keep fighting.

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some- one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other.

This is the story of V and me. Look. Each person has the possibilities of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives. The good family man doesn’t have a sense of responsibility. Simultaneously, he’s my angel. Simultaneously, his family’s a pack of incontinent dogs. In front of men such as him who believe they’re respectable, I love to talk about who they really are, the people they don’t want to know and socially and politically chastise. Look. I have loved and worshiped a pig. This society hates and locks up its madness because they hate and lock up themselves. I know the system of schizophrenia. Nevertheless I loved a pig and couldn’t stop.

What I rather wish to say is that the humanity we all share is more important than the mental illness we may not. With proper treatment, someone who is mentally ill can lead a full and rich life. What makes life wonderful--good friends, a satisfying job, loving relationships--is just as valuable for those of us who struggle with schizophrenia as for anyone else.

If a person can accept reality as it is, in that very acceptance, all tension disappears. Anguish, anxiety, despair—they all simply evaporate. And when there is no anxiety, no tension, no fragmentariness, no division, no schizophrenia, then suddenly there is joy. Then suddenly there is love, then suddenly there is compassion. These are not ideals; these are very natural phenomena.

The schizophrenic... will suddenly burst out with the most incredible details of your life, things that you would never imagine anyone could know and he will tell you in the most abrupt way truths that you believed to be absolutely secret," Félix said in an interview with Caroline Laure and Vittorio Marchetti (Chaosophy). Schizophrenics aren't sunk into themselves. Associatively, they're hyperactive. The world gets cremy like a library. And schizophrenics are the most generous of scholars because they're emotionally right there, they don't just formulate, observe. They're willing to become the situated person's expectations. "The schizophrenic has lightning access to you," Félix continued. "He internalizes all the links between you, makes them part of his subjective system." This is empathy to the highest power: the schizophrenic turns into a seer, then enacts that vision through his or her becoming. But when doen empathy turn into dissolution?

We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches--the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small--the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia--life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam.

Had he truly loved his wife, or in Sutcliffe’s world of paranoid schizophrenia, had she been the anchor that’d kept him from setting sail into complete insanity?

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channles might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.

Besides, it is doubtful that incest was a real obstacle to the establishment of society, as the partisans of an exchangist conception claim...The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire...is capable of calling into question the established order of society...it is revolutionary in its essence...It is therefore of vital importance for a society to repress desire, and even to find something more efficient than repression, so that repression, hierarchy, exploitation, and servitude are themselves desired...that does not at all mean that desire is something other than sexuality, but that sexuality and love do not live in the bedroom of Oedipus, they dream instead of wide-open spaces, and...do not let themselves be stocked within an established order.

There is something about being loved and protected by a parent (or guardian) knowing that I can be loved for who I am, not what I can do, or might one day become. Unfortunately it’s not usually like this in every single situation. From time to time, my parents made mistakes during my childhood. Possibly I was the mistake, or unwanted. But I don’t know. I had every material thing that I could have ever wanted, but there was still something missing, as if I felt distanced from my parents, or misunderstood, in the ways that they treated me. At times, I had felt completely loved and accepted by my parents, but for one reason or another, they were unable to care for me, provide for me, in some ways that would have been very important. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to make up for the experiences in life that were absent when I was a child.

It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It’s the Chris Farley of technologies.

Yet he would always know what was happening, no matter how crazy he appeared. He would register fear and humiliation – his or others' – and love and anger. He remembered it all.

This is what schizophrenia is: endless despair, endless, inconclusive treatment; endless clutching at little straws of betterness; endless realisation that that is all they are, is all there is.

Logan looked at her and wondered how someone so beautiful could be so oblivious to their own beauty, how someone so smart could be so foolish to the extent of their own intellect and how someone so loving and compassionate could ever think she wasn’t worthy of love? It was like watching a blind man trapped and wandering aimlessly and helplessly in a scorching hot desert unable to see the small puddle of water that lay just a foot away. The only difference was that she had eyes. Two beautiful ones, yet she could not see. Is that what madness was? Was it to be able to view and appreciate every form of beauty but to be blind to the value and exquisiteness of one’s own? Logan believed in many forms of insanity but he knew in that instant watching her trembling frame on the train tracks that hers, that her illness, surpassed any clinical or psychological term known. Maybe she did suffer from depression or bipolar or schizophrenia. Who knew? All he was certain of in that moment that she suffered from no greater illness than the blindness of the heart.

Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

That’s what family stories were—amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

Yet we know enough about schizophrenia now to understand that it is a physical malfunctioning of the brain, in which genetics, chemistry and environment interact in fathomless permutations. We know that schizophrenia is an illness; it is nobody's fault; it could happen to any one of us, or to those we love.

But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It's a cathedral. It's an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair hope... What if I get no answer there? If God hasn't spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don't be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger ...

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channels might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

In subsequent experiences I frequently found the mothers of schizophrenic children to be extraordinarily narcissistic individuals like Mrs. X. This is not to say that such mothers are always narcissistic or that narcissistic mothers can’t raise non-schizophrenic children. Schizophrenia is an extremely complex disorder, with obvious genetic as well as environmental determinants. But one can imagine the depth of confusion in Susan’s childhood produced by her mother’s narcissism, and one can objectively see this confusion when actually observing narcissistic mothers interact with their children. On an afternoon when Mrs. X. was feeling sorry for herself Susan might have come home from school bringing some of her paintings the teacher had graded A. If she told her mother proudly how she was progressing in art, Mrs. X. might well respond: “Susan, go take a nap. You shouldn’t get yourself so exhausted over your work in school. The school system is no good anymore. They don’t care for children anymore.” On the other hand, on an afternoon when Mrs. X. was in a very cheerful mood Susan might have come home in tears over the fact that she had been bullied by several boys on the school bus, and Mrs. X. could say: “Isn’t it fortunate that Mr. Jones is such a good bus driver? He is so nice and patient with all you children and your roughhousing. I think you should be sure to give him a nice little present at Christmastime.” Since they do not perceive others as others but only as extensions of themselves, narcissistic

How could I love a man as uptight as Nathan Edwards and still have a raging crush on someone as wicked as Ronnie Radke? Maybe I am an undiagnosed schizophrenic. That’s what happened to Jamie Foxx’s character in The Soloist. One day, he’s a gifted musical student at Julliard, and the next day he’s toting his cello through the streets of Los Angeles, disoriented and muttering to himself. “What are you thinking, Vivian?” I drop my hand and look at my best friend. “Nothing.” “Vivian?” I grimace. “Do you think I have schizophrenia?” Fanny tosses her pillow at me. “Shut up!

You’ve dated a shoplifter. A drug addict. A girl who claimed that her roommate kept her locked in a dumpster. She was admitted to Mulberry not too long ago, if I recall, right? They diagnosed her with schizophrenia.” Reece nodded reluctantly. “For the record, I only dated her for two months. And also for the record, she’s doing a lot better.” “Hmm,” Camden replied. “There’s the one who put salt on all her food then complained incessantly of bloating problems. Oh yeah! And the one who wanted you to tie her up and beat the shit out of her every night.” “All right already!” Reece snapped. “I get it. I haven’t had the best of luck with normal women.

There was almost certainly a genetic contribution to Einstein’s dopaminergic traits. One of his two sons became an internationally recognized expert on hydraulic engineering. The other was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of twenty, and died in an asylum. Large population studies have also found a genetic component of a dopaminergic character. An Icelandic study that evaluated the genetic profile of over 86,000 people discovered that individuals who carried genes that placed them at greater risk for either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were more likely to belong to a national society of actors, dancers, musicians, visual artists, or writers.

If you can imagine this, perhaps you can understand that someone from another planet who came to visit us would have a similar experience with humans. But it isn’t our skin that is full of wounds. What the visitor would discover is that the human mind is sick with a disease called fear. Just like the description of the infected skin, the emotional body is full of wounds, and these wounds are infected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer. All humans are mentally sick with the same disease. We can even say that this world is a mental hospital. But this mental disease has been in this world for thousands of years, and the medical books, the psychiatric books, and the psychology books describe the disease as normal. They consider it normal, but I can tell you it is not normal. When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can no longer take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books we call this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but these diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and the wounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outside world. Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big drama wherever we go. The way humans relate to each other is so emotionally painful that for no apparent reason we get angry, jealous, envious, sad. To even say “I love you” can be frightening. But even if it’s painful and fearful to have an emotional interaction, still we keep going, we enter into a relationship, we get married, and we have children. In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system. In that denial system we become the perfect liars. We lie so perfectly that we lie to ourselves and we even believe our own lies. We don’t notice we are lying, and sometimes even when we know we are lying, we justify the lie and excuse the lie to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

Why do families blame themselves? If so many of the family theories have been discredited why spend so much time on the issue here? Family theories in mental illness continue to exercise a remarkably powerful hold over us despite the evidence. And not just in schizophrenia but in depression, anorexia nervosa, personality disorder, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. Parents seem to have an endless capacity to blame themselves for what happens to their children (and perhaps children to blame their parents). This is probably because we need to believe it. Just as we need to believe in free will and our influence on the outside world, family members need to believe that they influence each other. If we didn’t why would we bother? The evolutionary psychologists would say that parents need to believe it to invest years and years bringing up their children. We’re biologically programmed to look after our children so we need some belief system to support it (just as they might say we’re biologically programmed to mate and need to believe in love to support it). It is proposed that such a belief is a mechanism for sustaining our attention to our biological task. The downside is, of course, guilt and blame. If we believe we have an influence we feel we have failed if things do not work out well. It is inescapable. Even in expressed emotion work where therapists insist emphatically that no one is to blame and that the aim is solely to find more effective coping strategies, families do feel blamed. ‘If only we weren’t so over-involved he would not have so many relapses.’ ‘Other families must have dealt with it better otherwise how would the therapist know what to advise?’ For some families feeling responsible, despite the guilt, is preferable. It implies the logical consequence that there must be something they can do to influence the outcome. Cultures which value resignation are less likely to blame themselves (high expressed emotion is less common in India than in Europe).

SCULLEY. Pepsi executive recruited by Jobs in 1983 to be Apple’s CEO, clashed with and ousted Jobs in 1985. JOANNE SCHIEBLE JANDALI SIMPSON. Wisconsin-born biological mother of Steve Jobs, whom she put up for adoption, and Mona Simpson, whom she raised. MONA SIMPSON. Biological full sister of Jobs; they discovered their relationship in 1986 and became close. She wrote novels loosely based on her mother Joanne (Anywhere but Here), Jobs and his daughter Lisa (A Regular Guy), and her father Abdulfattah Jandali (The Lost Father). ALVY RAY SMITH. A cofounder of Pixar who clashed with Jobs. BURRELL SMITH. Brilliant, troubled hardware designer on the original Mac team, afflicted with schizophrenia in the 1990s. AVADIS “AVIE” TEVANIAN. Worked with Jobs and Rubinstein at NeXT, became chief software engineer at Apple in 1997. JAMES VINCENT. A music-loving Brit, the younger partner with Lee Clow and Duncan Milner at the ad agency Apple hired. RON WAYNE. Met Jobs at Atari, became first partner with Jobs and Wozniak at fledgling Apple, but unwisely decided to forgo his equity stake. STEPHEN WOZNIAK. The star electronics geek at Homestead High; Jobs figured out how to package and market his amazing circuit boards and became his partner in founding Apple. DEL YOCAM. Early Apple employee who became the General Manager of the Apple II Group and later Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. INTRODUCTION How This Book Came to Be In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I’d worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn’t heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him to speak at our summer campus in Colorado. He’d be happy to come, he said, but not to be onstage. He wanted instead to take a walk so that we could talk. That seemed a bit odd. I didn’t yet

What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically? I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer’s picnic, clutching her big sister’s hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of watermelon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer’s day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It’s true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child’s body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out [Spinoza’s] Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me. Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can’t undergo and still continue to be herself. Would I then be someone else or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be I who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one? Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? In this passage from Betraying Spinoza, the philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (to whom I am married) explains the philosophical puzzle of personal identity, one of the problems that engaged the Dutch-Jewish thinker who is the subject of her book.5 Like her fellow humanist Dawkins, Goldstein analyzes the vertiginous enigma of existence and death, but their styles could not be more different—a reminder of the diverse ways that the resources of language can be deployed to illuminate a topic.

Creating stories is like breathing for me. With one foot or at least a toe always grounded in my imagination, I am never fully in reality. Even when I am asleep, my stories unfold like a movie in my head. This is a good form of schizophrenia.

The trauma of Down's syndrome is that it is present prenatally and can therefore undermine the early stages of bonding. The challenge of autism is that it sets in or is detected in the toddler years, and so transfigures the child to whom parents have already bonded. The shock of schizophrenia is that it manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood, and parents must accept that the child they have known and loved for more than a decade may be irrevocably lost, even as that child looks much the same as ever.

Ah, yes, insanity.  Such a lovely defense.  Let them call it schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder or just plain nuts… I call it getting away with murder. 

But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope… What if I get no answer there? If god hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Isaiah.

Christian psychiatrists have examined exorcism for the treatment of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders, although they do not report good results with these conditions.

Now if we turn to the Book of Revelation—which we saw as a cause of offense in its apparent celebration of a God of violence—we have to say in all honesty that it is in fact a nonviolent New Testament writing, and profoundly so. ‘The Lamb’ is the general symbolic name given to Jesus in the book, mentioned 29 times, an image of nonviolence and the book’s undisputed hero. The essence of the Lamb is not to use violence. When we first hear of it is ‘standing as if it had been slaughtered’ (5:6): it does not fight, it is slaughtered, and it continues exactly ‘as if it were something slaughtered (i.e. it does not lose this identity). Furthermore its followers do not fight, they also are killed. We learn that the Lamb holds the key to human history, opening its seals to reveal its purpose and meaning, including its intense inner violence. The Lamb is able to do this because it represents a completely different human / divine way of responding, other than that of violence. At the same time, precisely because of this revelation, all hell (literally) breaks out around the Lamb. The old world system—the Beast—does not remain indifferent to the introduction of a new way and the absolute challenge it makes, but reacts with continually redoubled violence. At the end of the book there is a final battle when the Beast and the kings of the earth with their armies are all slain by a figure called the Word of God, by the sword which comes from his mouth. But directly afterwards the new earth and the city of the Lamb welcome and heal these very kings and nations which have just been slain! The only figures not to be restored are the Beast and its prophet which represent the system of violence, the imperial order with its ideological apparatus of cult and worship. No doubt there is a powerful tonality of anger running through the book, against the oppression and murder that the Christian communities were then experiencing at the hands of the Roman Empire. And there is pretty clearly a sense of emotional release offered by the images of destruction and vengeance unleashed against the forces of oppression. But the final structure of the book is redemptive and life-giving, and that has to be admitted in any honest assessment. The duality then is not between a vengeful God and a gentle Jesus, or an initially gentle Jesus and then a violent one, but between an actual world and culture of violence and a core message of forgiveness and nonviolence. The early Christians were sorely oppressed by the former and seeking desperately to hang on to the latter. If they use language and symbolism derived from the former to restore hope in the substance of the latter then the tension is literary and poetic, rather than two moods or identities of God. The book of Revelation was intended to have a cathartic effect on emotion, in order that the Christians who read or heard it could arrive, in their minds and hearts, at the transformed perspective where they welcomed and blessed their enemies. In other words it was and is intended to be therapeutic.3 In contrast the split between Jesus and a God of punishment—which came to full growth in the Middle Ages—is ontological, and can only lead to a fundamental division in the Christian soul, with eternal love on the one hand, and eternal violence on the other. In other words, a spiritual schizophrenia. This

He is God. As our Maker and providential Ruler, his interests and writ extend to every aspect of our being, beliefs, utterances, and conduct. Thus to preserve some horrible tension between our belief systems and our conduct is not only an invitation to schizophrenia, it is also an insult against God, a horrible rebellion no less ugly for being selective. This means that our teaching and preaching must include not only truths to be believed, but also instruction on how to live.

We knew each other, we lived together, we loved together, and we were having a good time together. I hadn’t been this happy in a long time. We had plenty of destiny. If we played our cards right, we could reach the stars in this beautiful generation and never come down in a million years of rolling eternity.

So I start whispering my tale of marital woe to Jack, who sits in the hunched posture of somebody tensing against a blow. Occasionally, he’ll tug a red curl over the crease in his forehead. Eventually, I wind down and ask, what should I do? And I wait for the word salad of his scrambled cortex to spew forth. Instead, his eyes meet mine evenly, and he says—as it seems everybody says—You should pray about it. But what if I don’t believe in God? It’s like they’ve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can’t will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this: Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. It’s a cathedral. It’s an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope… What if I get no answer there? If God hasn’t spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Don’t be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. But I have to go to a meeting and make the chairs circle perfect. He kisses his index finger and plants it in the middle of my forehead, and I swear it burns like it had eucalyptus on it. Like a coal from the archangel onto the mouth of Moses.

Schizophrenia affects many people, both the people with the disorder and those who love and support them. Research is continuing and as advances in medical knowledge continue there is an increasingly likelihood that the disorder can be successfully treated

We think that there are people who are normal over here, and then there’s the pathological ones who have depression, anxiety, addiction or schizophrenia or Bipolar disorder or ADHD or any number of other conditions. What I see is a continuum; that we are all on a continuum. These traits to one degree or another are present in almost everybody. And it’s a mythology to think that there’s the normal and then there’s the abnormal. According to the research the best place to be a schizophrenic in the world is not North America with all its pharmacopoeia. It’s actually a village in Africa or India - where there’s acceptance, where people make room for your differentness, where connection is not broken but is maintained, where you’re not excluded and ostracized but where you’re welcomed. And where there’s room for you to act out whatever you need to act out or to express whatever you need to express - where the whole community would sing with you or chant with you or hold ceremony with you, and maybe find some meaning in your “craziness”. So, it’s contextual and it’s cultural. So, disease is not an isolated phenomenon of an individual - it’s in fact culturally manufactured or culturally constructed. A society that cuts us off from our spirituality; that cuts us off from society by idealizing individualism, and by destroying social contexts (which is what our society does), ignoring our emotional needs - it’s going to be a society that generates pathology. And I think that has to do with the very nature of the economic system that says that what matters is not who you are, but how you’re valued by others. It’s a materialistic society, which specifically means that what we value is not who people are, but what they produce and what they consume. And the people that neither consume nor produce are shunned to the side and they’re totally devalued. Hence the rejection of the old and the poor because they no longer pursue to produce and they’re not rich enough to consume a lot either. So the very nature of this materialistic society dictates or generates and promotes the separation from ourselves. There is an intelligence - I’m not speaking of an operative creature up there or out there somewhere doing things and deciding things. But there is an intelligence in Nature and creation that if we ignore we create suffering for ourselves and other people. And aligning with that intelligence and aligning with that connection is really how we’re meant to be. Whether we do so consciously or whether we do so because we’re called to do that which manifests compassion, connection and love - that’s the way we’re meant to be. So, recognizing that and striving for that is what I call spirituality. Fundamentally, there’s this spiritual nature that if we ignore it we’re actually ignoring an essential part of ourselves.

There is a foundational need inherent in every human person to love someone and to be loved. The self is completed and integrated and wholesome only when there is rapport with others. Mental hospitals are full of people who cannot communicate with others. They distrust, dislike, hate, and finally withdraw from the world of other persons. The condition is called schizophrenia. The need for fellowship is much deeper than sentiment; it is basic to mental health and ultimately to truly human existence. It is not the totally independent person who is the epitome of strength, but precisely the person who is capable of responsible mutual interrelatedness with others while at the same time maintaining a sharp and growing self-identity.

I think Marilyn was a very sick woman, a classic schizophrenic,” said Johnny Strasberg, son of Lee and Paula. “She was dedicated to love. It’s a thing schizophrenics talk about, love. They’ll do anything for love and, additionally, they are totally infantile; they have no ego, no boundaries, as the rest of us have. The amazing thing about her is that she survived as long as she did. There was enough capacity for life that had she been lucky enough to find a therapist who could treat her problems, she might have… That’s the tragedy. People loved her. But nobody could say no to her. No one would or could take responsibility for her. They had to cut her off or abandon her, which is the thing she expected. With Marilyn, you’re dealing with an abandoned infant who’s not an infant anymore.

If creativity is more important than being able to maintain a sense of reality, I could make a plausible argument for remaining psychotic, but the price of doing so is one that neither I nor my loved ones are likely to choose to pay.

This world is truly extraordinary, filled with a captivating mix of people and things that possess both good and bad qualities. The erratic and unpredictable nature of this world is what makes it so appealing and interesting, as it is full of both the crazy and cruel, as well as the lovely and kind. It is alluring in its ability to mystify us time and again, and evoke within us the power of emotion, be it joy, pain, or something in between. It is a world I am proud to take part in, and so I love it dearly.

While it may be tempting to surrender and accept eternal solitude, perseverance pays off when one discovers genuine companionship and experiences the satisfaction of accomplishing something worthwhile.

But I begin to humanise him – to try and understand him, to realise that a person’s life is a complicated process, and that nobody is all good or all bad.  To forgive.  And my reward is that my efforts at forgiveness make me feel a little better internally.  Forgiveness, in the end, is essential to recovery.  In my case, I have finally realised that if you hate the seed that begot you, it is difficult to love yourself.  Now, at last, I am beginning to heal.

We would finally have to confront our moral schizophrenia about animals, which leads us to love some animals, treat them as members of our family, and never once doubt their sentience, emotional capacity, self-awareness, or personhood, but at the same time we stick dinner forks into other animals who are indistinguishable in any relevant sense from our animal companions.

But that was just Brendan and Emily. Two people who simultaneously loved one another too much and not enough. Insanity is defined by repeating the same act while expecting a different result. Schizophrenia made insanity easy on Emily, though. Love is like a shadow. You see it right in front of your eyes, but it isn’t really there. Is it?

So, again, with Kekkonen, we see how difficult it is for the Finns to maintain democracy. They are too inclined to follow and trust their leaders, they are disinclined to stand out from the crowd and risk social opprobrium, or, rather, there are too few per capita people who are prepared to behave in such a way or support those who are prepared to. Moreover, it could be argued that Kekkonen successfully took advantage of a kind of paranoia among the Finns. As we have discussed, they are relatively high in schizophrenia, meaning that the average Finn is further along the schizotypy spectrum than is the average person in many European countries. This would mean that a higher proportion of Finns, with their very high empathy, would read too much into the external signs of the mind of the Soviet Union and thus become paranoid, prepared to assume that an indication of displeasure was in fact an indication of fury, possibly leading to invasion. ‘Only President Kekkonen can deal with this crisis’ they might reason, ‘so I must support him.’ But, in reality, there isn’t really a crisis at all.

This era when everything was working out almost made the last few years feel worth it. Or, rather, had he not been through all that he had, he certainly wouldn't have loved those days as much as he now could.

MAGIC secret. It was a prime example of the brutal choices that codebreakers must live with. Do you take risks to keep a secret that may save hundreds of thousands of future lives, or do you expose the secret to save a small number of lives right now? William once referred to this broad dilemma as “cryptologic schizophrenia,” adding, “What to do? Thus far, no real psychiatric or psychoanalytic cure has been found for the illness.

Akathisia's stygian abyss, where immeasurable restlessness tears the matrix of the psyche apart, is where beauty, love, and resilience find their most resolute expression. Even though Akathisia makes the body a puppet to an unseen puppeteer and the soul a vessel adrift in turbulent seas, human strength is the ability to find grace amidst chaos, cultivate love in desolate landscapes, and summon resilience in the face of despair and deterioration. Thus, amid mental and physical anguish, humanity's indomitable spirit transforms suffering into a crucible that yields a transcendent understanding of beauty, love, and the will to overcome. We become wise, compassionate, and resilient through suffering in this crucible.