How I Know About Psychosis

I never smoked dope, did cocaine or drank alcohol. But what happened one day was that someone put hash in my cake, unbeknownst to me.  Nothing happened right away so they put a lot more.  One hour later I awoke with a start saying that Bob Dylan was playing inside my body, which of course he was.  When we listen to music it is also a physiologic process going on inside of us.  The hash wiped away all filters so I experienced something with no defenses left.  But that was not the end of the story at all.

I went insane for 20 hours.  I could not stand any input and guided those around me not to input anything; no conversation whatsoever.  Too many trees became overwhelming.  I showed friends how to keep me grounded; still I was nuts. It came out in poetry. I spoke only in poetry for hours.  And I had strange ideas.  The hash might have been innocuous to anyone else but with me and my lack of defenses everything below came to the top; and I sprouted poems that I wrote in my head which was  bubbling with feelings.  It was a benign psychosis but psychosis it was.

Aside from the drug helping me discover and write about the three levels of consciousness, it also gave me insight into psychosis. And we go crazy in line with what lies below.  You know the old saying about mean drunks and nice drunks?  Well, we go crazy in the same way.  Someone filled with rage is going to be a mean nutcase.  In other words when defenses crumble either due to life’s misfortunes or from the use of drugs like hash, the unconscious surges forward.  And it often takes over.  It continuously nudges the top level neo-cortex into action.  The result is often paranoid ideation, someone is trying to hurt me, or they are talking behind my back.  Once it fully takes charge there is very little awareness of what we are thinking or doing.

In my case, I absolutely had no room from any input at all.  Nothing could penetrate, which is why we can never talk someone out of his  psychosis.  We are not talking to the rational mind; we are addressing a brain that is flooded with symbols of his life.  It is not a matter of what ideas the psychotic is using; they are in the service of defenses.  They are an attempt to rationalize the potpourri of feelings rising to the top.  These ideas are essential and are not to be tampered with; surely not to be talked out of.  We need to see strange ideas in the context of the gestalt, of the overall function of the brain.

  We see all this when someone takes an hallucinogen which does pretty much the same thing, unleashing feelings.  Once out of the flooding state we are rational again and can become aware of how we reacted.  It is also true when someone has a transitory psychosis due to drugs; they suddenly get rational when the drug wears off.  But in true psychosis there is nothing to wear off.  The gates have been shattered and cannot close up easily.  That is the danger of most drugs including marijuana.  The chronic use of marijuana produces a paranoid personality.  Not only have I seen it over and over but there are many studies out there that come to the same conclusion.  Marijuana over time becomes dangerous.  It makes sense since any continuous alteration in the brain’s chemistry and routing will eventually produce damage and/or impairment.

   The brain is a most delicate structure, never to be fooled with.  We often don’t see psychosis here because this kind of psychosis is not so blatant.  Let me give an example.  We have friends in Europe who insist that someone (a movie star) was murdered.  Every bit of information pointed to a suicide.  But they would not accept it. They smoked pot every day of their lives.  The result was manufacturing notions that had no basis in reality……a benign psychosis.  In real psychosis the paranoid ideation is much more bizarre because it is driven by imprints very deep down in the neuraxis.  When an imprint evolves from deep in the brain it is heavy; because of its whopping valence the ideas it drives must perforce be far out and strange.  So we can be strange and slightly nuts or be a florid type of psychosis.  Choose your poison but be careful of marijuana; it is not innocuous in any way at all. Believe me I am not a moralist.    But I want to save mental health.  Marijuana is not the way.  I know that it temporarily eases repression in those who are intellectual and deeply repressed.  It makes you feel at ease … normal … for a time.  Much better to get to your feelings in a systematic way and not need drugs at all.