How Psychotic Am I?

Statement:  I believe that the voices that I hear within my mind are from a real and highly intelligent source and are not audio hallucinations.

Psychiatrists and some therapists would probably say that I am deluded about my audio hallucinations.  They would say that I am psychotic, though no longer acutely so.

So how psychotic am I?  How much of what I write about has common sense intelligence in it and how much is just off the wall insanity?  I'm hoping that most people can follow my thought process in my writing, that I come across as basically sane, even trustworthy.  I hope for that because I want to be of help to others and I can't do that if I'm not making sense.  So I don't write about my voices much because I know to do so would be to lose what small credibility I have to begin with.  Now that I think of it, this is misleading because I am leaving out a key ingredient of my daily experience.

There are people who hear voices who are not psychotic and those that don't hear voices who are psychotic.  I started out hearing voices before I became delusional and paranoid and they were basically non harming and even helpful.  It's when the voices became intrusive and manipulative that I quickly became psychotic.  I believed in the delusions and paranoia and the voices took on many roles from sadistic to benevolent.  While I was acutely psychotic I interacted with the voices in a way that I no longer do.  The medications appear to have given me some distance from them and a sense of quiet space to reflect on my daily experiences.  But even with the distance, the voices are another layer of awareness in addition to my own awareness; I know I am never alone in my mind and experience.

I'm assuming that those of you who don't hear voices must take that last sentence and dismiss it as not real.  That's too bad because then you can't see into my world or rather what you do see is just a fraction of what is there.  If you were brave enough to suspend your disbelief and consider what it means to have voices that are not audio hallucinations, what would you find?  You tell me.

The voices are as constant to me as the rising and setting of the sun and as real as the blue sky that always resides behind the clouds.  But like the mind, they have no visible substance.  There is no concrete proof that these voices that I hear come from actual beings.  But if there were proof what would it mean for the consciousness of the whole world?  It would mean different things for different people.  Finally, we would have to stop imagining ourselves as alone in the universe.  But that these beings could somehow enter into our collective consciousness and into individual minds might not be so reassuring especially when the messengers are the mentally ill.

Am I doing people who believe their voices are audio hallucinations a disservice?  Shouldn't I be saying to them it's all just a genetic defect, a biochemical glitch?  I do believe that genetics and biochemistry are involved in developing psychotic disorders, but I would not be being honest if I said that that was the end of the story; being honest is what keeps me in recovery.  I can't lie about what I feel in my bones is true, but I have long since given up trying to prove my belief.  I can't prove it and it's been a relief to stop trying.  I've found that the people who are most sick are the ones who obsess on trying to prove their position.  At some point, you have to let go.  Letting go is a spiritual practice.

Still I believe that mental illness and recovery from mental illness is a psycho-spiritual process, one that requires that you stand up for yourself.  If you don't stand up for yourself, for your basic goodness, there's a good chance that you could be swallowed whole by the negative aspects of the illness.  Too many people turn to suicide or other forms of self-harm and many of those people wind up in and out of psychiatric hospitals or wards unable to live independently for any length of time.  If you have negative voices, you must search out the positive even within the negative.  My voices have called me evil so many times, but I rarely believed it, which is why I am still alive.  I said "No" to the voices assessment of me and yet I didn't harden myself against them.  I learned to cultivate compassion for myself, others and for them.

I did acknowledge to myself that I was sick and in need of help and I found a therapist within the first 6 months.  She taught me to see the negative voices as much sicker than myself.  This helped a lot.  Instead of internalizing the core of the sickness, hurting myself and possibly others, I learned to detach and defend the part of me I loved.  Initially I felt a lot of resentment towards the negative voices, but overtime, using the gentle practice of compassion, this changed and the voices returned to being mostly non-harming, even beneficial.  They still act up, especially when I get anxious, but I have changed my perspective on why they act up.  I try to see them as teachers and work with them instead of against them and myself.

Chris had asked me the question in one of her comments to a blog entry of mine "Would you really want to hear voices if you didn't have to?"  I honestly don't know.  I've lived with the voices for so long now, through thick and thin, and I have trouble envisioning life without them.  The medications do not remove the voices for me and if they can't do it, what will?  So I assume that they are with me for life and I have to adapt to their presence.  In accepting their presence in my life, I have come to appreciate what is good about them.  They are intelligent, creative, supportive and from time to time I really commune with them in a way that I don't commune with others.  They represent the whole spectrum of The Unknown.  In my heart of hearts, I believe that they are ultimately trying to help this world by working with people, individual by individual.

Anyway,  this belief that the voices come from a real source outside of me is what makes some people deem me psychotic.  So be it.  But don't tell me that I don't make a helluvalot of sense sometimes.  And how can that be that I am both psychotic and sensible?  Some might say that there's method in madness, but I'm here to say that there's truth in madness as well.  Don't ever discount the truth when you find it.  I'm here to challenge you to stay openminded.  I may not be able to prove that God exists, or angels and devils, or spirits, or aliens, but, on the other hand, you can't prove that they don't exist either.  There's more than meets the eye for all of our lives.  The mystery continues every day.

The Key Ingredient

Karen, Chris, Juju and Jen, thank you for your comments!  All of you amaze me!  You are all so smart, talented, hardworking and sensitive, despite what life has thrown at you.  What a great group; it's a pleasure to be connected to you.  And in a wonderful and serendipitous fashion you represent the whole spectrum of the issue.  Chris and Jen are anti anti-psychiatry, Juju sees value in both approaches and Karen has personally entered into reducing her medications, though very gradually, and is exploring the possibility of someday being medication free.  And you know what?  You are all right in your perspectives for your particular case.

Chris is symptom free and considers herself recovered.  She is one of the fortunate ones;  the medications seem to have given her her life back.  Jen went through years of hellish experience with her psychosis until she had a five month stay in a hospital where she began to take the medications for an extended period of time.  Gradually she has gotten her life back too and is in the process of becoming a social worker so she can use her personal experience and know-how to help other people (which she already does in her mental health advocacy work).  They both readily believe that it is the medication that has saved them and given them back the opportunity to have a full life.  I really do believe that part of the reason for their personal successes is due to taking the medications, but I must point out to them and to all who read this blog, that they are overlooking one key ingredient:  themselves.

They are both ambitious women who are motivated by their desire to help others.  They have both done a ton of research over time on mental illness, especially on schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.  Because they live in populous areas, they've had access to quite a few mental health resources and being who they are, strong women who wanted to take care of themselves, they took full advantage of those resources.  They not only took their medications faithfully, they got therapy, went to support groups, got vocational training and became serious advocates for mental health in the places they live and online.  They are one kind of success story and if you are like them, ambitious and very hardworking, and if your biochemistry responds to the medications and if you have the resources near you, I think you have just as good a chance as they did of finding personal success.  I have so much respect for both of them and I think they are doing the right things in their life.  There is no doubt in my mind that they will go far in life and help a lot of people.

But I'm starting to get the feeling that there are other success stories out there, success stories for people who don't respond to the medications or who are brave enough to attempt to reduce their medications, with the proper support.  We need all the help we can get, and if there are alternatives to using the medications, my God, wouldn't you want that?  Especially for those who don't respond to the medications?  We are all the same and yet we are all different.  We need to be pro-choice and never rule out the things we find that work for even the smallest percentage.  A small percentage of people who currently have mental illness in the world is in the millions!  Everybody must be welcome, everybody must be helped.  I don't think it is wise to take too strong a position (though I might be trying to do just that--ha!) because a one-sided opinion is actually a weak position.  To survive and thrive we have to be flexible, in mild winds or in hurricane winds.  Polarization works at keeping things polarized and the only real outcome to that is civil war.  And when that happens, people forget that we are all brothers and sisters on this planet.  Does that sound corny?  Well, I don't care because it's a big truth that too many of us ignore.

So I've written about Chris and Jen's story and given my response.  But what about Karen and Juju?  Karen is also an ambitious woman and a strong woman, like Chris and Jen, and like them she is a writer, but she is also a visual artist.  Her illness has restricted her for many years and she's learned to cope using both the medications, seeing a therapist and going to a support group (which she has also lead).  She is very smart and insightful and very dedicated to her art work.  Because she is so dedicated, it is important to her to be as sensitive, yet balanced, as possible.  After reading several books that challenged the so-called "medical model" of the need to be medication compliant, she began to consider reducing her medications to see if she could become more sensitive in her life and with her work.  In her system of priorities, being the best artist she can be is on the top of the list, even to the point of risking a return of symptoms.  Some people might call her foolish, but I think she's brave.  The main reason why I think she is brave and not foolish, is that she has a support system in place with her husband and therapist, with whom she is quite close.  She also agreed to return to taking the medications if her symptoms returned enough to require hospitalization.  And most importantly, in my opinion, she is staying vigilant to any and all changes, either for the better or the worse.  So far, on a reduced dosage of her medications, she is feeling better and not worse, but if I know Karen, she does not take that for granted.  She is no fool.  She also just wants to be happy, just like all of us and she likes a good challenge.

I, not only respect Karen, I identify with her because I am also a writer, an artist of sorts and a song writer.  I know some of where she's coming from and I just think she has a fine and sensitive heart and mind.  I want her to be very happy, which is why I want to be supportive of her decision to reduce and maybe eventually stop using the medications in conjunction with other alternative therapies (if possible).  So far she's had some success and if that continues it can only be good news, not only for her, but for people like me who want to learn from what works out there.  She's put herself in the frontier of people risking themselves to test out different approaches to their mental illnesses.  I don't have her courage, not yet anyway, which is why I look up to her.  I'm also way too ignorant and have a lot of research and studying to do, as well as feeling out what it is I want to do in my heart/mind.  And if Karen's experiment doesn't work for her, I'm sure she will be creative in finding out what will.  I know she can rely on her ability to be honest with herself.  Either way, success or "failure", I'll be in her corner.  She's the one who's really taking the risk here and she's not hurting anyone else in order to do it.

And Juju?  Juju is in the heartbreaking and sometimes maddening situation of being all she can be for her young son who suffers from schizophrenia.  He's lived with the symptoms of this illness since I believe he was twelve years old and now he is eighteen.  I only met Juju because she reached out to me and let me know about her blog which she just started in March.  She strikes me as a real, smart mama lion trying to take care of her wounded cub.  Her position is one of seeking any and all solutions or partial treatments to help her son.  And what is she, too?  A strong and ambitious woman who is also willing to go the distance for herself, her son, her family and her community.  In the comments section of my last blog post, she gave the best advice:  "Do what you need to do to be the best you you can be."  Now that goes for anyone.

So what's the key ingredient for all these women and for me and for you?  Our own sweet (and not so sweet, if we're honest) selves.  If there's a will, there's a way.  You have to believe in your self and love yourself.  And here's some more corny writing:  you have to be your own best friend.  There's a Buddhist mind training slogan that goes, "Of the two witnesses, hold to the principal one."  Pema Chodron says of this slogan in her excellent book "Start Where You Are", that the "one witness is everybody else giving you their feedback and opinions (which are worth listening to; there's some truth in what people say), but the principal witness is yourself.  You're the only one who knows when you're opening and when you're closing.  You're the only one who knows when you're using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you're opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is -- working with it rather than struggling against it.  You're the only one who knows." (p. 146)

My challenge to you now and always is to be super honest with yourself while at the same time being super kind to yourself.  You don't have to be a superwoman or a superman, you just have to tell it like it is.  Stop running.  Study yourself.  See what works and what doesn't work.  Learn from your mistakes.  Trust yourself.  And if you're able to, and you know that you are, play fair with others, not just some of the time, aim for all of the time.  If you do, gradually (or maybe even quickly for some) the world will change for the better.  Guaranteed.  Let's give peace a chance and lets use our hearts and minds together to find the solutions that are within reach, for all of us and not for just some.

Parallels With My Anti-Psychiatry Peers

I have come upon the anti-psychiatry movement late.  I've only just started reading some blogs about it.  There's a lot of outcry about the perils of being medicated, some of which I certainly sympathize with, but what I was really looking for was a list of alternatives to taking the medications.  I just found one large site with lots and lots of information on it, it's called Beyond Meds: Alternatives to Psychiatry.  I've only read a bit of it, but plan to return and continue my research.  I was fascinated to find that I have been going on a parallel course because some of the alternatives that are suggested are Mindfulness, Meditation, Yoga and viewing one's illness as actually a psycho-spiritual journey.  On one of the sites that I stopped at they even were pushing books by Adyashanti!  I also read an article by a woman who suffered from Bi-Polar disorder who came to embrace Tibetan Buddhism and mind training, while working in a peer-run support group and not taking the medications.

In terms of spiritual orientation these anti-psychiatry people appear to by "my" people.  I certainly do accept them as such because we have been to the same hard places.  And I am all for exploring alternatives to the medications.  If people don't explore, they will never find ways to develop better treatments to complex psychotic illnesses.  And without exploration, there's not even the possibility of discovering a cure.  It seems more and more likely that community outreach programs and peer run support groups will be the wave of the future.  God, I hope so.  I know I was meant to be a part of a mental health support group.  The great thing about support groups is that everyone is welcome from the acutely ill to those in partial recovery to those in full recovery.  There's so much we can learn from one another, but we have to get into each other's hearts and minds and learn how to be there for each other.

I want to believe that following a spiritual path of being Mindful and training the mind to study itself without judgment could help to treat acute psychosis.  I want to believe the same for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and peer run support groups and diet, nutrition and exercise programs, but I honestly don't know yet.  Maybe individualized combinations of treatments could really address the core symptoms enough to treat acute psychosis without medication or with medication at a very small dosage.  All I know is that people need to get organized and that's what the anti-psychiatry movement appears to be doing, working both in communities and online.  I know I need the help in my community;  medication and individual therapy have not been enough for me -- I need to meet peers face to face.  I've felt frustration about this for so long and disappointment in myself for not having the courage and stamina to start up a support group in my town.  I'm hoping this will change this year. I talk a good game about peer support because I got so much out of going to the Al-Anon group, but the group is just not appropriate from people with psychotic disorders.

And I do use the word "psychotic" and "disorders" as well as the word "schizophrenia" because I do see the phenomenon of psychosis as an expression of imbalance and illness, though I know it can be a means to personal growth; it can also lead to suicide.  As I wrote in my last post, it is the people in the thrall of acute psychosis who most concern me and that is why I still believe that medication should be an option at least for a period of time.  At the same time, I'm all for engaging individuals in various forms of treatment in addition to the medications.  Build a support network, and work on your own, too, while taking advantage of what the medications can do for you and then decide whether to continue with the medications or not.  The medications are imperfect; there's no doubt about that, but it's important to use as many options as you can, especially when you are suffering so much.

If I find that there are viable alternatives to medications, ones that really work to treat psychosis, I think I might consider reducing my medications, mainly because I'm on high doses and have been for 10 years and I don't know if that's good for me or not.  I'm still afraid of falling back into acute illness.  Most of my days have challenges in them.  I am not recovered, but I will continue to wave the flag of RECOVERY for any newcomers.  Recovery, in all its forms and gradations, is possible.  That's very important to realize.  No matter how bad it gets, and it can get pretty bad, you will not be stuck in a hellish place indefinitely, but you do need to motivate yourself to reach out to others, to share your story and to do what you need to do in order to take care of yourself.

The most important point I can make here is that we, who have suffered from psychotic disorders, are all peers regardless of whether we take the medications or try an alternative route.  We need to stand united or at least make bridges to meet each other across the sometimes great divide.  I deeply appreciate people on both sides, but really, we are the same with similar stuggles and successes.  Today I read a blog entry by Charles on his blog Mental Health Recovery and in it he writes about how you have to let go of blaming in order to recover and to "be positive in the face of negativity".  I think we've got to work to understand each other better and learn to be extremely tolerant of just those people who cause us to feel self-protective and defensive.  Check yourself out and see what you find.  I find the problem is usually within my own self and that I have a lot to learn from different people and points of view.

Why I Am Medication Compliant

There's been a lot of writing in this corner of the blogosphere about medication compliance versus the anti-psychiatry movement; I want to share my perspective on this.  First of all, we are all individuals with varying biochemistry and varying temperaments and what works for one person may or may not work for another.  There is no absolute right and absolute wrong here.  We each have to find our way through our mental illness and beyond into recovery and, as I've said before, there are over 10 percent of us who don't survive the acute stage or early recovery stage.  I don't know the percentages, but there are those of us who don't respond to the anti-psychotic medications or who have such bad side effects that it is nearly impossible to take them.  I venture to say that most of us fall into the category of being helped by the medications though not free of all symptoms.  And then there are the blessed minority who lose all their symptoms primarily due to taking the medications.  I am somewhere in the middle.  Most of my delusions and paranoia have gone, but I continue to have voices and bouts of depression and anxiety.  I have been taking the medications faithfully for a decade and in the interim I have gotten obese and to a lesser extent sexually dysfunctional.  I have told myself that since I am a middle aged woman living alone that these side effects are not too much to bear to have most of my sanity intact.  Being fat really does bother me and I still have hopes that I can reduce my weight.  I haven't completely given up.

But what if I were a young person?  Would it be worth it to put on tons of weight and become somewhat impotent?  It all depends on how ill one is.  If you are so consumed by delusions and paranoia to the point where you have several psychotic breaks I would say that yes, it is worth it.  But it is not that simple.  First you have to commit to taking the medication for at least a year, probably making medication adjustments till you find the best combination.  These are potent drugs and it takes time to adjust to having them in your system.  I would never have entered into the recovery stage if I hadn't had a whole lot of patience while trying to find what worked best for me.  After I did find the right combination, I would have years of struggling with depression and later anxiety.  I'm not going to kid you, recovery takes years not months, though it seems to me that the earlier you catch it and treat it the better the prognosis is for the long term.  That's for those who respond to the medications and the only way you find that out is by consistently taking them over an extended period of time.  When I first became acutely ill my psychiatrist gave me a lot of free samples of anti-psychotic medications to try because I didn't have insurance.  I had three breakdowns in three and a half years and each time I fell I would try taking some of the medication, but I would always stop after a few weeks or a month.  I dabbled in it and that did me no good.  If you're going to do, do it, commit to it, test it out, see which medications reduce your symptoms the best.

There are several reasons why I am faithful to taking the medications despite the side effects.  The most basic motivation for me is fear.  Only those who have crossed over repeatedly into insanity know how disorienting and frightening it is to lose one's mind amidst the onslaught of psychotic thoughts and feelings.  While I was in it I really felt as if  I were being psychically crucified.  I was figuratively lost at sea with no sign of help on the way.  I was in so much pain.  I lived in a twilight zone with maybe one foot tentatively in reality and the rest of me consumed by illusions.  I was battered by repeated breakdowns and the further along I went in that direction, the closer I got to yearning for death.  The medications gave me an opening, a window away from death and back towards life.  I took that chance.  I compromised.  I knew one thing clearly, I never wanted to return to a life of acute psychosis and I was willing to go the distance.  I'm here to tell you that I am so glad that I did.  My life is not perfect, but it is solidly good.  I am grateful to be alive, even when I'm suffering.  I no longer feel as if I'm on trial waiting for the jury to come back with their decision -- life in hell or a second chance at becoming a better human being with the odds tipping against me.  The medication is part of why I have beat the odds.

Another reason why I take the medications is to reassure not only myself, but my loved ones and society at large that I am doing everything possible to treat my illness.  I see it as accepting responsibility for myself and taking care of myself.  I also see myself trying to set a good example for those who are in the acute stage of psychosis to at least give the medication a try.  If you are one of the ones who does respond to medication, it gives you a choice of something that might help you to avoid suicide.  I hate to say it so plainly, but it is a hard, cold fact, if you develop schizophrenia it is going to become acute, a trial by fire, in which things will eventually come down to life or death if gone untreated.  It is those lost souls that I am most concerned about.

But what of those people who don't respond to the medications or who have way too serious side effects, what are they to do?  Before I began taking the medications I found a therapist and saw her once a week and I went to the only support groups available for mental health in my community:  Al-Anon and a domestic violence support group (I had lived with an abusive alcoholic for over five years...).  My voices were both positive and very negative, angels and devils and sometimes angelic devils and devilish angels.  I don't know how to explain it but they tormented me into reaching out to help others.  They said I had to "be of benefit to my community".  It was their idea, both the good and the bad voices, that I seek out a therapist, that I check myself into a hospital for an overnight stay so that I could get my diagnosis, that I go to support group meetings and actively try to help the people (mostly women) I met there, all while I was floridly psychotic.  What I really wanted to do was to go hide in a hole somewhere and try to survive the storm, but the voices absolutely forbade it and threatened permanent hell if I tried to avoid being responsible to myself and others.  I was required to pray for everyone in my support groups, required to make frequent calls to them to see how they were doing and to generally go out of my way to help others when I was in such desperate need of help myself.  I didn't tell almost anyone that I suffered from schizophrenia because I was still in denial about it.  So though I was busy helping other people, I was at the same time very isolated, living in that twilight zone and only talking to my therapist once a week.  What I really needed was to be surrounded by my peers, especially those in recovery.

If you have decided not to take the medications or they don't work for you, you must have a support system in place.  Actually that goes for people who take the medications as well.  Isolation is so tempting and I understand that some of that is necessary to reduce stress, but connecting with others who are in the same boat as you is the light at the end of the tunnel.  For me, the connection has been nearly entirely online because my community has not organized mental health support groups yet.  So far, this online presence alone has been able to sustain me, though I really believe that face to face meetings work to lessen the sense of isolation and to connect people within their communities.  It's one thing to contact someone online for support and quite another to call someone in your community and possibly see that person and interact with him or her.  Really both online and offline support are very important.  The more avenues are open for communication, the better you will feel.  This goes for individual therapy as well.  Talk therapy is known to work to alleviate symptoms.  So talk to your therapist, talk in your support group or at your club house, talk online and talk to yourself, too.  For me talking to myself took the forms of keeping a written and an audiotape journal.  The audio journal I began after I was firmly into recovery.  I'm not sure what it would be like during the acute stage of psychosis.  It might be disturbing, but then again it might be helpful to track the comings and goings of your symptoms.  I see it as a tool to develop further insight into myself and my illness.

Therapy, support groups and journaling as well as a dedication to one or more forms of creative activity (art, music, writing, etc...) give some guidance and direction and a release from the stress of holding one's psychosis inside.  My therapist taught me to objectify my illness, to see it as separate and distinct from myself.  If she hadn't helped me with that I might have internalized all that negativity and wound up feeling like some kind of monster.  Instead I believed in my basic goodness.  I was an ill person, not a bad person.  Adopting a Buddhist practice has gotten me to not only be very honest with myself, but has given me the tools to look at my mind with some discrimination.  Think of yourself as a compassionate and artistic scientist.  Study yourself.  I do think it is possible to overcome the trappings of psychosis without medication, but it would take great courage and discipline and support.  During the three and a half years that I was unmedicated I couldn't pull it off.  I broke down.  I had only partial insight and no support group.  It was all very new to me then and my main delusion colored my world; I lived inside of it.  I am not ashamed to say that my illness overwhelmed me to the point where I began to take the anti-psychotic medications.  There should be no shame in taking the medications if you need the help.  That's one area where I'm at odds with the anti-psychiatry people.  If they want to go cold turkey with their illness, that is their right, but they should not attack those that do take the medications. Some of us really need the help.  For some, our lives depends upon it.  There is enough stigma attached to mental illness without adding more into the mix.

I wish I had more to offer those of you who are sitting on the fence about whether to take the medications or not.  I only know what I know from my experience first without medication and then with medication.  I have not yet tried to reduce my medications or go off them completely.  Maybe someday I will try too, but if I do I will be prepared to the hilt.  So if you are unmedicated or going off your meds, have a plan of action.  Really think it through and never give up on yourself.

Florida Trip Photos

Peer Support

I'm back home from spending a week with my parents and brother in Florida.  The voices were mostly quiet, but I did experience some restlessness, which is like a lesser form of anxiety.  I loved seeing my mother and father (though my father was rather quiet this trip) and my brother's company is mostly quite welcome (except when I need a break from talking).  I think some of the stress I felt was due to not having a room of my own to retire into.  I slept in the living room and often had some time to myself there to finish reading Adyashanti's book, which I did.  I meditated a couple of times and just pondered space, asking the questions -- Is this space aware and alive? and What am I really?  It was good to do some reading and meditating, it renewed me so that I could be attentive to my family when we joined up again.  Basically, all went well, and I felt confident that all would be well at home with my seven cats because Sam was there to take care of them.

I'm resigned to the fact that I can only see my parents for two weeks out of the year because we live so far away from each other.  It's not the way I want it; it's just the way it is.  So I now call them once a week and let them know that I love them.  Being consistent with that is a new thing for me.  Usually I've withdrawn into myself, isolated myself, forgetting to stay in touch.  I attribute my new behavior to Sam's good influence on me.  Little by little she is teaching me how to take care of myself, my home and my family better.  I feel grateful to know her.  She is  becoming a part of my extended family.  Yesterday she picked me up at the airport and drove me home; then we sat outside and watched my cats wander around the cat pen.  That sounds so ordinary, but for me it was rather extraordinary.  I never sit outside, though I live in the country and so I never let the cats outside, though Richard built this spacious, sturdy cat pen with enough room for them to run around.  Sam says I need to soak up some nature, sit outside, go for a walk in the woods, do some gardening, just get out of this house so I can actually connect with something larger than my living room.  By right away letting the cats outside when we got to my house, she's gently pushing me to change my ways.  And small changes can lead to bigger realizations.

Then she left to go back to her home so she could work in her garden; the first thing I did was round up the cats and bring them indoors again.  I got a little paranoid sitting outside alone.  So what am I finding?  That I can't change overnight, but that working on changes with another person that I trust I can gradually come out of my shell.  It's amazing what just one thoughtful, hardworking person can do for someone like me.  I welcomed her into my home and she's been nothing but gracious and generous in return with not any condescension.  While I was away she did one thing that especially touched my heart -- she cleaned up most of my loft space.  What had been up there?  A couple of kitty litter boxes overflowing with turds, bags and bags of used kitty litter, heavy and hard to get down the small spiral staircase.  I have been ashamed about not taking care of that space, of being too depressed and lazy to deal with it.  Sam did the dirty work that I had no motivation to do.  Is that fair?  No, but God was it needed.  She also suggested that I buy the more expensive clumping litter because it is much, much easier to clean a little at a time instead of throwing out pounds and pounds of used, cheap kitty litter.  I felt so relieved and so foolish that I hadn't thought of that before.

One of my points in appreciating Sam is that people who suffer from mental illness and live alone need at least one person to come into their living space to teach them some very practical things and approaches.  This special person (or people) needs to be a trusted friend or family member.  Many of us who suffer with the symptoms of schizophrenia intentionally isolate ourselves.  It's going on fourteen years since I became acutely ill and it is only now that I am letting one person get close to me.  I believe my recovery would have progressed much more quickly if I had had access to mental health support group geared towards people with psychotic disorders.  Local, easily accessible support groups should be dotting the countryside as well as the major cities.  People learn from people who've been there.  These are people who have not only survived the acute stage of psychosis, but who have embraced some form of recovery in behavior and attitude.  Acutely psychotic people are typically not going to trust family members and doctors as much as someone who has walked in their shoes.  I turned for support from other people with psychotic disorders here in this blog with other bloggers and on online forums primarily for schizophrenia sufferers and sometimes their caretakers.  The internet has been a godsend for me because I live in a poor, rural part of the state with few services.

This blog in particular has boosted my confidence; I respect myself more and understand myself better for having stuck with this blog.  People I respect read my words.  People who have walked in my shoes one way or another and have suffered from depression, anxiety and/or psychotic disorders.  But recently a mother of a young man who suffers from schizophrenia started a blog called "Cracked To The Core" which you can find HERE.  She calls herself Juju and she writes with passion, sincerity and skill and I hope some of you check her blog out.  I've added it to my Blog List.  I'm glad she drew my attention to her blog because I don't have anyone on my Blog List to represent a caretaker's perspective.    Mostly I've listed blogs by people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, but really it occurs to me that those of us with mental illness and our family and friends could benefit from widening the circle and sharing our perspectives with each other.  Our blogs are another form of support group where each individual gets to shine in writing.

Here's a suggestion that the voices just made to me:  set up peer run, Skype, one on one meetings for those people who have no access to support groups or for those who don't have the motivation (negative symptom of schizophrenia) but need contact with someone who is in recovery.  Here's some more of my own thoughts about that:  make it a non profit organization run by volunteers open to the public.  It would be like a video conference between a peer counselor (and potential friend) and an individual looking for some support from a safe haven.  It would take a somewhat structured approach I think similar to Al-Anon and AA and a daily reader for people who have suffered or are suffering from psychosis--preferably several of them.  The volunteers would be trained the way hotline volunteers for domestic violence and suicide are trained.  Imagine the confidence building capacity for both the volunteer and the person who reaches out to try to open our hearts enough to ask for help and give it.  Maybe there could be a online directory of the volunteers that shares their history with mental illness, their badges of endurance and courage and people could go to the main site, pick someone with similar interests, older, younger or the same age and request to set up a time to have a video meeting.  Maybe the volunteers have at least one person on duty all the time.  I would think that there should also be a written forum to go to to talk to other people, maybe to get referrals for which peer counselor to consult about a particular problem.  Say some  counselors may have strong experience with drug addiction or homelessness or severe paranoia or with living alone or in a family or halfway house or any number of life experiences both positive and negative.

It seems to me that if we all do some brainstorming like this, we can come up with treatments, maybe even solutions to all kinds of problems and struggles.  It takes good ideas and I think many people who suffer from psychotic disorders have good ideas.  What they and I need are people deep enough into recovery to have regained, or discovered for the first time, their motivation, even ambition, to commit to being those volunteer peer counselors.  One of the reasons I need several peer counselors is quite simply to gather in information about different people's experience with the voices.  I have not talked to a single soul face to face about their experience with the voices.  There are millions of us in the world and I have not had a close enough contact with my peers.

Reconsidering Adyashanti

At the suggestion of the Anonymous commentator on my last blog post, I downloaded Adyashanti's book "Falling Into Grace" and have been reading it; I'm almost halfway through it.  Adyashanti is a good, clear writer and I found myself drawn into considering his ideas about the nature of suffering and how to alleviate it.  One of the Tibetan mind training slogans is - "Regard all dharmas as dreams."  This essentially translates into regarding life as a dream.  Adyashanti writes about this as well.  Basically he is saying that because we attach so strongly to our thoughts, seeing them as solidly real and rather blindly following them, we misguide ourselves and often we suffer.  He asserts that thoughts are neither real nor the truth about our essential selves.

By holding firm to our thoughts and fueling those thoughts with feelings, we go through life ignoring that we are much more than our thoughts.  How can you sense that you are more than your thinking mind?  You sense it by sitting with your present moment experience and studying what happens when there are gaps in your thinking.  When I did this, I quickly discovered that without any words in my mind, while sitting still and looking and listening, I was still fully alive, actually more alive than when I was struggling with my thoughts.  I realized that this is the essence of mindfulness.

This silent, spacious place you find yourself in without thoughts is receptive yet energized and keenly, delicately aware.  It's a beautiful, peaceful, kind hearted place and though thoughts return to take us away from it, it is always present.  It doesn't ebb and flow, it just is, very present, very steady, very available.  For the most part I am caught in the common, human delusion that we are what we think, but even I know I can just exist in a peaceful way when I stop thinking and doing and rest in being whoever or whatever I am.  It's so simple: just stop.  Look around.  Breath.  This is Awareness with a capital A.  This is much larger than the small, tight circle of the thinking mind.  If we have the ability to see at all it's due to this spacious awareness and not due to thinking thoughts.  Thoughts are contained inside Awareness, and not the other way around.

It comes down to asking yourself who or what you are.  I've been asking myself this question.  When I ask myself what is really real my attention immediately turns to what is right in front of me, the space I'm in, what I can see and hear and feel and smell.  When I stop to think if my thoughts are real, I hesitate.  My thoughts are all over the place and because of this lack of steadiness they feel unreal.  But somehow, through all their shifting movements, I feel tied to them.  On a closer look, perhaps even chained to them like an active addict.  Adyashanti says they are not real and therefore not the truth about us.  I'm hoping that he's right; I know I suffer because of the things I think about and if they are not real then I can keep returning my focus to the larger Awareness and learn to re-train myself to experience life on a more elemental level.  We are, after all, animals and the animals we interact with can teach us a lot about living in the moment, fully aware.  I'm in love with my cats, even when they are hunting mice in the house.  If a cat can be wondrous to me, how much more myself and other humans?

So are thoughts bad?  They can be, especially when we continually over emphasize them and reinforce them with repetition.  Then they mislead us, cause us to stay stuck in the dream of life.  But once we realize that we're imbalanced, we can learn to step back and see the broader picture.  In stepping back, we detach and take away some of the emphasis on the thoughts that continue to arise, while returning some attention to the space and silence in the present moment.  What we consider our natural state is most likely an unnatural state and our natural state is one we tend to ignore.  We're too busy in what Adyashanti calls an egoic trance.  Too much of the time we have blinders on, like the kind you see on city horses to keep them focused ahead and not distracted, but our blinders keep us focused on distraction after distraction and not on what is really going on in and around us.

It's strange to me that I could listen to over 7 hours of Adyashanti talking on the audiobook called "Spontaneous Awakening" and not get a feel for his message, but after reading 90 pages of his book "Falling Into Grace", where his emphasis is on suffering and alleviating suffering, his message is starting to get to me and with no psychotic overtones.  Little by little I'm going to apply his ideas to my approach towards myself and my life just to see where it takes me.  First I'm going to finish reading the book and then I'm going to read it again and take notes.  And I'll listen again to Adyashanti's audiobook to see if I can hear him more truly.  His book is providing a foundation for me to do that.  If I can hear, I can learn.  As for Nirmala, I will learn from him too.

Just to let you know, I will be away visiting my parents in Florida for a week and won't be online very much, but I'm taking my Kindle with me and am excited about opening to what could almost be seen as an adventure.

Learning From Nirmala

I first encountered a spiritual teacher named Nirmala (born Daniel Erway) on my Kindle.  (You can find his site here.)  I had been downloading books by Buddhist teachers and one day as I was checking out the Kindle storefront, I happened to look at their lists of suggestions.  There were several inexpensive books by Nirmala.  Most of the reviews were very positive and so I decided to buy one of his books.  The book I bought was called "Nothing Personal:  Seeing Beyond the Illusion of a Separate Self".  I found myself responding to some of what Nirmala was teaching.  I responded strongly enough that I downloaded the other three books, one of which is a book of his poetry.  I haven't read much of his poetry yet, but I have read his latest book called "That is That:  Essays About True Nature" and am in the process of reading the book that came out before this one called "Living from the Heart".

So I read "Nothing Personal" several months ago and wrote a blog entry called "Something Rich and True" on September 14th.  Nirmala, who may or may not be a Buddhist teacher, was asserting that Awareness is God.  This idea touched me on several levels.  It made me curious enough to begin to study my then present moments.  In his book, Nirmala kept inviting the reader to tap into present moment awareness, to test what he was saying out.  So from time to time I would put my Kindle down and just look around the open space of my living room and dining room.  I've lived in this house now for approximately 23 years and I continue to find the space interesting.  But perhaps it's not the space that is so interesting, but my awareness of the space.  Awareness is interesting.

On some level we are always aware, even when we're asleep some part of us is experiencing the dream state as if it were real, when it is not.  The idea that life is a dream is not a new one; it's deeply entwined in Buddhist concepts.  And yet, awareness of what is not real can be as interesting as an awareness of what is real.  Obviously this is so because so many of us are more aware of our thoughts, which are actually not real, and not aware of our surroundings, which are real.  Living on automatic, going from thing to thing while worrying, doubting, anticipating, is not being aware of the larger picture.  Our focus narrows, Nirmala would say it contracts.  We only see what is directly in front of us, often some worrisome thought, and fail to experience a greater mindfulness, a greater awareness of the moments that are always passing away from us.

When we contract, shut down, become myopic, we suffer.  Our awareness becomes limited, imagined problems grow large.  When we expand (again this is a Nirmala word), we open up and begin to see that there's a lot of space around everything and we relax.  Some Buddhists talk a lot about space, what they call Shunyata, also called emptiness.  One of the first things I noticed when I began to sit with my pain and look at it was that the pain was concentrated in one place, but became less intense as the space expanded around it.  I realized that the space around the pain was crucial; it gave me a choice.  I could focus on the center of the pain, weaving stories about the pain and feeling miserable or I could identify with the space around the pain and feel a release from some of the suffering.  So pain occurs within a large space.  Put in that context, our personal pain may be rather small, but only if we make that shift in our perspective.  That's hard to do because from childhood we have been taught to remain self-centered about our pain and the pain of those we care for.  We have been taught that pain is a Big Deal.  In making it a Big Deal, we magnify it and in magnifying it, we distort it and forget that the truth is much vaster.

I said that Awareness was interesting.  In the instance of me looking closely and impartially at my pain, awareness allowed me to consciously shift my attention away from my pain.  This shift left an impression on me.  I began to doubt that the pain I continued to feel off and on with my bouts of depression and anxiety was a solid and semi-permanent thing without much space within it or around it.    The space concept began to form an open foundation for further study.  I am also comforted by it.  The value of space shows me that there is always room to grow and that pain is just a smaller part of the landscape, not the whole picture.  Buddhists also say that there is no intrinsic self because what we are is spacious awareness rather than a body with thoughts.  This idea is a new one for me.  I still attach to myself as a body with thoughts, but not totally.  There's still room for the concept of spacious awareness as self to sprout and grow.

Mindfulness is Awareness practice whether you are meditating or going about your day and night.  You've heard something about mindfulness.  Really I think we go in and out of mindfulness all the time.  But what is it?  Awareness that is heightened.  Simple activities such as cooking,  eating, cleaning, bathing, driving as well as just being, stopping and looking around are infused with something special when you pay attention to either the details of the activity or the details of your surroundings if you're looking around.  And then there's sitting meditation practice where you identify thoughts as thoughts, return to the breath and let them go over and over.  The mindfulness lesson in that is that awareness gives you the power of having a choice, either to remain lost in the dream of thoughts or awake to the space of the present moment once the thought bubble has been popped.  Awareness of space is also awareness of self in space, hence the term spacious awareness.

From what I can see, Buddha Nature is what is intrinsic to spacious awareness, to Self.  Before the thoughts come and the judgments, there is unadulterated you, the essence of which is all good.  If space is the basis of everything and space is by its nature all embracing, accepting, non judgmental, peaceful, adaptable, essentially loving, even joyful, then we can heave a sigh of relief and train to shift our attention away from our preoccupation with the thoughts in our minds.  This is a radically different approach to understanding ourselves than the Judeo-Christian model which believes that our natures are fallen and essentially sinful.  Instead there is this idea that we never left the garden of eden, that we are still there in all our wonderful innocence, only we have fallen for the illusion that we are essentially bad and unworthy.

Living with acute psychosis telling me over and over again that I was evil, but never really believing it in my heart of hearts, led me to a compassion practice for myself and the voices.  Compassion practice led me to the idea of Buddha Nature.  Yes, people can and do do hateful, horrible things but the essence of the doer is not in the action, though many people appear to think so.  An "evil" action can brand the doer of that action "evil" as well.  I believe an evil action can produce some harsh karma; I think that what goes around comes around, but I don't believe in inherently evil people.  I believe in deeply ill people.  The harsher the crime, the greater the compassion.  Unfortunately, we are a bloodthirsty lot and behave towards offenders with as much illness as it took him or her to commit the act in the first place.  But our need for vengeful "justice" is mostly conditioning and still beneath that grisly veneer there is our essentially good nature and a way to get beyond our own brands of negativity.

I think it is fair to say that you can't recover from severe mental illness for very long if you continue to view yourself as essentially sinful and potentially evil.  The concept of Buddha Nature or the essential goodness in everything is a treatment for such a sick orientation.  It gives you permission to love yourself, love others, the whole world and beyond.

The Practice Of Writing

I began writing in a journal when I was 13 in 8th grade.  What motivated me to buy a spiral notebook and begin to write?  I was going to a public junior high school in Brooklyn, a school that harbored small gangs of young preteen and teen kids who bullied other less tough kids.  That was the background of my stay at the school, but in the foreground were my immediate peers, the boys and girls in my class, many of whom I had grown up with.  In 7th grade I had been popular with a small group of boys and with my circle of friends, but that popularity fizzled out when I ceased to pursue a particular boy that I liked, one who seemed to like me for a time.  In 8th grade my focus returned to my girl friends.  

There were about seven of us and we were a nicely mixed group: Jewish, Catholic, Agnostic/Protestant, Afro American, Chinese American, Italian American, Puerto Rican and Irish American.  A few of us were relatively poor, some middle class and others upper middle class.  And we were all bright, going to the top "Advanced Enrichment" classes at school.  I was very happy to have these particular friends; I loved our diversity, our intelligence and our humor.  But we were not happy.  The more desirable boys were busy with school studies and sports, mostly focusing on basketball and we turned our attentions more and more on each other.  We functioned as a group but we also paired up and sometimes we talked about each other behind each other's backs.  Most of our complaints were petty, but still they struck a chord.  

I think I turned to a journal because I wanted to see my life as something important enough to write about.  Unfortunately, I was an immature 13 and instead of being thoughtful, I was critical of different friends and superficial and still thinking of "the boys" with frustration.  My writing skill was minimal and yet I took pleasure in writing some of my thoughts and reactions down in one place.  Soon, I was bringing my journal to school.  My friends became curious about it and started asking if they could read it.  I began letting some of my friends read it and not others, which caused tensions.  The chain reaction was that most of my friends began writing in journals too, doing the same thing.  Everyone began getting pissed at everyone else.  So I asked my friends to come over to my house and do what I thought would be a consciousness raising group (it was 1975-6).  You know, air our complaints, but also resolve them and become better friends.  All but one of the group condemned me and rightfully so, though I was too self-centered to see it at the time.  I was very hurt by their reaction, but I couldn't really argue because their complaints made sense. 

But something had happened to me between beginning my journal and sitting through that group meeting; I didn't stop writing in my journal.  If anything I turned more decidedly towards it.  It was becoming a part of my solace.  The next year I was off to a new school and the decision to continue writing stuck with me all through high school and beyond.  This had to do in part with my new isolation.  In grade school and junior high I had this circle of friends, but in high school I did not.  For a lot of that time I was alone, which would become more of a pattern with me into my adulthood.  So in high school I turned into a writer, mostly in my journal, but a  few short stories too.  From then till when I moved away from New York City I felt very close to myself when I wrote.  My journal writing gave my life some much needed meaning.  I cultivated my introspection and I turned into an introvert.  

I know the writing process was therapeutic for me.  I needed to be heard most especially by myself.  My mother or my two friends or later my boyfriend could dismiss my ideas, but I wouldn't.  I needed to witness myself.  And I did.  This was especially true during high school when much of life was in high relief and dramatic.  There were things that I could only express in my journal and not to a friend.  There was almost a surrealistic quality to my life and to my writing.  But I'll never know for sure because I threw away almost all my journals (save one small one) after I left the City.  Threw them away after a domestic violence episode and in a fit of self-hatred.  So passionate and so foolish!  

Throwing those journals away created a break in continuity in my life.  There was the time before I threw away my journals, before I moved so far away, before I got involved with a mentally ill and addicted boy/man and there was all the rest of my life after that.  I still wrote in a journal, often secretly, but the magic had gone out of it.  Instead the magic got redirected into songmaking, but when I became psychotically ill even that means of expression was shut down.  So again, I returned to journal writing.  I wrote out my insanity until I survived the breaking point and then wrote some more.  Little pieces of magic are returning, many here in this blog.  It's been almost 22 years since I threw away the journals of my youth and young adulthood and now I'm forming a new continuity for the second half of my life.  It's not as bright and youthful as it was then, but just as vital.  

I'm writing about writing because I haven't been doing a lot of it this past month and I miss it.  Sam let me read one of her journals from 8 years ago.  I was surprised and pleased that she trusted me with something so personal.  She's also left her acoustic guitar and electric bass over here at my house, another sign of trust.  Reading her journal made me re-read a few of my more recent journals.  Our styles are different, but we are both bright, articulate and creative.  The difference between us is that she is a more disciplined writer.  She writes daily.  There's no doubt in my mind that Sam is a bona fide writer.  I am a writer too, even with my lapses.  This I need to remind myself.  I have a history of writing behind me.  

Writing is important and not just for me, but for you.  If you aren't writing already either in a journal or in an online blog, consider it.  We need to tell our stories to ourselves first and then to others. Email exchanges and letters are great, too.  It's interesting, I have both a written journal and an audio journal and the two are quite different, though both are valuable.  The written journal requires more of me and yet it's worth the extra effort.  Either way, written or verbal, it takes courage to be honest enough to face yourself and tell it like it is.  

Portrait of "Sam"

Magical Thinking

Magical thinking can be found in most religions; it can also be found in psychotic disorders and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).  There are various definitions of what magical thinking means, but it can swing from "normal" even positive to abnormal and possibly harmful.  I suffer from a mild case of OCD and I've had some of it since I was a young woman; it might have begun when I started to hear voices.  What I do obsessively/compulsively are minor things -- tearing toilet  tissue on the perforated line and not raggedly ripping it, when I microwave something often I make the time add up to the number 7 which I see as a lucky number, making sure my paper money is not in the reversed position in my wallet, making sure the tag on my comforter is down by my feet instead of up by my head, reciting a prayer not to hurt myself or any living thing when I drive my car.  That's all I can think of right now, but you can see that none of my OCD symptoms really incapacitate me, but I do notice them and they do disturb me.  Well, reciting the prayer mostly releases some of my anxiety and gives me the confidence to drive, but there are times when I think that I am not hitting any animals mainly because I am sending out a thoughtful prayer not to.  I do believe some of that, that turning your will towards lovingkindness, not just in your actions but in your deepest thoughts and feelings, can be both self and other protective.  Good will engenders good will in others and allows serendipity to occur.  

Pema Chodron has talked and written a great deal about a Buddhist meditation practice called tonglen.   The meditation goes through four stages.  First you imagine a wide, open space such as the sky or the sea, then you imagine breathing in the dark, warm, heavy, negative and breathing out the light, cool, refreshing and healing.  In the third stage you think of either your own pain or the pain of someone you care about; you breath that in as completely as possible and breath out anything you can imagine to release the pain into healing.  Pema Chodron has called this "changing the atmosphere" from dark to light, from painfully obstructed to liberated.  In the final stage you universalize it by realizing that other people suffer just like this and then wishing for all beings to free of this suffering.  To be free of suffering is to be in Nirvana or heaven.  I think that this is training in magical thinking/feeling because in essence the practice is about believing in the power of meditation to change the quality of life for yourself and then using that to extend the benefits out towards other people.  It's a magical thought that you as an individual can transform the negative into the positive merely through breathing and training your mind to harness the imagination.  But just because it is magical thinking should it be discounted the way we discount a delusion or can we remain openminded?  

Many religious people believe in praying, same for some non religious people who consider themselves spiritual nonetheless.  To an atheist, praying is magical thinking and for them praying is a waste of time and certainly has no effect on other people or situations.  Praying is just meant to comfort oneself during stressful times.  I believe there's truth in that, but I don't think that that's all there is to it.  So far, there is no good scientific test for the benefits of prayer, but there are more and more studies proving the benefits of meditation.  The latest Shambhala Sun, a Buddhist magazine, dedicates a whole issue to it.  On page 47 there's a chart that says on top, "Scientific Minds Want to Know".  The chart is divided into "The Question", "The Study" and "The Results".  Here are the questions:  "Is meditation effective for pain control?", "Can long-term meditation practice reduce brain atrophy and help prevent dementia?",  "Can Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) help prevent relapses of depression?",  "Does mindfulness benefit cancer patients?", "How does yoga compare with conventional treatment of lower back pain?", ""Does meditation help women cope with menopausal symptoms?" and "Does meditation affect brain structure?"  The results, to varying degrees, confirm that meditation/mindfulness/yoga are beneficial to human health, even brain structure is changed with an increase of "gray-matter density in the hippocampus, important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection."  They also found a decrease of "gray-matter density in the amygdala, which plays a role in anxiety and stress."  The decrease meant a reduction in stress levels.  

Prayer and meditation are related, but not the same.  Prayer involves magical thinking, either a belief in a higher power or spirit world.  You formulate a prayer and send it out.  Out into what?  Some primordial spiritual space where mere thoughts can travel across space and time and reach some unknown destination where it is heard and possibly acted upon.  The act of praying is not mysterious, but where our thoughts go when we pray is mysterious.  Western philosophy asserts that we are individuals, separate and solid, and that there is no primordial spiritual space where we can interact with either higher powers or each other.  Buddhists say that the idea that we are separate and solid is an illusion, a trick of our ego orientation.  Meditation is a method for them to uncover this trick in order to begin to free themselves from their dependence on their egos.  Our egos work through thoughts, speech and actions especially when we assert that this monolithic "I" is the center of the universe, that we are a big deal and that is also magical thinking.  Mindfulness meditation is applied to ego inflamed thoughts, speech and actions as a balm.  Through practice ego becomes more subdued, while awareness of the present moment increases.  I only think of mindfulness meditation as magical in that valuing the present moment in doing or being mode does make for heightened awareness and clear seeing.  What makes mindfulness practice accessible to nearly everyone is that it does not rely on the magical thinking of religions.  You don't have to believe in anything but the value of your present moment. 

In a meandering way, my point is that magical thinking can be either useful or harmful depending on how it's used.  Sending out a prayer for good health to a friend who is sick can be useful even if it has no effect on one's friend's health.  It can relieve stress and deepen compassion; it is not hurtful to yourself or anyone else.  And ultimately, we don't know what prayer might or might not do.  The point is, our intentions are good.  We desire to help and heal if only in our thoughts.  But the magical thinking involved in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder can lock you into excessive behaviors that are harmful to yourself and possibly towards others.  And maybe you could even say that schizophrenia is an excessive form of OCD.  Delusions start out obsessive and then as they are accepted become compulsive.  To a paranoid person often their first thoughts are that someone is trying to persecute them, even when nothing is happening and no one is around.  I know the medications helped me to break out of my delusions and paranoia, but I had also gotten so low that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired and I knew my main priority had to be taking care of myself on very basic levels:  taking the medications, getting enough sleep, talking to my therapist, staying creative, writing in my journal etc...  I believed that doing these basic things would help me stay on the right, sane track.  For me it's not the OCD that really bothers me, but my dips into depression and anxiety, though OCD certainly has to do with anxiety, but it's attached to a specific action rather than being a generalized feeling of threat that can last for hours.  

One thing I'm pretty sure of and that is that most mental illnesses are related to each other.  People get misdiagnosed all the time because the doctors aren't quite sure.  Schizophrenia, Schizo-Affective Disorder, BiPolar Disorder, Major Depression are all in the same genetic soup.  Some of us started out with some magical thinking that de-evolved into delusional thinking/feeling.  Magic is borderline, but delusions are over the line and into insanity.  Magic can charm and delight and surprise, delusions can do some of that too, but the outcome is mostly negative.  But magic still relies on unseen forces and this belief in the unseen can pull you from a tentative balance into delusional distortions...or it can raise you up to a greater faith in the goodness of a higher power which can restore your sense of balance.  The mind at its best is flexible and allows room for the unknown; the mind at its worst is inflexible and shuts out fertile possibilities.  When I was delusional, I thought I knew The Truth and now that I'm in recovery I know I don't know The Truth, only little facets of it.  But I still believe in Magic.  The sanest amongst us must admit that appearances can be deceptive and the truth elusive.  We live with not knowing all the time, we live with life in flux all the time.  Magical thinking can help us come to terms with some of that.