Scribbles and Bits

Mori: I textually transcribed this zine I raved about earlier! It's a mad pride manifesto with influences from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Icarus Project, Inner Family Systems, and anarchist concepts like mutual aid and collective liberation. Its beautiful imperfection means a lot to my hothead self, so here it is!

This zine is anti-authority and anti-medical. You may not want to read it, especially if you're in a place mentally where your brain is causing you a lot of havoc and doesn't seem at all your friend. Paris Williams's Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift In Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis covers some similar territory with more research, page count, and moderation.

Knocking from the Inside: Breaking Free from Mental Imperialism
by Jimmy Dunson

( You have lost your mind? So? There are worse things to lose. You have found the heart and soul of the universe. You simply stopped being the false god to the universe within you, you stopped being the dictator to your differing parts. )

We found Paris Williams’s book, Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift In Our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis, thirdhand in a free box a couple years back, and gave it a shot. Super glad we did!

Paris Williams was a hang gliding instructor and a pilot when he experienced what others would call psychosis. He dealt with it outside the psych system, then devoted himself to studying how to handle such experiences and got a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. His book is at times awkwardly formatted, but it really made us think differently about our own brain and what it might be doing when the wheels come off its bus. Williams has put it up for free online, and it’s well worth checking out: https://rethinkingmadness.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Rethinking_Madness_completeBook.pdf

This post, however, is about only one brief tangent in this book that we keep returning to.

Williams describes “a woman who found herself in an existentially untenable situation with what I believe may have been a virtually nonexistent window of tolerance [aka, an inability to handle anything] as the result of a very traumatic childhood. In very early adulthood, her entire personal paradigm (her beliefs and experiences of herself and the world) underwent a profound transformation that clearly involved a radical shift within both her cognitive constructs [how she saw reality/herself] and her window of tolerance [how much she could handle], a modification that has remained relatively stable to this day, nearly forty years later. Within her new belief system, she experiences herself as a very powerful being on a messianic quest, and she also experiences herself as belonging to a very benevolent and supportive family outside consensus reality.(footnote) ... Her life has become an inspiring model of compassion and sympathetic joy for all beings... To this day, she continues to do quite well, having a relatively high sense of wellbeing and meeting her needs at least as well as the average person whose personal paradigm is more in alignment with consensus reality.

“Footnote: ...just because such beliefs and experiences are clearly anomalous relative to consensus reality (at least within mainstream Western society), this does not nullify the possibility of their having some degree of validity. [etc etc]” (182)

Williams doesn’t say anything more about this particular woman, but we think about her a lot, and take comfort in her anonymous forty-year example.