Posted by Lunatic on April 20, 2000, at 0:55:41
In reply to Re: Lunatic, posted by Mark H. on April 19, 2000, at 15:18:48
"I would find it useful and informative to read more about your internal experiences
with schizophrenia, if you're willing to share them."Its isn't real clear to me what you mean. My illness consists/consisted of primarily delusions, not much in the way of hallucinations, and at times severely disorganized thought, (during active psychosis). Over the years, I have been able to recognize and label and defuse some of my delusions. A lot of my delusions in some way revolved around religious ideation. Therefore, the Church has helped me in some ways to come to terms and recognize some of my delusions by becoming more familiar with the dogma and seeing the erroneous nature of the delusions. On the other hand, some of the beliefs held by the wider Church, (right, far-right), would sound to most people delusional. I can only suspend judgement, because based on my experience many obvious truths have turned out to be false and vice versa. I also have a degree in a hard science and I am a little sceptical about the exact nature of reality and our ability to perceive it.
In my day to day experiences I may overreact to external stimuli. I see good and evil at work, by my perceptions, and if the radio is playing "Sympathy for the Devil", I turn it off. My perceptions that you may find questionable are based to an extent on learned symbolism, (rectus,sinister etc.) that I sort of sum up to how I perceive reality, which I might revise from time to time. Its a sort of loose association of similiar ideas. If, for example, someone asserts, "There are no such thing as demons!", then maybe from the framework of their perception of reality this seems entirely reasonable, but if I know that within a group such as the Church this is pretty much common belief, (that demons exist), and it is easy for me to see that there is consensus in belief only in certain fractions of society in general, I would question their assertion and my beliefs would be unchanged. So I would have to disagree with the idea that certain religious ideas are "delusions" unless they are inconsistent with the dogma of the individuals claimed belief system. I can see one other advantage to believing in demons vs. id impulses. Demons are seen as external while id impulses are seen as arising from unfulfilled desires or internal. Since the actual reality of the situation cannot be known, (I think this is reasonable), then the belief in demons rather than unwholesome aspects of the self relieves the person of unnecessary guilt. I find it troubling at times to realize that the reality of a situation is for all practical purposes, unknowable. This prevents me from throwing out paranoid ideas. But based on my experiences, having been burnt too many times, trust is foolish and illadvised.
poster:Lunatic
thread:30376
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000411/msgs/30664.html