Many years ago, frustrated by yet another night of feeling unease while lying in bed, I decided to try to let go of my voice of judgement and see where my heart and mind would naturally drift. As I embarked on this personal experiment I began to have the strange sense that I was not the “me” I thought I was. The more I relaxed into this curious feeling, the more I noticed a new “me” beginning to form. I noticed first the sensation of blue-colored fur beginning to grow out from my arms and torso, and then from my legs. I noticed as well the sensation that my hands and feet were elongating and beginning to sprout sharp claws. In my minds eye I could see as well that my face was shifting into that of a predatory beast, much like a wolf. At first I felt this beastly me as a superficial form superimposed upon my human form. But the more I sunk into the feeling, and the closer I drifted into the dream state, the more I felt that strange creature with the blue fur was the true “me,” and my human form was the construct, a role I have been playing my whole life.
My initial impulse was to resist this transition but the well-being I felt in my new skin was undeniable, and ultimately irresistible. And I noticed that once I was completely one with the blue beast, I was also no longer caged by the four walls of my bedroom. Vast exotic natural vistas shrouded in the shadows of night grew around me, while others like me blissfully prowled the landscape. From within this timeless space between wake and dream, unchained by the bounds of identity and place, I then drifted off into a deep restful sleep.
Clinical Lycanthropy: a rare psychiatric syndrome that involves a delusional belief that the affected person is, or has, transformed into an animal.
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I had been plagued by a recurring nightmare for many years, one which others I know have had. It is my Senior year in High School and I am doing fine in all my classes but one. In that one class, I was in serious trouble. I had attended it sporadically, if at all, and there was a final exam upon which my educational fate rested. Of course, I had never cracked open the assigned text book, which was naturally as thick as The Bible. The nightmare always ended the same way, with the scornful eyes of my teacher locked eagle-eyed upon me as I shameful took a seat behind a desk, ill prepared to take the test and consumed by dread. There was always a sense of sweet mercy when I woke from the dream, but also a sense of frustration that this dream, many years after graduating, still would not stop haunting me.
One day, the nightmare returned with one key difference: all the parameters were exactly the same as they had always been, but I entered a state of lucidity within the dream, and noticed I had some volition. No longer was I completely at the mercy of this previously rigid dream scenario, I could now assert my will and effect its outcome. So as the all too familiar plot unfolded and I entered the classroom to take the exam, instead of taking my usual place behind a desk, I decided to approach the teacher.
“How do I fix this problem?” I asked him. The teacher looked directly into my eyes and peered at me intensely.
“You have to become like that vampire, what’s his name?”
“You mean Nosferatu?”
“Yes! You need to become like Nosferatu”
When I awoke from the dream, instead of the usual dread I felt a sense of deep well-being, almost euphoria. This was an oft-felt feeling following a lucid dream, but the sensation was magnified by the sharp hopeful turn my recurring nightmare had taken, and by the potential for there to be some resolution to it, however cryptic and bizarre the solution appeared to be.
That day while ruminating about the mysterious directive to “become like Nosferatu,” I ambled into “Seven Stars,” a Boston bookstore that specializes in esoterica. I made a beeline for the “Shamanism” section, as was my habit given my interest in the subject, where a book titled “Spirit of the Shuar” caught my eye. The cover was fairly nondescript, but any new title that came down the pike would capture my attention. And the author of the book, John Perkins, had written a book years earlier, titled “The World is as You Dream It,” which had made an indelible impression on me. I cracked open the thin green paperback and effortlessly read several pages deep without noticing time passing. The book portrayed the life of a fierce warrior tribe in the Ecuadorian Amazon and focused on a man named Chumpi, the tribe’s most powerful and revered elder. This, I determined, would be my new read.
I barely lifted my eyes up on the subway ride back home, and continued reading for hours when I got home. I approached the end of the book as evening fell, and was startled by a revelation in the narrative. The Shuar believe in a life force called “Arutum” that is infused in all creatures. They believe the force can be cultivated, and they believe some are endowed with more Arutum than others. The greatest warriors can even do special things with their abundance of Arutum, including shapeshifting into the form of power animals in order to avoid death. The book, which tracked Chumpi’s life from youth to old age, concluded dramatically. As a great and powerful warrior with a wellspring of Arutum, Chumpi chose to cheat death by transforming into his most prized and most beloved power animal…the bat.
Delusions of reference: An individual may believe that seemingly normal, insignificant events or occurrences have significant meaning.
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Excerpt from “Reindeer people: Among the humans, animals and spirits of Siberia,” by Piers Vitebsky:
“In Siberia, shamans combine a distinctive imagery of reindeer and of bird-flight. Their costumes sometimes include imitation reindeer antlers, occasionally tipped with wings or feathers, placed on the headdress or attached to the shoulders at the very point where reindeer are tattooed on the Pazyryk mummies. Like the participants in the Eveny midsummer ritual, shamans may ride to the sky on a bird or a reindeer. But their relationship with these animals goes far beyond mere riding. One shaman is suckled by a white reindeer during his initiatory vision as he incubates in a bird's nest on a branch high in the tree that links earth and sky. Another becomes a reindeer himself by wearing its hide, while hunters with miniature bows and arrows surround him and mime the act of killing. The hide is then stretched across the broad, flat drum that the shaman will beat as accompaniment to his trance. Another shaman, seeking to consecrate his reindeer-skin drum, is guided by spirits as he combs through the forest to find the location where the reindeer was born and traces every place it has ever visited over the course of its life, right up to the point where it was killed. As he picks his way through bogs and over fallen branches, he picks up the scattered material traces of its existence -- snapped twigs, dried dung -- to gather together every possible part of its being, and then moulds them into a small effigy of the reindeer. When he sprinkles the effigy with a magical ‘water of life’, the drum comes to life. Like a reindeer itself but with enhanced power, it is now capable of bearing the shaman aloft with its throbbing beat to nine, twelve, or more levels of the heavens.”
Delusions of grandeur: Those experiencing grandiose delusions believe that they are a deity, have special powers (e.g. they can fly), rare abilities, or hidden talents.
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"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad."
- Salvador Dali
If anyone outside of a Klan rally or a seedy dive in the heart of Alabama were to utter the phrase “The White Man must be rescued" they would no doubt, in today’s climate, be shunned on such a mass scale that their life would likely be irreparably impacted. One could easily foresee a cascade of negative repercussions following such a statement, including loss of housing, employment, and full scale ostracization by friends and family alike. And an argument can be made that such a calamitous fate would be justified, given how offensive and outside the bounds of decency that statement and sentiment is. At least, that is the majority sentiment today. This is not to suggest, of course, that we have wiped out racism from modern society…far from it. The New Jim Crow is shamefully in full tilt, but few “respectable” Americans today would actually crow about it, at least not openly.
It wasn’t that long ago in our nation’s history, however, that such a statement was not only acceptable it was de rigueur, the clear and uncontroversial zeitgeist of the day. In fact, those exact words, “The White Man must be rescued,” were actually written and published by the renowned author Jack London in an editorial he wrote in The New York Herald in support of the boxer Jim Jeffries, who was white, prior to his much ballyhooed bout with the acclaimed veteran boxer and reigning heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who was black. Johnson had in fact become the first ever black heavyweight champion two years prior by defeating the then title holder Tommy Burns, having been denied a title shot throughout most of his career for purely racial reasons, but many considered Jeffries the true champion since he had heretofore retired undefeated (and, of course, because he was white). The bout was largely considered a referendum on the superiority of the “white race,” not only by the commoner but by the supposedly learned and enlightened intelligentsia, of which London was a revered representative. Jeffries himself stated that he agreed to fight Johnson “for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro.” So afraid, was the general populace, of the potential impact of a black man proving his superiority over a white man in any arena that even the “liberal” New York Times chimed in with a preemptive editorial prior to the fight, stating:
“If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors."
It’s hard to read such accounts of history without thinking “what the hell was in the water back then that made everyone so damn crazy?” Truth be told, however, such mass madness has been more the rule than the exception in human history, with diasporas, genocides, heinous acts of oppression, and “low-grade” prejudices riddled throughout the centuries. We are just barely, for example, inching our way out of a mass era of homophobia in our country. Case in point, as I am writing this the politician and presidential aspirant Tulsi Gabbard is facing backlash for comments she made about the LGBTQ+ community just a few years ago, comments which, at the time, hardly registered as controversial within the majority culture. And less than a decade ago the majority of Americans opposed gay marriage, including such “liberal” icons as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whereas today it’s a relative non-issue. Up until just a few decades ago, in fact, homosexuality was “officially” designated as a clinical pathology in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (aka, the DSM), considered the diagnostic “bible” by the professional therapeutic community.
Many norms are, in fact, still broadly accepted despite their obvious toxicity. We live in a time, for example, where using the tools and techniques of art to manipulate the populace into consumption for the sake of profit (aka, advertising) is considered perfectly acceptable, even respected, social behavior. So pervasive is our acceptance of propaganda in the fabric of our culture that even our leaders rely upon it to secure power, and few seem to think that this is madness.
Likewise, we currently have a healthcare system inherently designed to produce obscene amounts of wealth for a handful of industries and individuals at the expense of the sick and the poor. While we are at the moment in the throws of a national debate about this issue, for decades this has been the unquestioned norm. And even while the insanity of this system seems obvious to many today, there are still many who accept, and even profess a preference for, the current model despite its obvious obscenities.
And there are countless other examples of modern social norms that have such horrific impacts on human lives that their broad acceptance seems insane: for-profit prisons that encourage mass incarceration, private market-driven housing that promotes unstable communities and homelessness, the non-stop production of petroleum that’s devastating our planet, and on and on and on. While there is ever-increasing protest of these behaviors, that is a far cry from designating belief in these toxic ideologies as psycho-pathologies. Yet admit belief in soul flight and synchronicities* and a clinical diagnosis is likely soon to follow despite the prevalence of such beliefs in non-industrial cultures and communities for centuries if not millennia.
How ironic is it that even those “founding fathers” of rational Western thought, Socrates and Descartes, would likely be considered mentally ill in today’s society. The “Socratic method” remains to this day the gold standard for objective scientific analysis of information for the purpose of getting at truth, yet it would be surprising if those who hold up Socrates as the poster boy for reasoned analysis also know that Socrates believed he was possessed of a spirit that helped him discern right from wrong. Turns out there was a fair bit of “madness” to his method. Likewise, René “I think therefor I am” Descartes, one of the vanguards of the Age of Reason, credited his pursuit of math and science to a visitation by a divine spirit as a young man.
And so we have rampant examples throughout history of mass acceptance of insane ideologies, like racism, that were considered sane, and even enlightened, in their day, while so-called “fringe” personal experiences like synchronicities, shapeshifting, and encounters with God are considered clear signs of psychological pathologies by today’s professional arbiters of sanity despite rampant evidence that such beliefs are the bedrock of many thriving cultures, and even of modern rational thought. It makes you wonder, given our rather abysmal record of determining reasonable and accurate boundaries of sanity, whether there is any truly objective way to measure sanity, and diagnose insanity. So often those boundaries seem more determined by cultural norms than by an accurate objective analysis of the human mind.
The psychiatric community essentially recognizes (admits?) this now. While in previous editions of the DSM culture is barley addressed, in the 5th (and most recent, as of this writing) version of the DSM, published in 2013, the authors state:
“Mental disorders are defined in relation to cultural, social, and familial norms and values. Culture provides interpretive frameworks that shape the experience and expression of the symptoms, signs, and behaviors that are the criteria for diagnosis. Culture is transmitted, revised, and recreated within the family and other social systems and institutions. Diagnostic assessment must therefore consider whether an individual’s experiences, symptoms and behaviors differ from sociocultural norms and lead to difficulties in adaptation in the cultures of origin and in specific social or familial contexts.” (p.14)
To say, as the psychiatric community appears to believe, that mental pathology is determined by ones capacity to adapt to social norms is like saying that the canary’s physical pathology is determined by its ability to adapt to the coal mine. The vet who views medicine through this lens would have no interest in looking for toxins within the environment that might be making that canary (and, by extension, the coal miners) sick, but would instead slap on that poor helpless bird an official “disorder” tag (lets call it “Coal Mine Adaptation Disorder” or, CMAD) and then prescribe for our little feathered friend some kind of potent med to help manage the symptoms of its environmental “maladaptation.” Coalminazine, perhaps? This is, of course, a great recipe for a thriving pharmaceutical industry, but a horrible health paradigm for not only the other canaries in the coal mine, but ultimately for the miners as well.
Might a black person show more symptoms of maladaptation in a historically (and currently) racist society? Might a gay person show more symptoms of maladaptation in a historically (and currently) homophobic society? Might a woman show more symptoms of maladaptation in a historically (and currently) sexist society? Might a poor person show more symptoms of maladaptation in a historically (and currently) classist society? These are rhetorical questions…of course they would. The psychiatric paradigm, then, will always grant a pass to the pathologies within the majority culture while pathologizing and stigmatizing (and medicating!) victims of the majority culture’s various forms of oppression. George Orwell could not have devised a more insidious model for exacerbating oppression and suppressing dissent.
My own family history is a good, and tragic, example of the toxic impact of this paradigm. When I was about seven years old, my mother started showing signs of so-called “maladaptation.” Among her many expressions of distress were her frequent, and frantic, cries of “they’re coming to take me away!” which the psychiatric community viewed as an open and shut case of Paranoid Schizophrenia. The primary treatment was frequent injections of the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine which did nothing more than turn her into a zombie each time, only to have her distress reappear with full force once she emerged from her drug-addled fog, a horrifying cycle that lasted years and ultimately culminated in her abandoning the family and living her remaining decades homeless on the Streets of New York.
When I got older and learned the details of my mother’s childhood, through multiple stilted and awkward conversations with my mother’s also-wounded sister, as well as hours of pained dialog with my mom in cafés, on park benches, and other such exposed public spaces throughout New York’s raw urban environs, a radically different narrative regarding what ailed my mother (with radically different social and personal implications) began to emerge. I learned that my mother was six years old when her father died. While a painful event, no doubt, for any child, this alone would not likely trigger the kind of trauma that my mother manifested decades later. What transpired immediately thereafter, however, could. At this moment of profound grief and vulnerability, when one would expect family and friends to rally to my mother’s aid and provide, at minimum, a modicum of comfort and reassurance, her mother instead immediately sent she and my aunt (two years old at the time) to a boarding school. It was when I learned these incomprehensibly cruel details that I understood my mother’s cries of despair. I realized it was not, in fact, a paranoid delusion she was expressing, but rather an old, unresolved, childhood trauma.
They came to take her away.
The implications of this epiphany were profound. Rather than a genetic and / or biochemical pathology, I recognized that my mother was actually expressing a pathology that had its roots in family betrayal. But my mother’s trauma begged, for me, another question…why? Why did my grandmother do this to her two young daughters? What could cause her to act so significantly against her parental instincts, and against the interests of her obviously vulnerable young children? The answer to that question had even more profound implications.
As more details about the family history emerged from my ongoing conversations with my mother and her sister, I learned that my grandmother had in fact witnessed and experienced horrors that defied comprehension. I learned that she herself was just a little girl when the terrifying anti-semitic pogroms swept through her village in Odessa. I learned that she bore witness to the torture and murder of incalculable numbers of Jewish relatives, friends, and neighbors, as mass hysteria tore through the community. I learned that her father wanted desperately to save his family by emigrating to America but their poverty, and the anti-Semitic American quota system, allowed for only him to come to the new world. I learned that he spent years separated from his wife and daughter as he desperately tried to scrape up enough money to bring his family to safety. I learned that, in the process, he fell prey to the horrors of the industrial revolution as all the fingers on his left hand were cut off in a banana packing plant accident. I learned that, through relentless and frantic toil, he finally managed to save enough money to rescue his wife and daughter and get them to America, before he shortly thereafter succumbed to stress and exhaustion, and died.
This was the context in which my grandmother came to Brooklyn. And this was the context in which she later had to process the grief of her husband’s premature death. When I learned her unbearable story, I understood the desperation and overwhelming (likely unbearable) despair that led to her inhumane decision to send my mother, and her sister, away in their critical time of need. When I understood her burdens, the wounds that were no doubt still festering that had their roots in genocide and diaspora, her decision was understandable…even, perhaps, to be expected. Dehumanization, after all, begets dehumanization. When I thought about, too, how difficult if must have been for a woman, even under the best of circumstances, to raise two children alone in 1940s America, let alone a grieving, shell-shocked refuge who knew barely a sole in her newly adopted home country, my heart just welled with sorrow for her, nearly a century later.
What a different picture of reality, and what different lessons we learn, when we listen to the canary’s song rather than slap her with a “clinical” diagnosis at her first signs of “maladaptation” to the coal mine, and silence her with potent psychotropics. Think about how likely we are to continue to get exposed to the various social toxins of injustice and inequity if we insist that the pain expressed by the oppressed is merely a pathological maladaptation to their environment. Think about, too, how the numbing of our pain and the silencing of our stories deny us the gifts of empathy and wisdom that come from honoring, and listening to, our suffering.
The psychiatric model ultimately muzzles our howl, clips our wings, silences our songs, and stifles our protests, at the service of preserving a historically oppressive social order that benefits from our anguish. It might be time to turn to the shape-shifters, the shaman, and the schizophrenics to teach us how to return to a healthier social equilibrium by honoring, rather than pathologizing, the margins of experience. What we will likely learn, by listening to their songs, is that the only difference between them and madmen is that they are not mad, but the rest of society, including the psychiatrists, may well have lost their collective minds.