We Are Going To Need More Beds

I was reading an article the other day where the author referred to someone who had “fantasies of victimisation“ and it made me think.

In the world of psychiatry and psychology, someone whose mental boundaries have broken down and their fantasy world has seriously leaked into the material world to the extent that they can no longer tell the difference, is deemed to be psychotic. This is different from psychopathy in so far as it is seen as a failure of normal brain function for whatever reason, as opposed to a developmental disorder as in personality disorders.

People can have just one, or if they are unlucky several psychotic episodes, which in between they are perfectly normal and can talk about the difference between their inner world creations and their experiences in the material world without conflating the two. Or they can be in a permanent state of psychosis whereby they need intensive support and possibly hospitalisation. Active schizophrenia is an example of this, as is acute paranoia, complete with hallucinations, both visual and auditory.

Because no one knows why the brain behaves this way under certain circumstances, the solution is therapy to help sort the inner and outer, and drugs to dampen down brain responses so that therapy can be effective. Even with this, the long-term prognosis is not so good for a lot of people and further episodes of care will be needed. It seems that once your brain has decided to go down this route, it is reluctant to come back.

One thing that is known, is that you can trigger psychotic symptoms in yourself if you try. There are several ways to experience psychotic episodes. Drugs, overuse of alcohol, brain injury, severe trauma, certain types of unresolved attachment problems in early childhood to name but a few. That is not to say everyone who experiences these things become psychotic, but one or more of these things are usually present in those that do. It is also observed that there may be a predisposition towards this end of the mental health spectrum in some people and this has been noticed in studies of identical twins brought up together where one is psychotic and the other isn’t.

Whatever the underlying biological causes the one thing that is not often mentioned is that you can go from being an averagely functional person to someone who is showing signs of trouble in a relatively short space of time. This often starts with a person’s obsessive desire to focus on one thing, or a particular episode from their life or history compulsively, weaving a fantasy narrative around it where they are the central character.

Take the situation in Palestine or the Atlantic slave trade for instance. People who focus to the point where they get very upset about these things, aren’t simply empathising; they often emote in a way that leads one to think that they actually believe it is happening to them personally in some way and that they are in grave danger. 

Toxic empathy is a great trigger for psychotic behaviour in normal brains. Your inner world imagines what it must have been like for a slave on the Atlantic crossing. You imagine deeper, how they might have felt or thought; the hopelessness, the none human status. Now you can feel the whip on your own back and experience feelings of humiliation and degradation so strong that you want to lash out and punish those responsible. Your inner world has broken free and becomes your new reality. Of course, one episode does not make you a full blown psychotic.

This can also be seen in more everyday situations, such as complex bereavement, where the person does not acknowledge the death and acts as though the person is still there. If the boundaries between inner and outer are still working, most people “come back to themselves” and realise that it was all in their mind, and, more importantly, it is their imagination working on certain facts and creating an upsetting narrative. We have no idea how people viewed the world in past times, so we can only ever interpret history through today’s beliefs and perspective.

Nevertheless, more and more people “feed the beast” so to speak with help from the media, chat rooms etc. and become in their own minds, the person that literally feels the pain of other people’s past. You could say it is a form of mental, rather than cultural appropriation. It is not their pain to feel though, but they cannot conceive that they have created it themselves.

The danger of this to society as well as themselves is that the need to make the world fit in with an individual, or a group of individuals fantasy beliefs becomes so strong that any means necessary is seen as reasonable, because you are now, in your own pseudo reality, fighting for your life.

This proto psychotic experience, if you like, can, if continued, take over the person and become their whole self as well as their reason for existence. They become that slave, Palestinian, trans person, Israelite etc. it’s gone past empathy and into self-protection. Hence, their perception is all about surviving in a hostile world; based on nothing that is actually happening to them, or probably ever happened to them in the past. Self-induced fantasies about victimhood are as damaging as self-induced fantasies of trauma.

The concept of racial abuse has had to be exponentially widened to allow people who have never suffered racism but probably had to put up with some everyday bullying that anyone can come across, to claim they have. At worst, they can report things that never happened, even as they imagine they did, in the certainty that they will be believed, no matter how mad it sounds. Yasmin Alibi Brown is a great example of this sort of behaviour.

People whose trauma occurred outside their heads are usually desperate to either resolve it; or if they can’t, block it out. Imaginary trauma often causes obsessive thinking and comes in ready-made packages for expanding on. War is a good example of this. Nobody whoever fought in a war and been in battle wants to remember it in detail. Perhaps that is why the forces that fought the first and second world wars mostly didn’t speak of their experiences. The same for those who fought in Bosnia, Vietnam and the Middle East. All they want is peace of mind so they can enjoy their lives again.

The chap on the morning tv show that said fighting two world wars for what we have now was not worth it. The horror that followed was all about how he had failed the imaginary narrative about the wars of the twentieth century.

Booker T Washington was one of the only people born into actual slavery that has left a coherent record of his life and thoughts. He didn’t want to politicise his experiences, but to help others who were disenfranchised become equal to anyone. As a result, black activists see him as a betrayer of the cause, because he did not distinguish himself from whites. The last thing he seems to have wanted was to keep the fact that he was born a slave in the forefront of his mind. As this does not fit in with the image of the black slave hating the white man, his experiences are not often referred to, and he remains a controversial figure.

It’s strange to think that the fantasy that proto psychotic people create leads them to want to protect and revenge fantasy created victims. When real victims speak, from the complexity of their experiences, it is usually seen as a problem.

Because more and more of people’s experiences are at one step removed from actual physical engagement; people feel that they can experience the most awful things that happened to other people happening to them and call for the wrath of God to rain down on those identified as responsible because of those thoughts, and yet still be protected from any consequences. They may be protected from becoming physically impaired, but the mental damage over time may mean that one day, they will be unable to reset to a normal state of information processing.

This is not about free speech; it’s about not colluding with other people’s pathology, by pretending that you see the same crazy things that they do. If society continues down the route of forbidding people to check out earthly reality in a concrete way; we are going to need a lot more inpatient beds for mental health.

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