Voices

Posted on March 9, 2006 in Mania Spirituality and Being

I am coming to appreciate the importance of culture when addressing my bipolar symptoms. In another time, another place, I might be a shaman, secreting bloody feathers in my mouth, spitting them out after sucking at a pain in the body of a patient, and telling all the world that I had drawn out the evil spirit, hopefully before the damage the spirit had wreaked had become irreversible.

Clever charlatanry keeps many of us from admitting that we are sick. Or we don’t recognize the symptoms as symptoms. For many years, I heard voices in the whirring of fans and in motors’ hum. I attributed them to boredom, to my mind filling empty space. They said “You are evil. You are evil.” And I screamed at them to shut up, stayed in my home so that they wouldn’t seduce me into violence or theft. I resisted successfully. I knew that the voices had come out of my childhood experience, out of the teasing of the kids and out of the bitter taunts of my family. I was a bad bad boy for being different for reasons that I did not understand. Why had God done this to me?

The two remedies that removed me from this world were agnosticism and medication. Agnosticism took God off my back. (If there is a God, I don’t think He wanted to be there anyway.) I committed myself to being a good person regardless of whether or not I believed. (Cf. John Lennon’s “Imagine”.) The medication made fans whirr and electric motors hum without narration or chanting.

Auditory hallucinations were never a joy for me. When the osteopathic psychiatrist asked me if I’d ever had a vision, I did not describe them because of the many gullible noncompliants in the room. Support rather than harassment was what I needed and the New Age groupies would, in the name of the first, provide much of the second.

Recently, I chose to step out of a support group where noncompliants had staged an effective coup. Most attended 12 Steps Meetings. DBSA had been founded, in large part, because 12 Steps groups such as AA or Emotions Anonymous tended to promote denial of illness and resistance to the use of medications. Though these rules are not in the groups’ literature or bylaws, they persist because of disinterest and denial by the national organizations. In AA if you show up drunk, they show you the door. EA doesn’t do much of anything, I gather, for those who do not take their meds. Perhaps DBSA should do so for people who don’t want to take their meds.

Religious “cures” make me suspicious. They become a cognitive addiction that can only be broken by humble surrender to the knowledge that our mental disorders have a chemical cause. In Pentecostal and certain New Age groups, voices in the fans and out of the endless sky above us are attributed to spirits. I know of a woman who believed a voice to be an angel and that angel told her to let go of the steering wheel of her car. If asked whether she would do it again, she said “Yes, because in my belief system you do what angels tell you.” The maddening evidence suggests that she knows her theology causes her to react destructively. She will not let it go.

The voices in the machines instruct us to do many things. I sent myself to former Yugoslavia in the belief that I had a revelation*. As I look over the pictures from that period, I recall the pain and the sweat of that three month summer. The voices said “You are evil. You are evil.” Child of God or free agent in the Universe that I am, I know that this is a lie.

* I admit revelation to do good beats revelation to hurt.