Saints and Madmen: How Pioneering Psychiatrists Are Creating a New Science of the Soul

261 Pages·2000·3.04 MB·English

by  Russell Shorto

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Saints and Madmen
How Science Got Religion
Russell Shorto
Contents
Foreword
1. The New Psychotics
2. The Singular Pluralism of William James
3. Zeitgeist
4. Storming the Castle
5. The Don Quixote of Westchester
6. At the Center for the Spiritually Disturbed
7. The Patients of Job
8. Crusaders
9. The Walking Symbol
10. Satan in the Brain
11. Acid Flashback
12. Experience Itself
13. Beer, Sex, Shopping, Chocolate, God
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Foreword
The resistance to addressing an individual’s religious and spiritual beliefs and
practices in the field of psychiatry, psychology and social work has a long
history, dating back to Freud’s view of religion. For him, religion was either a
defense or a symptom. Learning how to take a religious history, how to explore
religious material in therapeutic work with an open, non-judgmental attitude was
omitted in the training of mental health professionals.
Shorto’s book, published in 1999, was a knock on that closed door. He
searched out and interviewed men and women who departed from the main
stream view and in doing so, presented his readers with the challenge of
rethinking the long held position of omission or of pathologizing a person’s
beliefs. But religion is not always good for people and he presents the
complexity of what a person’s beliefs can mean and can lead to in destructive
ways as well as constructive ways.
Since his book was first published, progress has been made in the ways
mental health professionals deal with the complex interaction of a person’s
beliefs and their mental health and mental illness. Including an understanding of
the role religion plays in a person’s life in the training of psychiatric residents,
psychologists and social workers, while not a part of the core curriculum in all
academic programs, has increased significantly. At academic conferences,
spirituality and religion is more frequently included in presentations, workshops
and research.
In a world where religious discourse can be so polarizing, the ability to
have respectful conversations that are motivated by a desire to genuinely
understand the other is crucial. Shorto, in his approach both to the patients and
the therapists he interviewed, illustrates the benefit of doing just that. As he says
in the chapter on “Crusaders,” “ Terrorism doesn’t spring from open-air
discussions, but from closed rooms; conspire literally means ‘ to breathe
together,’ and in a close brotherhood of like minds individually held passions
can get reechoed and simplified until they take on a reality of their own.”
Shorto, in his clear and engaging way of presenting the cases and his study
of the history of psychiatry and religion, makes the case that talking about
religion and spirituality in the clinical context is not tantamount to believing and
accepting all that an individual presents but that therapists need to inquire,
explore, be curious and non-judgmental. All this is in the service of truly
understanding the other as he so aptly has done.
Nancy Kehoe RSCJ, PhD
Author of Wrestling with Our Inner Angels: Faith, Mental Illness and the
Journey to Wholeness
1
The New Psychotics
Consider that you are in God, surrounded and encompassed by God,
swimming in God.
—MOTHER TERESA
Space is the place.
—SUN RA
THE CRACKING OPEN OF Joshua Beil’s world began on a thick August day in 1996,
in New York’s Central Park. Actually, depending on how you figure these
things, it could have started at the beginning of that summer. No one knows why
a large percentage of what psychiatrists call psychotic episodes occur at the
coming-of-age stage of life—late teens to early twenties—but one guess is that
the unhinging of one’s sense of reality is in these cases related to that first
significant severing of connection to home and parents. Going out on your own,
planting your identity in new soil, giving it new air to breathe, a chance to grow
in new directions, not necessarily the straight-up path your parents encouraged
but maybe sidewinding, maybe forgoing the air altogether and burrowing down,
exploring the soil itself—such wild freedom may be just too much for some
psyches.
In Joshua’s case there was an extra dose of disorientation. He had been born
and raised in Honolulu, where body-boarding, pottery, and Bob Marley were his
major interests. The only other part of the world he knew was the even more
laid-back surf town of Santa Cruz, California, where he had spent his first two
years of college at U.C. Santa Cruz. But his father thought he could do with a bit
of real-world experience, so he arranged a summer internship at Citibank in New
York City. Out of filial duty, Joshua went along with the plan, but the new
environment was almost overwhelming; he had never been to the East Coast,
and the throbbing, broiling, stiff-necked skyscraper cauldron of Midtown
Manhattan was like another planet. He had no friends in the city, no points of
contact with anything he knew, and the pin-striped account jockeys that
surrounded him might as well have been zoo creatures.
On that day in August, his wandering around the city landed him in Central
Park. He was wearing sandals and had cut his foot; he asked someone nearby if
he happened to have a bandage. In answer, the fellow handed him a rolling
paper. Joshua grinned and said thanks, whereupon the stranger gave him a
shaka, a waggle of the thumb and little finger, the Hawaiian “be cool” sign.
They began talking; the guy had been to Hawaii. Joshua fell in with the young
man, whom we will call Alan, and who turned out to be “temporarily homeless
and temporarily unemployed.” He had an interesting potential business, though,
selling quartz crystals, which he said he had mined himself. He took Joshua to a
truck; indeed, the back was filled with crystals. He just needed a little money to
get things off the ground. Joshua loaned him two hundred dollars. He was
beginning to feel a little light-headed. “Let’s go clubbing tonight,” Alan said.
They ended up at Wetlands, a downtown club that showcased world music.
Late in the evening, after a few drinks and a modest amount of marijuana,
Joshua found himself in a separate room in which a “drumming circle” was
taking place. He picked up a drum and joined in. And then it happened. He
doesn’t know how much time passed, but he began to feel part of the rhythm,
that he was the rhythm, that he was carrying the whole drumming circle. Very
quietly, as if tiptoeing across an unnoticed line, his personality unhinged.
Standing outside the door of his apartment building at four o’clock that
morning, he noticed a shadow on the back of his hand. As he watched, it took
the form of a falcon. Then the falcon flapped its wings and transformed into a
bear, then a bull. He was mildly astonished, and went inside to get a better look
at himself. In his apartment, he saw a “rainbow of electrical beams” shooting
through his palm. He held his arms out to the sides and watched light pass
through his body. He examined his mood, and realized that he felt exhilarated
and wonderfully peaceful at the same time. He had enough attachment to reality
to understand that something unusual was going on, but he felt sure—and
continues to this day to be sure—that he wasn’t delusional. “These were not
hallucinations,” he said, “because I definitely saw them.” Instead, he had the
strong impression that this was “the beginning of some sort of enlightenment
process.”
Hold it right there. The glossary of the American Psychiatric Association
defines psychotic as “grossly impaired in reality testing,” meaning that a person
loses the ability to tell the difference between the real world and the fairies of the
mind. Psychosis involves delusions or hallucinations; one common
manifestation of psychosis is “hyperreligious ideation”: believing you are God,
seeing angels, believing you have a special mission to save humanity.
Throughout the past century, and right up to the present, psychiatrists and
psychotherapists have done a lot of hand-holding with people in psychotic states,
listening to reports of their ecstatic visions, their accounts of meetings with Jesus
and Lao-tzu, nodding a great deal, and then beginning the slow job of grounding
the person, encouraging a reconnection with ordinary reality by talking about the
weather or common objects. There is even a (rather grotesque-sounding) term
for it in behavioral psychology: extinction; the goal is to extinguish the
delusional behavior with a bucket of cold, bracing mundanities. The strategy has
been to get the patient out of the state, the way one might climb out of a ditch,
and forget about it.
In the days following his drumming circle experience, Joshua found himself
submerging more and more frequently into his sublime state of awareness:
I might be staring at a tree, and all of a sudden I see the spirit of the tree
manifesting itself, the God-createdness of the tree. I see how it relates to the tree