
Psychiatric Name-Calling Simplistically Devalues What William James Referred to as “Exceptional Experiences”

The first time I came across this question occurred while reading about William James’s 1896 series of lectures on “Exceptional Mental States.” Harvard psychologist, Eugene Taylor, had reconstructed these lectures from James’s original handwritten lecture notes, newspaper reports, letters, and a variety of other sources.
At the very beginning of the lectures, James argues that experiences that are commonly viewed as unhealthy or morbid are really “an essential part of every character,” and give life “a truer sense of values.” To support his contention, James first provides three examples of famous individuals who suffered from melancholy, a term that corresponds closely with what modern pathologizers call “major depressive disorder.” St. Paul, the religious figure of the New Testament, Cesare Lombrosa, a late 19th-century Italian criminologist, and Immanual Kant, the 18th-century German philosopher, became, according to their histories, better as a result of their troubling experiences.

James then goes on to tell his audience about Buddhist sects in Japan that have priests who believe they can put themselves into a trance so that a god can speak through them. These people seek to cultivate these experiences, apparently believing that they provide some benefits to their sect.

Even if this demon [of Socrates] were really meant hallucinations of hearing, we know now that one in eight or ten of the population has had such an experience and that for insanity we must resort to other tests than these.



As Taylor (1984) closes his reconstruction of the lecture series, he quotes James as follows:
There is a strong tendency among these pathological writers I have cited… to represent the line of mental health as a very narrow crack, which one must tread with bated breath, between foul friends on the one side and gulfs of despair on the other. Now health is a term of subjective appreciation, not of objective description….There is no purely objective stan
dard of sound health. Any peculiarity that is of use to a man is a point of soundness in him, and what makes a man sound for one function may make him unsound for another…. The trouble is that such writers . . . use the descriptive names of symptoms merely as an artifice for giving objective authority to their personal dislikes. The medical terms become mere appreciative clubs to knock a man down with. . . . The only sort of being, in fact, who can remain as the typical normal man, after all the individuals with degenerative symptoms have been rejected, must be a perfect nullity . . . Who shall absolutely say that the morbid has no revelations about the meaning of life? That the healthy minded view so-called is all?

William James and the Leo Tolstoy Example
A few years after this series of lectures, James wrote one of his classic works, The Varieties of Religious Experience. There he tells us about the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s 2-year period of despair.
In his painfully personal book, My Confession, Tolstoy relates how, at about the age of 50, his life had become “flat, more than flat: dead.”
I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force impelled me to get rid of my existence, in one way or another…. Behold me then … hiding the rope in order not to hang myself from the rafters of the room where every night I went to sleep alone; behold me no longer going shooting, lest I should yield to the too easy temptation of putting an end to myself with my gun.
All of this took place at a time when Tolstoy’s outer circumstances seemed excellent.
I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a largeproperty which was increasing with no pains taken on my part. I was morerespected by my kinsfolk and acquaintances than I had ever been; I was loaded with praise by strangers; and without exaggeration I could believe my name already famous.


When James uses a brief phrase to refer to Tolstoy’s experience, he chooses “an attack of melancholy,” rather than “mental illness.” Melancholy serves us well. It is an experience that is familiar to us all. To me, it evokes the beautiful words from the Joni Mitchell song “Hejira”:
There’s comfort in melancholy where there’s no need to explain. It’s just as natural as the weather in this moody sky today.
In our Tolstoy example, his melancholy appeared at first to come on him as if out of the blue. Later, Tolstoy came to understand it as having been due to living wrongly. Only by questioning deeply and repeatedly the meaning of his despair did he come to this understanding. Thus, Tolstoy’s experience, it seems to me, is far more aptly construed as a tool for personal growth than a mental illness.
The Review of the Evidence
It may seem a fanciful theory that the experiences now referred to as mental illnesses can be potentially helpful. However, in 2010, Robert Whitaker published a book titled Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness. To write the book, he pored through the scientific literature for the past 50 years and found a dramatic increase in the number of people who are pathologized, which led to an astonishing increase in psychiatric drug consumption. And more people then ever before became disabled for longer and longer periods of time.
In the 1980s, Martin Harrow, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, began a long-term study of 64 newly diagnosed schizophrenia patients. Every few years, he assessed how they were doing. Were they symptomatic? In recovery? Employed? Were they taking antipsychotic medications? The collective fate of the off-med and medicated patients began to diverge after two years, and by the end of 4.5 years, it was the off-medication group that was doing much better. Nearly 40% of the off-med group were “in recovery” and more than 60% were working, whereas only 6% of the medicated patients were “in recovery” and few were working. This divergence in outcomes remained throughout the next ten years, such that at the 15-year follow-up, 40% of those off drugs were in recovery, versus 5% of the medicated group.
Whitaker also found studies that compared cultures, like our own, that employed the pathologizing model with cultures that framed exceptional experiences as potentially beneficial. Countries infected with the pathologizing approach had outcomes significantly poorer.
These findings lead me to conclude that it is time to have a reasonable discussion about embracing other models of care.
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Some people will enjoy reading this blog by beginning with the first post and then moving forward to the next more recent one; then to the next one; and so on. This permits readers to catch up on some ideas that were presented earlier and to move through all of the ideas in a systematic fashion to develop their emotional and social intelligence.
source https://drjeffreyrubin.wordpress.com
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