How Culture Affects Hallucinations | Hacker News Reader

How Culture Affects Hallucinations

priceonomics.com

36 pointsmercer10 comments

> In our culture, people suffering from schizophrenia or other forms of psychosis are more likely than members of other cultures to recognize their hallucinations as a symptom of pathology, but they also tend to have hallucinations that are very violent and negative.

I can see how encouraging positive relationships could be beneficial for anyone with such a symptom, regardless of figuring out if it's a symptom of pathology (depending on the culture context.)

I wonder if this also has to do with the mythology of Western religion that says humans are fundamentally flawed and bad. Western religion tends to promote this idea that we are fundamentally bad and our only hope for salvation lies in Jesus. With this mindset then of course if you hear a voice coming from inside your head it must be bad and violent.

I grew up in an extremely fundamentalist Christian cult and I heard many talk fearfully about demon possession and experiencing supernatural phenomena that they attributed to the Devil. Of course later in life I realized that many of those people were probably mentally ill, and not recognizing the symptoms for what they were because they saw things through a different lens, which was one of a world in which Satan was out to get you.

It makes sense that in a culture that reveres the ancestors one would tend to attribute hearing voices to ancestors as well, and could have a more peaceful relationship with their own abnormal experience.

That should be easy to study. Both Judaism and Islam don't know the concept of original sin, that's a Christian idea. Judaism holds that humans have capacity to do good and evil, and that everyone has a choice. Islam teaches that humans are fundamentally good and have an innate capacity to follow the will of God. Someone must already have looked at how schizophrenia manifests itself in devout Jews and Muslims.

> Someone must already have looked at how schizophrenia manifests itself in devout Jews and Muslims.

That'd be an interesting study. If this exists I'd love to see it.

Mental illness is not just a personal problem, mental illness is also a social problem. When all of society is set up to get you to do stuff for them, and treat you badly when you don't perform, when you can no longer perform society will specifically make you mentally ill, with bad treatment as being a non-worthy human being. In other more social societies, and our society is extremely anti-social and sociopathic in how we use people, people that are no longer able to contribute are not made to feel extremely unwelcome, this goes a long way towards them not feeling insecure and turning to negative emotions due to their insecurities.

It's interesting in our society we have lots of tolerance for those born with mental illness or the ones permanently disabled. But we don't have a lot of tolerance for those down on their luck, or dealing with depression, or other mental issues. There is an implicit understanding that they should just get their act together and perform.

I wouldn't be too certain about that. There are Christian- specifically American Evangelical Christian- approaches to responding to such voices in a positive way:

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/26/149394987/when-god-talks-back-... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/books/review/when-god-talk...

These Evangelicals seem to be the American equivalent to the Masai who speak to the dead.

I find this topic fascinating because my experience with Evangelical churches is that there's a marked difference between the visions/messages shared by 'normal' church members and those of the churchgoers who had mental health issues (who are relatively overrepresented in Evangelical churches, in my experience).

The best I can explain the difference is that the 'normal' voices/visions were 1) generally more coherent, 2) often very much a matter of 'letting the subconscious/intuition speak' rather than an explicit voice, and 3) shared in a relatively cautious, painting-a-picture kind of way.

Sometimes I miss the way our 'inner voice' was encouraged and given a place, because quite often I think these messages or visions were quite valuable and even profound.

Reading about DMT hallucinations is pretty fascinating, but at some point it conincidental to DMT's popularity, I became firmly convinced that a feedback loop had developed.

More people took trips after hearing wild trip reports, and with those in mind, either seemed to fixate on the reports they read, finding their version what they imagined the report to be, or told tall tales to be cool.

Much like the guy who turned into a glass of orange juice while tripping on LSD, the interdimensional elf gnomes seem to be this legend lore of the DMT trip now.

Nonetheless, whatever the fad imaginary spirit animal is these days, it's interesting to see clinical proof that most hallucinations require a priori knowlege to envision. The mind doesn't seem capable of conuring concepts never experienced.

Yeah it isn't so much conjuring new concepts as it is that the hallucinating mind connects existing concepts in ways never experienced before. So someone would never normally connect the concept of their self identity with the concept of a glass of orange juice while sober, but while high on LSD this could seem like a plausible scenario, and the synaptic connections made during that trip can persist afterward and leave a lingering sense of bizarre connection.

I read a very interesting piece on the use of LSD by creative people and how some felt they benefited immensely from taking LSD precisely because of those random connections that they formed between mental concepts that they had. The basic theory was that creative people in these scenarios had minds full of concepts that would tend to work well together and could benefit because there was a high probability that the connections that formed were valuable and useful ones.

Yeah I don't care how much Joe Rogan tells me everyone sees elves, I did DMT twice and never saw any elves or felt any presence.

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