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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

There's some historical burden of this analysis to that you could be ready to back up. Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual state, and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing or any more dangerous while not.

It's certainly feasible that in many cases it would be chronic and severe enough to interfere with necessary responsibilities but that doesn't take us straight to "everyone who showed psychosis was exiled or executed." We know that some cultures did have explicit roles and accommodations for people who were way out there.

One of the graphics the author showed mentioned this but it didn't otherwise come up: look at the tradition of the holy fools in some slavic cultures. This got rolled into christianity but it appears to predate it in those cultures and straightforwardly includes people without obvious productive benefit for their society.

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    Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual
    state,

Agreed.

    and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing or any more
    dangerous while not.

Hard disagree. I have been in a mental ward. I have been in close proximity to people who have been undergoing psychotic breaks. Never have I felt in more danger for my safety, even though, ostensibly, nurses and other trained medical professionals were right there to deal with the issue. Being in close proximity to someone undergoing psychosis is a terrifying thing, and it's no surprise that traditional societies, in the absence of other mechanisms, would choose to exile people undergoing psychosis. And if the people never returned from their exile, well, that's a hard thing, but the great spirit must have had a different purpose for them.

Yes these aren't privileged experiences I have had them too. It is extremely frightening and is riskier than a lot of other activities. That's not itself evidence of how any particular culture treated people experiencing it or what they thought or expected of the experience.

This particular subject is one that has interested a lot of people, including historians and anthropologists, and there is a lot of history and anthropology on it. I'm neither, but from what I've read people who have professionally studied it mostly refrain from making generalizations of how it has been experienced through time and across cultures.

If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're making broad assertions. I'm curious what that is based on other than extrapolation from your own frightening experiences.

    If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being
    tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're
    making broad assertions.

It's a broad assertion I feel safe making from what I've read, and from what I know of human nature, and the often toxic dynamics of small communities. Being different in a small tribe sucks. Yeah, if you're different in just the right way, you're venerated as a shaman or religious figure. But I feel absolutely safe in asserting that for the average mentally ill person, being mentally ill in a pre-modern society would have been worse, both in quantity and quality of life.

Maybe you wouldn't have been exiled, as such. But you would have been a marginalized outsider in an environment that was far more resource constrained than the environment in which we live today, and which rewarded conformity to a far greater degree.

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