Columns

This week's column will contain some discussion of intangible things. Consciousness isn't something you can pick up and hold in your hand, look at under a microscope, or poke and prod with physical tools. Yet, physical things affect consciousness. Consciousness also has characteristics and parts to it that people can learn to describe.

What you eat, how much exercise you get, the levels or types of stimuli in your environment, and the biochemical composition of your nerve cells and synapses are some of the physical things that affect consciousness. Around whom you spend your time affects consciousness. Do you live with a "complainer"? Do you live with an abusive individual? Or, do you live with someone more uplifting?  

For people on psychiatric medications, we are more vulnerable to incorporating things people to say directly into our thoughts. Medication makes previously psychotic people malleable. Psychotherapists sometimes make use of this. 

Focusing on your physical surroundings can bring your mind out of the abstract and into a more basic state of mind. This is usually a good thing. Focusing on what needs to be done in the "now" moment and, at least on an emotional, level blocking out worries about the future, as well as blocking out painful memories of the past, are strategies that can bring you away from an abstract and painful reverie and into a more focused mode.  

Being psychotic could mean that our mind is way out on a limb of abstraction. This is to the extent that we mostly disregard the five physical senses. We are less likely to be psychotic if the mind is focused on our immediate surroundings and if our consciousness is focused in the present moment.  

If in treatment, a good movie can be the final straw that brings you out of psychosis, and back into a state of tracking what most people would call reality. If the movie grabs you and brings you into its plot, it substitutes for the internal "movie" of the psychotic world you have been living in. Then when the actual movie is over, you are back into the room, and you might feel good enough and relaxed enough that your mind snaps back into the immediate world as conveyed by the senses.  

On the other hand, if not in treatment, and if very far into psychosis, a movie may not help--one may incorrectly believe the movie is conveying messages. Most people who are severely psychotic (and not yet in a mode of recovery) probably could not sit through a movie. Or, perhaps we would not be in a position of watching one in the first place, because we are too stuck in the problematic circumstances that often accompany being psychotic.  

For a reasonable bystander, it won't help to confront a delusional person concerning his or her illusions, unless he or she is already beginning to return to reality. But it probably doesn't hurt to try, so long as the person with whom you are dealing is not potentially assaultive.  

Medication may partly work by making us more suggestible. It may also work by increasing the neurological priority of one's surroundings and decreasing the neurological priority of internally generated stimuli. Someone with acute symptoms of mental illness isn't good at listening.  

On the other hand, a "mental health consumer," when in treatment, tends to lack defenses. Defenses are fine if you are maintaining an accurate picture of your environment. If the material in your mind is inaccurate, you are better off if people can get through to you. 

Trying to reason with someone presupposes that the individual is listening, that their mind is functioning, and they are willing to listen to reason. (Speaking other than of mentally ill people: If you are dealing with a potential assailant, it is foolish to appeal to their higher sensibilities or their conscience, as they may have none.) 

There is an extraordinary number of states of consciousness the human mind can have. This week's essay scratches the surface of some of the things people's consciousness can do. The mind can be "grounded" in which case the person is aware of his or her surroundings, is engaged in reality, and is practical and mostly accurate in his or her thinking. Or the mind can be unanchored, distant from the senses, and we may not be making sense. Medication may do part of the job of bringing us back to home. However, once medicated, we are only at the beginning of what is potentially a long journey in the quest for mere clarity.  

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Many thanks to those who have bought copies of my self-published books--especially to someone in England who purchased 30 copies of my self-help manual. I expect to release newer, better books within the next year. I might soon discontinue the one titled, "Jack Bragen's Essays on Mental Illness" (which is simply an anthology of the first year of this column). So get your copy while you still can!