Paranoia

One of my psych inmates is refusing his meds. His behavior is still fine, though he's clearly on edge, walking in tighter and tighter circles and showing the gross motor activity (GMA) of near panic or near rage.

He feels he sees the world so much clearer without medication. The 'invisible men' who run everything, route all money through their hands and manipulate the children with television so that they grow up to be unable to think in certain ways or challenge or question... this is all much clearer to him without the fog of medication.

I'm worried that if he sees it clearly enough, he will feel the need to do something and we will once more have to respond to him arguing or fighting with a person that only he can see. That's his cycle both inside and outside of custody.

I was raised on a self-sufficient survivalist ranch in the 70's. My parents were sure that soon, very soon, either a nuclear war or a massive economic crisis or an ecological crisis was inevitable and my teen years were spent training and preparing for it. I still know people who believe the same things and dozens of people who feel that world events and American politics are controlled by a shadowy group of rich and powerful men.

They aren't in prison or on medication. Because their delusions are less severe? Or because they control their behavior better? Most people talk to themselves in their own minds all the time. Is hearing voices a matter of degeree? When I debate two sides of a question with myself or play chess alone, am I flirting with voluntary schizophrenia?

Of course not. Maybe.

Everyone sees the world differently, but there is an unspoken agreement of both how differently we are allowed to see it and how much it can affect our actions before society quitely labels you "other". From that point on, no matter your intelligence or the profundity of your insight, anything you say can be dismissed as "crazy talk".

Everyone has seen something unusual- the human image at the edge of your vision that disappears when you face it. The distinct sound of footsteps in an empty building. And nearly everyone dismisses it as just imagination. An optical illusion. Nothing. They move on. How many children have had imaginary playmates, as real to them as anyone in the house? How many of those children were constantly told to quit lying, quit making things up, quit being a baby until the best friend they ever had is an embarassing memory of delusion?

What if you were to embrace these illusions, look for the people at the edge of your vision? What if you were to find them? What if this was the key to the song-sorcerers of the Finnish Kalevala and the lost Druidic mysteries? Would you be allowed to return to the world that everyone agrees on? Or would they give you some chemicals and call it "crazy talk"?