One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was originally a novel, written by Ken Kesey and published in 1962. (Ken Kesey, worked the graveyard shift as an orderly at a mental health facility in Menlo Park, California. He spoke to the patients and witnessed the workings of the institution. He also voluntarily took psychoactive drugs, including mescaline and LSD, as part of Project MK Ultra. In addition to his work with MK Ultra, Kesey took LSD recreationally.)

The novel was adapted into film in 1975, directed by Miloš Forman, and went on to win five Academy Awards.

The narrative focusses on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson in the film), who fakes insanity to serve his sentence for battery and gambling in a psychiatric hospital rather than at a prison work farm. The head administrative nurse, Nurse Ratched, rules the ward with absolute authority, assisted by her three day-shift orderlies and her assistant doctors and nurses.

In this episode we discuss the character of McMurphy, as an example of an “individual” who stands out from the crowd like Tyler Durden in Fight Club (who we discussed in Episode 8 — Monsters & Masculinity). McMurphy cannot be allowed to run loose in society, and so he is trapped and forced into the punishment system. One Flew Over the Cuckoos nest is about “the combine”, the machine, that forces us to fall into line. With the arbitrary rules, the opiate drugs to dull our senses, with the shame that turns us into our own police.

Towards the end of the book, one of the patients comments how they forced McMurphy to stand up for them, as they are too cowardly to stand up for themselves. McMurphy pushes the boundaries of the system in their behalf, smashing up against a machine that he cannot defeat, a machine that wants to grind everyone down into the dirt.

But despite this seemingly hopeless situation, this film (and novel) can still serve as a call to action. It can be a call to be an individual in the face of the oppressive machine. To be the one who stands, not the masses who push. Either way we are destined to be ground into dust by the machine, but to be an individual is surely a more glorious way to live and honourable way to die.

References

• Episode 8 — Monsters & Masculinity: delving further into the Jungian Shadow
• Episode 9 — From Pepe Silvia to Geshinka: the curious domains of psychosis
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) directed by Milos Forman
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) written by Ken Kesey
• Rottnest Island Prison & Burial Ground
• The Mask (1994) directed by Chuck Russell
• Tyler Durden from Fight Club, as discussed in Episode 8 — Monsters & Masculinity
• Paris Williams — Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
• The Shawshank Redemption (1994) written and directed by Frank Darabont
• The Liberators
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack

Links

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby

A Glimpse of Eternity by Alejandro Tuama

• Purchase the novel here.
• Listen to the serialised audiobook here.

We altered mates find ourselves now almost at the end of a deep dive into the intersession between psychedelics and psychosis, and at this point is seems to be that what is happening in both psychotic episodes and psychedelic trips are what Scott Hill refers to as a “confrontation with the unconscious”, or in other words — an overwhelming of the conscious ego by the archetypal forces of the unconscious.

According to Jung’s ideas, the archetypal forces of the unconscious, or just the archetypes, “live in a world quite different from the world outside— in a world where the pulse of time beats infinitely slowly, where the birth and death of individuals count for little. No wonder their nature is strange, so strange that their irruption into consciousness often amounts to a psychosis. They undoubtably belong to the material that comes to light in schizophrenia.”

Jung argues that our alienated condition is manifested in symbolic messages from the unconscious that express themselves in a strange and incomprehensible language, which cries out for interpretation. As Jung puts it, “in insanity we do not discover anything new and unknown; we are looking at the foundation of our own being, the matrix of those vital problems on which we are all engaged.” The terrors of the psychotic are merely extreme forms of our common human condition.

Perhaps we should consider our own sanity to be traversing a knife’s edge—for anyone who's engaged in high dose psychedelic experience, this may well be a regular thought…

As mentioned in the introduction: A Glimpse of Eternity by Alejandro Tuama

• Purchase the novel here.
• Listen to the serialised audiobook here.

References:

• Episode 12 — On Scott Hill’s “Confrontation with the Unconscious”—Part One
• Scott J. Hill — Confrontation with the Unconscious
• Paris Williams — Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
• Christopher Nolan — Inception
• The Farrelly Brothers — Me, Myself & Irene
• William Shakespeare — A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Pete Docter — Inside Out

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby

We try to wrap our heads around useful, working models of psychosis and (attempt to) determine where this troubling and mysterious phenomenon overlaps with the psychedelic experience. In the process we toss around ideas like Washburn’s Ego and the Dynamic Ground; discuss how researchers accidentally induced “ecstatic mystical” experiences and cured a group of alcoholics of their addiction; speculate as to whether a psychotic episode has the potential to reveal insights for the experiencer; and we even come up with our own metaphor to illustrate how the ego can become overwhelmed by the unconscious.

Ultimately, we agree that psychotic experiences and psychedelic experiences appear to have a common underlying mechanism that enables unconscious material to penetrate the psychic membrane and potentially overwhelm the ego, albeit in a variety of different forms and across varying durations in time.

One question left unresolved in our discussion is this: if you have a personality disorder, are you more likely to have a psychotic experience? If you have any insight into this question, please get in touch with us…

References

• Scott J. Hill — Confrontation with the Unconscious
• Paris Williams — Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
• John E. Nelson — Healing the Split: Integrating Spirit Into Our Understanding of the Mentally Ill
• Michael Washburn — Ego and the Dynamic Ground
• Ernest Becker — The Denial of Death
• Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri
• Kurzgesagt — “Addiction” (note: Kurzgesagt has taken the video down from their YouTube, but it is available here).
• Episode 1 — Challenging Psychedelic Experiences
• Episode 9 — From Pepe Silvia to Geshinka: the curious domains of psychosis
• Episode 10 — Czech, mate! Psychedelic Research in Communist Czechoslovakia
• Episode 11 — Giving LSD to kids! (…to treat severe childhood schizophrenia)

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby.

But probably the most confronting and disappointing aspect of this whole paper, is the fact that—as Fisher writes in the introduction—this, “research done 35 years ago is still the last word on the use of psychedelics to treat these conditions.” Indeed, we were left thinking what an outrageous and avoidable tragedy it is that the terrible suffering of children like these continues to this day because of the so-called “war on drugs” and the related cessation of research into psychedelics.

The paper appeared in the newsletter of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Volume 7 Number 3, in the summer of 1997 (pp. 18-25). The paper is titled: Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia Utilizing LSD and Psilocybin.

As an introduction, consider these two passages from the paper:

1. Now that the FDA has permitted research with LSD and psilocybin to resume, we feel it is important to share examples of a remarkable experiment, the results of which were not sufficiently taken into account because this line of research was prematurely halted in the mid-sixties due to political considerations. Childhood schizophrenia is still a difficult problem to treat and causes much suffering. It is a terrible shame that research done 35 years ago is still the last word on the use of psychedelics to treat these conditions.
2. The working hypothesis of this study is that psychosis is a massive defensive system of repression-avoidance-denial in the service of protecting the individual from experiencing early childhood trauma. The repression is so massive that the individual ceases to experience himself with any validity. The individual exists isolated in a world without feelings and this world becomes meaningless.

References

• Treatment of Childhood Schizophrenia Utilizing LSD and Psilocybin, Gary Fisher.
  • MAPS article
  • Psychedelic Salon Podcast episode
• Photos of Gary & Nancy: The Elementary Kool-Aid Acid Test

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby.

And… while people moving through a schizophrenia or a psychotic break often experience disordered thoughts, we too, experience a certain amount of disorder in our discussion. So we hope that our listeners are possessed of a forgiving temperament and pardon our naive ramblings.

Czech it out.

References:

• Sarah Marks (2015)—From experimental psychosis to resolving traumatic pasts: Psychedelic Research in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1954‑1974
• Paris Williams — Rethinking Madness: Towards a Paradigm Shift in our Understanding and Treatment of Psychosis
• Nassim Haramein— here but also here.

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby

In the process we discuss a number of texts including Better Call Saul, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Black Swan and Joker.

According to the Verywell Health website psychosis is a “symptom”, of which signs include: hallucinations, delusions, and agitation; and schizophrenia is a mental health “condition” that can cause psychosis. People living with schizophrenia can experience symptoms of psychosis but not all people experiencing psychosis have schizophrenia.

The writers of the DSM-V suggest that schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders are defined by abnormalities in one or more of the following five domains: delusions; hallucinations; disorganised thinking; grossly disorganised or abnormal motor behaviour (including catatonia), and; negative symptoms.

Please listen in as we try to wrap our heads around these five domains of schizophrenia.

References

• DSM-V-TR (APA)
• Verywell Health
• Under the Silver Lake (2018) directed by David Robert Mitchell.
• Better Call Saul — here’s an example of Chuck McGill’s behaviour: Electromagnetic hypersensitivity
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia — the infamous Pepe Silvia scene.
• Black Swan (2010) directed by Darren Aronofsky
• Tchaikovsky — Swan Lake
• Disorganized Speech Schizophrenia
• Joker (2019) directed by Todd Philips
• Rethinking Madness by Paris Williams

Links:

Altered Mates Website

Altered Mates Instagram

Music for the show by Si Mulumby.