Some Very Basic Advice For The Mentally Ill, From A Veteran Of The Mental Health System!

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of my entry into the New Zealand mental health system. It’s been a frustrating and horrifying journey, a blend of Brave New World and Dante’s Inferno. Because much of what mental health experts have told me in this time has turned out to be false, I have had to teach myself about psychiatry to a major extent. If I could summarise what I have learned about dealing with a psychiatric condition oneself, I would give two basic pieces of advice.

First, understand nervous system regulation.

Modern psychiatric theory has abandoned the chemical imbalance model for the traumagenic neurodevelopmental (TN) model. This means that no well-informed person still believes that mental illness is mostly caused by chemical imbalances that can only be corrected by expensive pharmaceuticals.

According to the TN model, early childhood trauma plays the major role in mental illness by causing the brain to develop in unnatural ways. The brains of highly traumatised people tend to respond much differently to stress: some anxious and neurotic types powerfully over-react, some bluntened and depressed types under-react. Such abnormal responses to stress can make it much harder to live a normal life.

This model has implications for those who have, until now, believed that their condition was the result of something intrinsically wrong with them mentally or spiritually. It turns out that most psychiatric conditions are actually physiological in nature.

Somatic symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, nausea and migranes are often stress responses, and signals that the nervous system is already hyperaroused. Anxiety and depression are common consequences of suffering this hyperarousal for an extended period of time. As such, keeping the nervous system well-regulated is crucial for lessening the impacts of most psychiatric conditions.

The best way to do this is to avoid stress, which is not always possible. The grim truth is that most stresses are forced on people by the needs to find food and shelter. Nonetheless, there’s a lot each individual can do to minimise the stress on their nervous system.

Learning to meditate is one of the best things that anyone with a psychiatric condition can do. Cultivating the ability to not physiologically react to distressing thoughts is as good as taking any pharmaceutical. Dedicated meditation practice can downregulate the nervous system more effectively and more permanently than anything else.

Another great move is learning to avoid toxic narcissists. This is also not always possible, because of family and work obligations. But it’s very useful to learn the typical early warning signs of toxic narcissism, so that those displaying it can be shunned as early as possible.

Second, understand the importance of connection. This means connection at every level: to family, to community and to the divine.

The simplest and easiest way to feel connection is through one’s family. But, if you have a psychiatric condition, chances are high that your family environment is psychotogenic. If so, then interacting with your family can add to the stress and nervous system dysregulation. This is where the community comes in.

Connection to the community is relatively easy, but here a person has to be realistic. A mental illness will mean that certain avenues into the community will be closed off. However, it will also mean that solidarity can be easier to find in some other ways. It’s very easy to feel solidarity with other people who have had to deal with the psychiatric system. Groups organised on this basis that meet physically can be challenging to find if one doesn’t live in a city, but there are numerous online groups devoted to every psychiatric condition.

Divine connection is harder to find. The main problem here is that Westerners have been lied to about spirituality for centuries. The native Western spiritual traditions were destroyed by the coming of Christianity, so that when Christianity died, we were left with only memories of the divine. When the European spiritual traditions, such as the Eleusinian Mysteries, were lost, the Western soul was lost to confusion.

The answer here is a combination of meditation and spiritual sacraments. Correct meditation will silence the mundane thoughts, and correct spiritual sacrament use will bring the glory of the divine back to consciousness. This combination of meditation and spiritual sacrament use is the basic formula espoused by some New Age religions such as Elementalism.

Cultivating a divine connection can help create a sense of belonging, which many people do not otherwise have. It’s common to feel like an alien on this planet and in this society. Meditating or taking spiritual sacraments with friends or family can create powerful feelings of connection with the rest of reality.

Society might never have been more mentally ill than today. However, it has (probably) never been easier for an individual with a mental illness to cope with it. Advanced knowledge of the causes and treatment of mental illness is now available through the traumagenic neurodevelopmental theory, and communities of meditators or spiritual sacrament users have never been easier to find.

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The Harvester Judgement And How Much Has Been Stolen From Us

Mainstream media propaganda would have us all believe that the West has never been wealthier. Our glorious leaders have led us into an unparalleled age of prosperity. Never before have the lives of everyday Westerners overflowed with such abundance. Apparently, even the lowliest Westerner has easy access to luxuries that kings could not have dreamed of in ages past.

If you don’t agree, the media tells us, you’re a terrorist. A filthy, ungrateful reprobate whose resentment endangers the entire project of civilisation itself. How could a person not be grateful for the beneficence shown by our ruling classes? Just how?

As it turns out, anyone with a solid knowledge of history has reason to feel ripped off at their current treatment.

In 1907, the idea of a minimum wage was introduced in Australia. In a case relating to the Sunshine Harvester Company of Victoria, Justice Henry Higgins determined that a “fair and reasonable” wage for a manual labourer was that which could support a family of five. A skilled worker should receive even more. This was later known as the “Harvester Judgement“.

Because people higher up the social ladder would make more money than manual labourers, the Harvester Judgement created a floor underneath which no full-time worker could fall. It therefore ensured a decent quality of life for everyone in Australian society, not just the rich. This judgement became a core principle of Australian employment law and is one of the main reasons why the Australian worker’s standard of living has been so high until recently, and why Australia is known as “The Lucky Country”.

According to Grok, a family of five living in Auckland requires some $7,000 per month to meet housing, food, utilities, transportation and other costs. This means some $84,000 per year – after tax. Before tax, it’s $112,963 per year. Less than that means a family of five has to start going without some things.

This is the income necessary to have a similar quality of life to a labouring family in 1907. This means nothing extravagant – just basic housing, decent food, the lights on, the ability to get to work and visit some people etc. It doesn’t include luxury travel or building an investment portfolio.

Also according to Grok, fewer than 8% of New Zealand workers earn $112,000 or more. Because some 10% of the population has an honours degree or higher, this means the top 8% of the workforce will be mostly professionals and managers, i.e. highly qualified, highly experienced people. Those few in the top 8% without an honours degree or higher will mostly be top managers.

$112,000 is about 70% higher than the median New Zealand wage of $66,000. What’s more, that median wage figure itself includes those highly-paid professional and managerial jobs, which means that the median manual labourer’s wage is even lower still. The minimum wage in New Zealand is currently $23.15 per hour, which works out to $46,300 per annum if one works 50 weeks of 40 hours, and many manual labourers will be close to this.

In practice, therefore, almost none of the people working in manual labour positions in New Zealand are paid enough for their wage to be considered “fair and reasonable” under the Harvester Judgement. The entire idea that a wage ought to pay enough to raise a family has been abandoned, seemingly by the employees as well as the employers.

Our wages are now less than half of what is needed to support a family of five. But the quality of life promised by the Harvester Judgement has not simply been lost, it has been stolen from us.

It has been stolen from us in a number of ways, but the mass importation of cheap labour is the foremost of these. The explanation for how full-time manual labourer wages were decoupled from the requirement that they could support a family of five is simple: employers have undercut local workers by importing cheaper ones from overseas.

The Neoliberal Era normalised this practice, so that it become ideologically impossible to even object to the imports. Anyone who did so was smeared as a racist acting out of pure hate. Several decades of this allowed the employer class to drive wages down so far that they’re now about half of what they need to be, as per the Harvester Judgement.

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Who Is My Guru?

Recently I asked the readers and viewers of VJM Publishing material to ask me any question they liked, in the fields of psychology, politics or spirituality, and I would answer it. The question answered in this essay – and I apologise for not being able to remember who asked it! – is who my guru is.

There’s a very simple answer to that question: Socrates.

There were few positive male role models in my childhood environment. I was the son of a gang member, and various uncles were also gang members, drug dealers or junkies. I was fortunate enough to have an excellent grandfather, who taught me a basic sense of honour and decency, but my philosophical ambitions soon brought me beyond what my family could fulfill. I needed a guru.

My male teachers at school were generally decent men, typical of the high-trust society that was 20th Century Nelson. But they weren’t gurus. The pains of life etched in their faces were understandable even to a child. Clearly, they were struggling through life much like I was, and needed a guru much like I did.

In Classics class during my final year of high school, one assigned topic was the trial and execution of Socrates. We learned how Socrates brought wisdom to the ungrateful masses of Athens, who eventually voted to have him killed. His form of execution was to drink a deadly hemlock tea. As I first learned the story, I presumed that he would refuse to do this, but he did, reasoning that it was not only his duty but he wasn’t afraid of death anyway.

I was awestruck.

Soon I developed a total fascination with this feat. This equanimity in the face of death seemed superhuman to me. Everything I had believed – or been taught – about human nature suggested that death was the most terrifying thing possible, the darkest of all mysteries, the termination of all of one’s dreams.

Everyone around me behaved as if scared stupid of the subject, never speaking about it. Socrates’s example proved that man need not fear death, and not in the delusional, heroin-high manner of the Christians and other religious fanatics. It was possible to die without fearing death simply through philosophy.

About a decade after I finished high school, I had lived a full life. I had earned a couple of degrees, been around the world a few times, even been married and divorced. The problem of death still plagued me though. Haunted me. What was the point of any of this, if I was doomed to die and all of it would be forgotten?

Here Socrates still acted as the guru. It was through studying him, and his disciple in Plato, that I came to realise the role of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the philosophy of fearlessness in the face of death. These Mysteries were famous in ancient Greece for alleviating the participants’ fear of death; Plato and Cicero wrote about their effects, and Aristotle, Epictetus, Plutarch, Alcibiades, Euripides, Sophocles, Pindar, Augustus, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Julian were known to have been initiated.

Through learning about these mysteries, I came upon psilocybin mushrooms – believed by Terence McKenna to be the main psychoactive ingredient of the kykeon drunk by all participants in the Eleusinian Mysteries. This led me to taking psilocybin mushrooms myself and undergoing a total spiritual transformation at age 27, something discussed at length on this website.

Later, when I came to think more about politics, Socrates was still the guru, being the hero of Republic and Plato’s explication of political reality. Socrates’s unsurpassed example of honest reason as a tool to uncover the truth of political questions, despite opposition from liars and fools, inspired me. Like Socrates, but to a lesser extent, I have also been banned, cancelled and suppressed. I am proud to have followed in Socrates’s example!

Even now, I can still gain great insight about the nature of the soul from reading Phaedo. Socrates’s description of philosophy as preparation for death sets my entire life into a perspective that makes sense and gives it meaning. I might be almost 30 years older now than when I first read about Socrates, but his example of assuaging fear of death through pure reason appeals to me just as much today.

Many people think I am crazy for turning my energies away from making money and turning them towards spirituality instead. They don’t understand why a person would meditate or do psychedelics at all, let alone do little else for over a decade. Why philosophise at all, when there is money to be made?

I do it because of the example of relentless pursuit of truth set by Socrates, who is to me the most admirable man of all. This has led me to the spiritual beliefs expressed in Elementalism and in the essays on this website.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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Fan Mail 23

This seething was caused by me taking the piss out of a pedo in Destiny Church’s youth leadership wing