Sleeping with the Angels : A Spiritual Journey Through Schizophrenia

By Yvonne Nahat

This book is a creative non-fiction account of a woman's journey through 7 years of schizophrenia. The book focuses on the spiritual dimensions of the experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447599692

Book preview

Author

Introduction

I have been battling, enjoying and suffering from schizophrenia for the past seven years. Something which stands out in my interaction with doctors is my repeated refusal to consider myself sick. I have been diagnosed a paranoid, catatonic, schizophrenic and suicidal. I have spent years in an out of institutions and in and out of bouts of madness, so yes, I have been mad, but I still refuse to consider myself as having been sick. I remember being at a doctor‘s meeting at the Rissen Hospital in Hamburg, with an army of doctors standing around me, imploring me: But Mrs. Nahat you are sick and my shouting back a quotation from Nietzsche: My sickness is my great health, leaving the barrage of doctors dumbfounded and speechless. Some might think that this is just another case of denial so common to mental patients, but I believe in hindsight, that my intuition was driving me at the time, telling me the truth, that yes, I was mad but not sick. And indeed this warrants a closer look.

Clinical psychology has become a very external profession. Schizophrenia is diagnosed for the purposes of treatment, however, this world is never entered and this is discouraged by doctors and caretakers a like. What the mad are experiencing however, is an entirely interior world. They are undergoing severe psychological and spiritual transformation. The label ‘sick’, does not remain at the label level. The ‘sick’ are treated immediately with medication in order for the symptoms to subside. In effect the label ‘sick’ buries a plethora of inner life and riches, an inner life filled with imagination, flight, paradox, vision, voices, hallucinations, myth and ritual all of which have cosmic, universal, cultural and deeply personal and spiritual dimensions. What modern clinical psychiatry does is shut the door on all this with the label ‘sick’. This robs madness of space time and a voice because the attention is on the suppression of the symptoms. This is an area where current bio-medial psychiatric practices are in need of great reform. Other cultures give time space and special attention to altered states of consciousness. I am thinking of initiation rites and other rites of passages as encountered in so called primitive cultures or shamanistic practices for example.

This book is being written in order to give madness space, time and a voice. Madness here is seen not as a sickness, but as a deeply personal crisis as well as a spiritual journey and a healing process already underway. In many ways I would say that I was sick before going mad and that the madness was already a part of the healing process. Madness has many faces and a vast interiority. If I compare myself to peers my age, all of whom have progressed in their careers over the past seven years, they have gotten married, founded families and have made deeper friends, I have not been so much sick as undergone one of the most exciting, arduous, beautiful and difficult adventures of my life. I don’t have careers success, wealth and other material prosperity to show for it, but I have deeply become another person filled with the experiences of having been to other lands of the mind, psyche and soul.

This book looks at schizophrenia from various angles. First it begins with a biographical sketch. In this sketch you will hardly find a neat outline of a progression into madness because schizophrenia can befall anyone at any time. There are no set patterns for mental illness. The book continues with essays written from the inside of schizophrenia. These essays are intended to give the reader a first hand account of being in a psychotic’s mind, heart and soul. This is done without interpretation, analysis or judgement. The idea is to place the reader as close as possible to the events unfolding. In chapter three the meaning of schizophrenia is investigated. To me schizophrenia is above all a spiritual journey, a deep transformation of the self in psychic terms. This chapter looks at some of these meanings, such as initiation, the symbolism of the center, participation mystique, kundalini awakening, the dark night of the soul and more. The following chapter looks at my convalescence period, which again, can be entirely different for different people, there is no preordained path. Chapter five focuses on how to understand a schizophrenic. It is geared towards family members, spouses and friends confronted with a loved one undergoing schizophrenia. The last chapter looks at the mental health care system and makes suggestions towards a vision for better health care in the 2 1st century.

People looking for bio-medical information in this book on schizophrenia will not find it. I, along with thousands of other schizophrenics, am deeply disappointed by the way traditional medicine treats psychosis. I do not think that the bio-medical approach to schizophrenia is the door to its remedy, for remedied it must not be. Psychosis is a spiritual journey and must first be understood as such. Insight of the psyche, heart mind and soul are required. That there are overlaps with traditional medicine, after all I am on medication, does little to better my opinion of the shortcomings of how mental disorders are treated currently by traditional medicine and society at large.

The language available when dealing with schizophrenia is very tainted. Terms such as ‘mental illness’, ‘mental disorder’, ‘psychosis’ and the like are unavoidable. Let there be no doubt however, that in this book, these terms are not used in a pejorative sense. Illness can be a great source of strength. It can be a mirror to one’s own self development and it certainly is always an indication of matters of the heart, psyche and soul. Physical illnesses are as well. Perhaps there are no physical illnesses, but only illnesses of the mind, heart, psyche and soul. This would greatly change any notions about health care for the 21st century.

Above and beyond any labels however, schizophrenia and any psychosis is a spiritual journey of immense proportions. It is a delving into the unconscious, into the world of myth, initiation, archetypes and a transformation of the Self on a spiritual level. May this book help all those confronted with schizophrenia discover their own spiritual journey and path and may it open the hearts and minds of those on the ‘outside’ to encounter schizophrenia with the attention, insight and respect it deserves. Imagine a world where having a psychosis is seen for what it is, comparable to a great feat, such as the climbing of Mount Everest. Until this is the case we still have a long way to go. May books like this be, albeit a small step, nevertheless, a step towards this goal.

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Chapter One

Biographical Sketch

My Early Years

I saw the light of day in Zürich, Switzerland, on June 15,1962. After nine months of sharing my mother’s belly with my twin sister Isabelle, she pushed me out. Isabelle in turn had to be pulled out. My mother says, Isabelle did not want to be born. It was an extremely intensive labor which lasted 24 hours. According to the stories I am told my father fainted several times at the news that his wife was having twins. My parents did not know beforehand. My mother tells me I was a happy baby.

My parents come from a multicultural background. My mother’s family is of Indian Arab origin. My mother was born and grew up in Baghdad, where she and her family left after the 1958 revolution. The family moved to London where my parents met. My father in turn is as Swiss as anyone can get. He currently lives in the mountains of Appenzell with his sheep and herb garden. The match between my parents was not made in heaven. There was a lot of fighting at home when we were little. My mother, very inspired and achieving, began working when we twins were about five years old. She entered the fashion business with her brother. They were very successful and my father joined them. When Isabelle and I were six years old my mother became pregnant again, and we had the wonderful addition of a baby girl to our family. I remember asking our mother why the baby was Chinese. Leila, our sister had very Asiatic eyes as a baby.

Our mother is a very loving person. Although working all the time, she was always there for us children with her warmth and enthusiasm. My father is a different story. Although present in body, he was absent in spirit. He seemed too obsessed with our mother to be completely there for his children. My father to this day is one in absentia.

Life was very turbulent when we were young. We moved from our small village to a suburb of Lucerne, Switzerland where our parents had bought a house. Since both our parents were working we had a nanny taking care of us. I remember that we liked to tease our nannies, putting spiders in their beds, mice in their rooms and the like, the kind of things children have fun doing. We had a lot of business guests at our house, our parents and the family traveled much. Family would often come and visit from London or the Middle East and India, or we went to London or Tessin to visit our respective grandparents. Especially Tessin was great for us children. My grandparents had a house outside of Lugano in the mountains. Here life was bliss. Hours were spent outside playing, helping in the grape harvest or being spoiled by the village friends of our grandparents. We were the darlings of the town. Isa, an Italian village woman family friend, lived in one of those stone mountain houses the region is famous for. Here she would cook polenta on the open fire. Being with her was always a treat and although we did not understand or speak Italian we communicated perfectly. The preferred language was love! I remember going to Sunday church with our grandparents. The village church was small and usually the men would congregate outside, sitting on a bench, whilst the women went inside, their heads covered with black embroidered shawls. The singing was my favorite part, even though the singing of the womenfolk in church was an incessant screech!

But all was not well at home. My father was jealous of my mother’s worldly life. On the one hand he adored her being in fashion and at the same time he resented her being independent. Our father would not infrequently beat our mother. There was trouble at work, the family began fighting and the stress on my mother was very great. I remember the fighting and her nervous breakdown very well. We lived in a two story house, built into a hill and my bedroom was right next to my parents’ rooms. So I was usually the first of us children to hear the fighting. My two sister’s rooms were upstairs. I remember sometimes climbing out of the window at night, getting help from neighbors because the fighting got so frightening and violent.

In her early thirties my mother had a nervous breakdown. The scene was harrowing. I don’t recall who called the doctor, but our mother was carried out of the house wincing and crying as if she were crying for the whole world. Our father could be very authoritarian and he did not allow us to see our mother during her time at hospital. Once my mother had recuperated after having been at several clinics, returned home, my father moved out of our house. I was relieved. I resented the fighting and hoped they would finally get a divorce so that we would have some peace.

New York

At the hospital my mother had met a man with whom she had fallen in love. I was very happy for her. After a while we decided to join him in the United States. My twin sister refused to join us, she wanted to remain with our father in Switzerland. With a heavy heart because of the absence of Isabelle, but also elated because a new life was opening up for us, we moved to New York in 1976. The United States was a new world for me. I loved the country, its people and school. In Switzerland I had not been a very good student. School seemed arduous to me and although I went to the gymnasium, I don’t know if I would have remained there. I did not like the bureaucratic and functional ways of teaching in Switzerland. In the United States education was much more open, individualized and personal. I loved it. For the first year I went to a high school in Croton-On-Hudson. Here I joined a bohemian crowd of friends. We partied a lot, smoked marijuana and led a carefree life. Anyone seeing us might have thought we were hippies. We had long hair, the boys and the girls. The girls wore long wavy dresses. We walked barefooted a lot. After one year we moved from the town to the city of New York and I entered a girls’ boarding school in Troy, Upstate New York. Here is where my love with the private American educational system really took a hold of me. I met young women from around the world and forged friendships which would last a lifetime.

After high school I was accepted to Columbia University in New York. But I was weary of entering college immediately. I took one year off and went back to Switzerland. I lived with my twin, worked, fell in love and had a passionate time. This all ended abruptly when my mother traveled to Switzerland to take me back to the United States by the power of her authority. I was heartbroken but began college one year later. By this time we had moved to the city and we were living on Fifth Avenue. My stepfather was a wealthy CEO at a conglomerate that traded raw materials amongst other things. At first I loved my stepfather. My mother and he were madly in love and he was far more open minded than my own father. He also never became authoritarian with us children. We read psychology books together and discussed family matters. This impressed my young imagination. A positive role model I thought. The initial courting phase did not last too long however. Soon it became apparent, that he was an alcoholic with a psychopathic personality. He could become very mean and hurtful and he used to pick on fights. As a matter of fact he thrived on disaccord although he never became physically violent like my father. It was a great disappointment to discover this aggressive side to my stepfather. It made all of us very sad.

At college I fell in love the first year I was there. Philipp was my future husband to be and this