This week, a question from a loyal Psyched subscriber:
So am I, and so should anyone be who's ever had a close encounter with mental illness.
ABC talkshow host Andrew Denton explored the topic on his Enough Rope program last year, and many of the comments made by his interviewees were fascinating from a spiritual viewpoint:
WOMAN ‘5': You basically are a different person. They've got different identities, different names, different you know behaviors ah usually when that happens, I lose time. I see some things that a normal camera can't capture and....
ANDREW DENTON: What sort of stuff do you see?
HEIDI EVERETT: Oh I see like um little people in shadows and things so people call them fairies and elves and stuff, but I, I think they're actually offended by that term. Um I see angels, demons, um yeah, UFOs, aliens.
In another segment, a schizophrenic interviewee revealed how distracting it was for her to walk down the street, as ‘half people' would appear, up to their waists in the bitumen of the road... Which seriously makes me wonder if she is crossing between parallel worlds, realities or dimensions, and catching glimpses as two worlds collide. Perhaps bipolar and/or schizophrenic types are missing the ‘blinkers' or filter that the rest of us have, which blocks out these other dimensions, so that we can get on with the business of being human here on 3D Earth?
Then there's issociative identity disorder (which used to be called multiple personality disorder) and those ‘voices' the mentally ill frequently refer to - which caused people like Joan of Arc to be burnt as witches in olden times - which are possibly malevolent entities attaching themselves to humans who are sensitive and vulnerable enough to hear them. It's kind of like that annoying girl you knew in high school who wouldn't leave you alone, or that boyfriend you didn't know quite how to break up with who was just plain No Good for you... Spirits who love to hand around, tease and torture those who don't know what's happening or how to get rid of them.
So could a good spiritual cleansing or energy ‘rinse-off' be beneficial a mentally ill person? I feel it even goes a little deeper than that... It almost seems like the mentally ill need their cells or DNA slightly recoded or rewired at a much deeper energetic level in order to strengthen and integrate themselves. (I'm seeing an image in my mind of a schizophrenic person who has three ‘selves' which are all joined by a common thread, like a Venn Diagram, but which are all quite different, causing intense chaos and confusion inside the ‘host' - the human body and personality which is constantly trying to bring them together as one, and operate as 'normal'.)
Autism is another complicated issue. I feel that people with this condition are operating within another framework, another set of rules, from another time/energy/space... Which is why we don't ‘get' them here on Earth, and they're perceived as quite different to us. It all makes perfect sense to the autistic person, but the rest of us are left scratching our heads. Autistics may feel quite left of centre, but are completely unsure what to do about it - how, exactly, to integrate their unique vibrational frequency with Earth's.
There is much ground to be covered here by our spiritual teachers and healers as we look for more gentle, holistic ways to assist these members of our population in the future. Clearly, locking already-sensitive souls inside institutions, zapping them with electricity and medicating them up to the eyeballs is an archaic, damaging, soul-destroying way to handle such complex and delicate conditions of the mysterious mind and spirit.