THE REAL CAUSE OF PARANOID SCHIZOPHRENIA
PART IV
WHY SO MANY SCHIZOPHRENICS AVOID READING THE BIBLE
By Dr. J. / Jerry Marzinsky BA M.Ed
September 2, 2016
This article is a continuation of Part II where we took a tour into the resistance schizophrenics encountered going to church or engaging in any positive spiritual pursuit. This was first noticed while working at the state hospital where their behavior diverged from that of other patients as they remained behind on dank wards when given the opportunity to go outside, walk across pleasant grounds in fresh air and sunshine on the way to church services where they were often given free cake, cookies and ice cream afterward.
If you have not read Part II then I recommend you do before continuing with this Part IV.
In Part II we found that many of these patients were consistently tormented by the voices they heard if they attempted to go to church. An interesting phenomenon for what were supposed to be hallucinations. For some, their voices got so loud and abusive that they were actually driven out of church. For many schizophrenics it was easier to just not go to church services. Part II left off where I began to wonder how the voices responded to those few schizophrenic patients who owned Bibles and attempted to read them.
Now to Part IV
After seven years at the state hospital, I took a job in the psychology department of a large state prison in the southwest. I continued working with and exploring the nature of the voices schizophrenics experienced. Due to California’s Proposition 13 state hospitals across the country were being forced to shut down. For the most part, inadequate community mental health facilities and the resistance of schizophrenic patients to taking anti-psychotic medications resulted in their being sent into communities with little viable support leaving them unable to fend for themselves.
Unable to work, in record numbers they turned to drugs and alcohol to self-medicate the abusive voices raging in their heads. Many became addicted. They had few options to support themselves other than begging on street corners or turning to crime (see Part III on why schizophrenics stop taking their prescribed meds). Many turned to crime. Many became disruptive with some becoming uncontrollably violent. After questioning scores of schizophrenic inmates it became clear that many were listening to and acting on the commands of their voices at the time they committed their crimes.
I was stunned as I listened to inmates report their voices telling them which houses to break into, when the occupants were up, where to find valuables in the home and when the police were about to show up. It was the stuff of which science fiction movies were made and had I not heard hundreds of such stories I myself would not have believed it.
The shut-down of state hospitals had backfired. Now the prison industrial complex had taken over the function state hospitals once had at many times the cost while providing very little treatment. There are few people on the planet who get in more trouble or punish themselves as badly as do schizophrenics. Their being sent into highly negative environments such as prisons and exposed to ridged staff programmed with a punishment mentality, a hostile and often violent living environment and little or no mental health treatment only made them much worse, more violent and more callus. At the end of their sentence, often more volatile than when first incarcerated they were released onto an unsuspecting society still unable to support themselves. They were given two weeks of anti-psychotic medications and told to go to the nearest hospital ER when they ran out. Such poor release planning contributed to a massive prison recidivism rate which hovers around 75% over three years.
Once I started work in the psychology department of a large state prison in the southwest I noticed that schizophrenic prisoners reported that the voices they were hearing in their heads were virtually identical in content to what these same patients had reported in the state hospital some 2000 miles away. They were hearing virtually indistinguishable from the voices heard by state hospital patients. The content remained extremely negative, derogatory and abusive. It seemed that whatever these things were, they had all been made by the same gigantic galactic cookie cutter, commanding their victims to behave in self-destructive ways that often got them sent to prison.
Prisoners were also revealing that their voices reacted in the same negative volatile fashion if they attempted to attend church services or read the Bible. I was taken aback one day as one of my inmate patients came in and reported that upon his reading of the 23rd Psalm, his voices reacted like they were being tortured. He likened their reaction to worms being thrown onto a hot frying pan. Again, very strange behavior for what psychiatry considered to be a hallucination.
The inmate’s report sparked my curiosity and I began to tell my other schizophrenic patients about it when reports began coming in that their voices reacted to the reading of the 23rd Psalm in a very similar manner.
How could this be? At that point, I wasn’t sure what the voices were but the evidence was mounting that they were far different from hallucinations.
Unlike hallucinations which were random, the voices were always negative, abusive, derogatory and destructive. Whatever they were, they weren’t good and it was clear they were contributing to the deterioration of my patients.
My instincts told me that whatever irritated the voices must also be bad for them. I knew in my gut that the louder the voices became as I tried different methods to probe their reactions, the worse whatever I was trying was for them. One of the first things I discovered tormented them was the patient memorizing and repeating the 23rd Psalm. Their reaction to this Psalm was quick and volatile. It was striking a nerve. Shortly afterward other patients reported that the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and the singing of the song Amazing Grace evoked similar tormented reactions from the voices.
I passed out copies of the 23rd Psalm to other schizophrenic inmates with whom I was working and found the results were overwhelmingly the same. The voices hated hearing the 23rd Psalm repeated by the patient.
The negative reaction of the voices to all of these materials was very consistent. The voices were reacting as if hot acid was being poured on them as the patient repeatedly recited any of these works.
During the course of their illness, schizophrenics had found very little they could do on their own to fight back against these horribly abusive voices other than take the medications which many abhorred. Many felt they were helpless victims with no power to shut them up or fight back.
Once they experienced the tormented reaction of their voices to the reading of these passages, they became aware that they had a means to hit back at their dictatorial voices. They no longer felt completely helpless and had at least one weapon to fight back. Many began fighting back.
As I checked on their progress, I found that in a large number of cases, the voices had made them forget to repeat these passages by showing up very quietly and slowly then increasing in amplitude or merely distracting the patient with other things. But despite this, the patient now had some means to strike back. In addition, the reaction of their voices to these passages convinced these patients who were often atheist’s or agnostics that there must be some truth or power in these passages for the writings to consistently torment their voices to the point where they tried to stop them or make them forget to repeat these passages when the voices showed up. Many were surprised after experiencing the reaction of their voices to this material.
I was in my office one day with an inmate whose voices were very strong. Although he didn’t think they were who he was like myself at the time, he wasn’t sure what they actually were. I handed him a copy of the 23rd Psalm and asked him to read it so he could see the reaction of his voices for himself. As he started to read, he went into a daze staring blankly at the paper. I encouraged him to keep reading. As he struggled to do so his face turned beet red. He broke into a cold sweat then said, “I can’t do it. The voices are way too strong.”
For those inmate patients I sensed really wanted to get rid of their voices, I handed out copies of the 23rd Psalm the repetition of which often increased their anxiety levels as their voices reacted negatively touching off an internal battle. Over time, I learned that the voices reacted negatively to any positive spiritual material the patient attempted to read almost 100% of the time.
When the chief psychologist discovered I was passing out what he felt to be religious materials he ordered me to stop immediately. Once again, as with the state hospital, I was called on the carpet for trying to find an alternative means of helping my patients. He had no interest in the results. Only approved, common methods of therapy were permissible. Problem was, none of them worked. The toxic medications along with their horrible side effects merely suppress psychotic symptoms while slowly destroying the nervous system. The fact that once these medications were stopped, psychotic symptoms reappeared was proof positive that these drugs were curing nothing, merely suppressing symptoms which were waiting just under the surface to reappear.
Some schizophrenic’s are so eaten up by the voices that even with medications and therapy, they can’t be brought back. Much to my surprise, I found that there are others who have isolated themselves for years with their abusive parasitic voices that they now consider them friends, although bad ones. After working with one patient for months and finally getting rid of voices he had lived with for decades, he found himself so lonely without their bad company that after a few weeks he called them back and they returned. If the patient does not want to get rid of their voices, there is absolutely nothing that can be done except medicate them and they will resist that.
The important aspect of this section is that patients who experience the effect that reading the 23rd Psalm, the Lord’s Prayer and singing Amazing Grace has on their voices they now understand they have at least one weapon to strike back at their tormentors. They don’t feel as defeated and helpless. They often see for the first time that there is at least something they can do to hit back giving them some semblance of hope. The information I’m providing here is far from the conventional system of belief of mental health authorities who forbid experimenting with alternate methods of treatment.
As with any of the information that we are providing you, don’t take our word for anything that we say. See for yourselves! For those practitioners out there working with schizophrenics who hear voices, and for parents or family members struggling to help loved ones with this dread mental disorder, try these things for yourselves and ask the patient to report on the effect of repeating these spiritual messages on their voices. Again, don’t take my word for any of this. Open your eyes and see for yourselves.
Give your patients or family member hearing voices a copy of the 23rd Psalm, have them repeatedly read it and ask them how their voices respond. Drop your preconceptions, ignore what you’ve been told and verify for yourself independently.
Ask these poor souls what their voices are telling them when they attempt to go to church or read the Bible. Then ask yourself, “Is the reaction of the voices to this material in line with psychiatry and psychology’s insistence that they are hallucinations?”
Although I’ve stated this in other articles, it bears repeating. You need to understand that for people who hear voices the outcome of speaking about the voices they hear is rarely a positive experience for them.
They have suffered a long history of judgment and negative repercussions after telling others about their voices. Friends and often family are freaked out. Many begin to think they are strange or crazy. The voices tell them straight up that if they speak to others of their presence their friends will think they are crazy.
They have discovered that if they speak of the voices they hear too often to others they are taken to doctors who pump them full of mind numbing drugs after being told their brains are broken due to a chemical imbalance.
In addition, they are told by doctors that the voices are merely hallucinations and nothing more. They are told they must remain on toxic, mind numbing drugs for the rest of their lives, a message devoid of hope.
After experiencing these reactions often more than a few times, they learn not to speak to anyone about their voices – to others who don’t hear them.
To their more normal friends, the voices are often frightening, something they don’t understand and are frightened of. This seems to be a peculiar human flaw where curiosity of the unknown is replaced by fear of the unknown.
If the individual hearing voices senses that you are genuinely curious, non-judgmental and trustworthy, with time they will begin to tell you about them and once trust is established they will begin to speak of what those voices are saying to them. They cannot be pushed into this. They must learn trust. As they begin to trust you with such information they will tell you more.
Another major obstacle to their speaking of their voices to others is the fact that the voices themselves tell them not to. They tell them the worse scenarios of what others will do if they reveal their truth. Unfortunately, much of what they say all too often comes to pass. The voices have evidence from the individual’s own past experiences to prove there are dire consequences to speaking of them which often keeps these patients silent.
It is important that these individuals trust you won’t harm them and are at least giving them the benefit of the doubt. They have learned the hard way that it is safer not to trust others and keep silent with their experiences.
If they sense any judgment or threat from you they will remain silent. If they sense you are genuinely trying to understand, they will be much more likely to open up and share the reaction of their voices to the materials mentioned above. Again, don’t take my word for any of this but also don’t blindly take psychiatry’s pronouncement that these voices are hallucinations. This is something you need to see and experience for yourself.
END OF PART IV
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