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Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual state, Agreed. and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing

Most people who experience psychosis don't experience it as a perpetual state, Agreed. and they aren't particularly more dangerous while experiencing or any more dangerous while not. Hard disagree. I have been in a mental ward. I have been in close proximity to people who have been undergoing psychotic breaks. Never have I felt in more danger for my safety, even though, ostensibly, nurses and other trained medical professionals were right there to deal with the issue. Being in close proximity to someone undergoing psychosis is a terrifying thing, and it's no surprise that traditional societies, in the absence of other mechanisms, would choose to exile people undergoing psychosis. And if the people never returned from their exile, well, that's a hard thing, but the great spirit must have had a different purpose for them.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Yes these aren't privileged experiences I have had them too. It is extremely frightening and is riskier than a lot of other activities. That's not itself evidence of how any particular culture treated people experiencing it or what they thought or expected of the experience. This particular subject is one that has interested a lot of people, including historians and anthropologists, and there is a lot of history and anthropology on it. I'm neither, but from what I've read people who have professionally studied it mostly refrain from making generalizations of how it has been experienced through time and across cultures. If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're making broad assertions. I'm curious what that is based on other than extrapolation from your own frightening experiences.
- quanticle 4y ago
  If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're making broad assertions. It's a broad assertion I feel safe making from what I've read, and from what I know of human nature, and the often toxic dynamics of small communities. Being different in a small tribe sucks. Yeah, if you're different in just the right way, you're venerated as a shaman or religious figure. But I feel absolutely safe in asserting that for the average mentally ill person, being mentally ill in a pre-modern society would have been worse, both in quantity and quality of life. Maybe you wouldn't have been exiled, as such. But you would have been a marginalized outsider in an environment that was far more resource constrained than the environment in which we live today, and which rewarded conformity to a far greater degree.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

Yes these aren't privileged experiences I have had them too. It is extremely frightening and is riskier than a lot of other activities. That's not itself evidence of how any particular culture treated people experiencing it or what they thought or expected of the experience. This particular subject is one that has interested a lot of people, including historians and anthropologists, and there is a lot of history and anthropology on it. I'm neither, but from what I've read people who have professionally studied it mostly refrain from making generalizations of how it has been experienced through time and across cultures. If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're making broad assertions. I'm curious what that is based on other than extrapolation from your own frightening experiences.

quanticle 4y ago
If you're going to say or imply that surviving these experiences, or being tolerated for experiencing them, was only "a small proportion" then you're making broad assertions. It's a broad assertion I feel safe making from what I've read, and from what I know of human nature, and the often toxic dynamics of small communities. Being different in a small tribe sucks. Yeah, if you're different in just the right way, you're venerated as a shaman or religious figure. But I feel absolutely safe in asserting that for the average mentally ill person, being mentally ill in a pre-modern society would have been worse, both in quantity and quality of life. Maybe you wouldn't have been exiled, as such. But you would have been a marginalized outsider in an environment that was far more resource constrained than the environment in which we live today, and which rewarded conformity to a far greater degree.