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Jerry Marzinsky and his Iconoclastic Conclusions
Jerry Marzinsky is an interesting guy. He is a licensed commercial pilot, a certified SCUBA diver, flies high-performance gliders, and enjoys cross-country motorcycle trips with friends.
And he is a retired licensed psychotherapist with over 40 years of experience working with and studying the thought processes of psychotic and criminally insane patients in some of the most volatile psychiatric institutions in the nation, per his bio. And he has worked extensively with incarcerated paranoid schizophrenics.
And he’s counter-cultural, at least in the psychiatric community.
The most interesting thing that he’s said is asking the question: Where do thoughts come from? This was a leading question because he had an odd answer at the ready. Some thoughts come from living, conscious, intelligent, malevolent, immaterial, communicative, verbal, parasitic beings which can come into people, and affect their minds and thinking, control their will, causing them to do things they would not otherwise want to do, and at times control their bodies, and even speak through them. And they’re extraordinarily mean. And they lie. Marzinsky says that these creatures have existed from the first human beings, and are part of every culture. People who hear these voices often call these voices demons. And Marzinsky often uses this word as well.
Why demons? Sufferers call them demons.
In fact, Marzinsky says it took him years to finally get to the point that he could accept that they were real living beings separate from the patient. He does not refer to these beings as spirits. And I have not so far ever heard him refer to God, but he did once refer to an angel who stood behind him to protect him from bodily injury in the course of his work.
Where do thoughts come from? Philosophers come up with delightfully fanciful tales and much like a teenager explaining the universe to his father. Right brain – left brain interaction misperceived by the thinker, driving evolutionary success. Etc. Purely uneducated speculation. No one knows what the mind is, and yet entire careers and industries are built upon the pretext of knowing. And speculation is taken as fact.
The chief speculation, because they cannot really know, but only assume based on their view of reality and on their training, is that auditory hallucinations are random productions of the human mind, and that they are so random as to be senseless and incoherent. In short, there is no reason for a bug to be hallucinated on the window sill, no reason to hear knocking on the wall, and no reason that voices say anything; and consequently knowing a patient’s hallucinations has no bearing on what the patient is thinking or feeling so psychiatrists dismiss them. And so psychiatrists and psychologists, Marzinsky says, are taught never to acknowledge the occurrences of hallucinations, never explore their content, presumably so as to never validate the hallucinations, and never to consider their content for psychological or psychoanalytic meaning; instead they tell patients to ignore the voices, which is difficult or impossible to do. And additionally they offer a medicine regimen which dulls the brain and either fully or to some degree blocks the occurrences of hallucinations, or makes the hallucinations easier to ignore.
The only exception to this prohibition of acknowledging hallucinations is when the patient says that the voices are telling him to harm himself or others, or telling him to commit suicide. Then they are important to the patient’s thinking. In this case alone, the professional guidance is to accept the hallucinations and their effect on the patient as functional.
Going outside standard therapy, Marzinsky actually investigated so-called paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations, and he found some remarkable similarities across a variety of patients and of geographical locations. And when his observations became known to psychiatrists, Marzinsky said his questioning patients regarding their hallucinations was banned by his supervising psychiatrists, ostensibly because they focused the patients’ attention on the hallucinations, and validated them as in some way real; and apparently they were not real in the sense that they did not follow a simple materialistic explanation.
In fact, Marzinsky says that there is no known neurological, biochemical, biological, genetic, or any data-driven reason given by the psychiatric community for the occurrence of organic hallucinations; in other words, they don’t know what they are, or how to treat them, they only know how to make the brain insensate to them. At this time, modern psychiatry has assumed that hearing voices has a physical cause, but it still doesn’t know what that supposed cause is. That’s why, instead of curing it, all psychiatrists do is prescribe the patient pharmaceuticals with significant and permanent side effects, that have only the temporary effect of sedating the patient and to varying degrees quieting the voices.
Oddly, Marzinsky says that when asked, the patients say that they stop taking the medicines because the voices tell them to; that the voices say that the medicines’ side effects make life worse for the patients, even if they actually make the even more disturbing voices go away. In other words, the auditory hallucinations argue against any intervention that would silence them.
Additionally, these voices lie. They lie sadistically, convincingly, and continuously. They consistently lie to each person saying that the person hosting them is worthless and unlovable. They consistently lie to each person that people around them hate them, bear ill-will toward them, mean them harm, and are betraying them. And consistently, schizophrenics are physically exhausted by these verbal assaults, which tend to come at night and deprive the person of sleep, and this fatigue makes them even more subject to manipulation.
I don’t know if Marzinsky was a Christian at the beginning of his study, or if he is a Christian today, but as I said, he never has referred to God. In his book “An Amazing Journey into the Psychotic Mind,” Marzinsky does not present himself as anything like an orthodox Christian. Nevertheless, he did notice a pattern among paranoid schizophrenics that they avoided church services, and Bible verses, and particularly disliked clergymen. In fact, patients said that the random voices protested even contemplating going to church, and got louder and more vehement, to control the patients and prevent them from attending services. Also he says that the most common and effective non-pharmaceutical means of quieting demons is the 23rd Psalm.
Indeed, Marzinsky’s treatments have apparently permanently cured a number of paranoid schizophrenics, and the 23rd Psalm is central to his methods. One thing he does is tell the schizophrenics that they are not creating their own voices as the effect of an incurable disease, but that the voices are real, and exogenous, and coming from beings that are parasites feeding off of negative emotions, and induce negative emotions in others; and that this is why they are so upsetting to the people experiencing them. Knowing this, people gain a sense of control upon which they can act to fight off the accusations and demands of the voices. Another thing regarding the 23rd Psalm is that he encourages patients to keep a rubber band on one wrist and snap it when voices get loud. This momentary pain distracts from the voices long enough for the patient to recite the 23rd Psalm, which stifles the voices for several minutes and over time tends to make the voices stop for good.
Furthermore, Marzinsky says that though commonly and psychiatrically schizophrenia has in the past been ignorantly interpreted as possession by demons, Jesus is reported to have cured schizophrenia by casting out demons. So, again, the opposing arguments hinge on whether or not demons exist in reality. One thing Marzinsky insists is that these auditory hallucinations are not random and not incoherent but are coherent, responsive and conversant; that is, they respond intelligently to statements and to questions of both the patient and the interviewer. An example of this may be seen in that the voices comprising these hallucinations exhibit knowledge that the patient cannot know, such as giving explicit driving directions across several states to a location new and unknown to the patient to safely buy drugs.
So, do demons exist as anything more than a metaphor or myth? The answer one gives would be based on one’s world view and whether or not one accepts the religious or supernatural. Marzinsky’s world view, based on his experiences, is that they most certainly do exist. And he does not always call them “demons” but rather parasites, and does not give a religious interpretation or a Christian Biblical account of the origin and nature of these entities.
I would say in summation there is unique and convincing evidence that “The Devil indeed made me do it.”
Authored by the Member Formerly Known as Flicker with Saint Augustine
Published in General
One thing that may be relevant is that neurological and neuropsychiatric researchers found that chemical and physical insults to the brain can directly cause hallucinations. For example, someone having an LSD trip, taking ayahuasca, or other hallucinogens will experience delusions that can be similar to those experience by a psychotic person. I know from personal experience that high fevers can induce hallucinations – that was absolutely terrifying. (I was absolutely convinced my hand was turning into a claw, even though I knew it was impossible and I was hallucinating… the logical part of my brain did not matter. I have a lot of sympathy for the mentally ill, as that one evening was plenty for a lifetime.) Is it any wonder that people defaulted to a physical explanation?
It might be useful to distinguish between physical and non-physical cases.
I would say yes for the one fact that if you believe in God, you must believe the other exists too. Some of the paranoid schizophrenics could be possessed but the overwhelming majority are suffering from mental illness. Maybe there is no clear line between the two. That’s a troubling thought. Even the expert Marzinsky had trouble defining it, which proves my point. We’re human, we’re not that smart.
I think it was, more than anything, the spirit of the age that insisted on a materialistic explanation.
So it’s not a wonder, but that doesn’t mean it was the right move based on that evidence either.
We’ve known that physical states affect mental states since before there were philosophers. (Plato and all non-materialist philosophers after him were well aware of the effects of wine on the mind.)
I’m inclined to think that mind and body are far more intertwined than we like to admit these days. Physical things can have some effect on spiritual states. The theologian-priests on The Lord of Spirits talked in one episode, as I recall (perhaps it was this one), about hallucinogenic drugs as things that likely do open the mind to particular spiritual influences; but they’re the wrong way to open the mind!
Allow me to respond in advance to the materialist who leaps in here with an “Aha! Aha! You’re admitting that these effects come from physical causes! Your belief that they are anything more than that is unjustified!”
Well, I really did believe, just a few years ago, that there really are, by and large, merely physical causes for these things. I suppose I could go back to believing that–were I persuaded that there is a sufficient chemical explanation for these particular mental states, and were it not for these other indicators covered by Marzinsky that there is more going on than just chemicals.
In other words, I have certainly not admitted that these things come from physical causes; I have only observed that they do not come entirely from other causes. And my belief that these unfortunate mental states are (oftentimes) more than just the effects of physical causes would be unjustified if we had a physical explanation for all of it. Setting aside Marzinsky’s or my own views on these supposed beings, the basic facts as he describes them indicate that we have no such explanation.
Postscript:
Personally, I have no direct familiarity with even one of these facts; I cannot vouch for them. But I notice that the facts as Marzinsky presents them parallel something I really am familiar with:
In philosophy, when people try to explain the mind as a physical thing, they talk a lot about how mental states are affected by brain states. But they provide no explanation at all as to how brain states create mental states. Meanwhile, those of us who pay attention to the fact of consciousness can see that it has about as much to do with matter as, for example, the color purple has to do with the number 7.4.
Interesting.
Not true.
Very true.
But perhaps in reverse? The doctor’s last remarks in The Horror at 37,000 Feet?
Meanwhile. thoughts and decisions can change one’s mental states. Does that also change the brain states? Can a mere thought or decision change the physical and chemical? My experience is that it can. Thoughts are things. They matter. We are given a faculty of judgment that allows us to separate the sheep from the goats of our thoughts. We should do so.
I bet Marzinsky talks about that too. Thanks for filling in the gap I left.
Two more words: Jeffrey Schwartz!
If one believes in demons or evil, does that necessitate that one also believes in God? I don’t think that it does. One can believe in selfish super-natural beings without having to believe in a good side. It is as one can believe in human nature without believing in unselfish altruism. Cod knows that materialists believe in selfishness as an explanation for altruism.
Don’t make me get all Augustine up in here!
I think evil is defined by good, not vice versa.
But maybe we should leave it at that?
All that I’m saying is that it is possible to believe in demons without believing in God, and vice versa. Contrasting good and evil is very Persian. If one looks at other mythologies that have two “divine” sides, neither side is necessarily good nor bad. For instance, the Jotuns versus the Aesir and Vanir. None would say that Othinn is terribly moral. He has selfish goals as he fights against the fate assigned him. One might see them as all being selfish beings, demons if you will.
I’m not saying that such a view is correct, just that one can have it.
On the other hand, one can believe in only one God, one power, with no opposing powers.
This is not too difficult to understand that these views can exist. They have in the past. They will again.
Yes.
Fascinating, GM. Much to contemplate. I don’t know enough about severe mental illness or hallucinations to ender an intelligent assessment, but it’s so darn interesting!
As far as the mind-body connection, I don’t have a clear concept of it, but I’ve long been under the impression that though the mind works through the body it is separate from it but intertwined, as in referring to “dividing the soul from the spirit”. But this point was brought home to me by Robert A. Baker, who, without explaining things, documents the commonplace hormonal experiences in which the body controls the mind, and John Sarno, MD who explains and treats the mind which causes physical, testable medical conditions.
From what I’ve read and viewed, Marzinsky does not say that all auditory hallucinations are manifestations of demons, but that the extreme cases of auditory hallucinations diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia are (or at least leaving the possibility that the majority of them are). And he has a way to cure at least some people with paranoid schizophrenia and auditory hallucinations by how the sufferer responds physically and intellectually to the hallucinations.
This in itself, is enough to call into question the purely physiological and organic biological, biochemical or genetic bases assumed to be the cause of problematic paranoid auditory hallucinations, or paranoid schizophrenia.
I find that persuasive. Very.
Dr. Descartes, call your office.
In one of Larry Correia’s excellent Monster Hunter International books, the Big Bad is a mental parasite known as an alp, that feeds on nightmares. A WWII project running parallel to the Manhattan Project captured one and enhanced it to use as a potential weapon. It slipped the leash, making for a rousing story, but one that felt oddly realistic. Not that I’m hearing voices in my own head, other than my mom’s…
I think these areas are worth exploring. I definitely believe in the mind/body connection for a number of reasons, and his approach seems rational and practical.
I read this fascinating post last night where it was percolating in my own mind while I was sleeping, and my thoughts went in two directions. And they are related to each other.
First, complexity. Figuring out how the human mind works will never be a straightforward process like studying geology. Knowing the different parts of thoughts and feelings will yield very little information about the workings of the mind. It is a wondrous thing. That truth has to be front and center in order for us to learn anything about it. And we must learn because for some poor souls, the mind is broken somewhere, and they need our help so they can enjoy life the way we do.
I was blessed to watch my own three babies grow up, and I was and continue to be astounded at their development. Those feelings of wonder and awe came back to me last week when my new five-month-old grandson stayed with us. There is something wrong with any person who is not completely blown away by the awesomeness of the human heart, mind, and soul.
My grandfather was a wonderful person who touched the lives of many people. Helping people every single day was what got him out of bed. When he passed away, the friends he had made filled his little Cape Cod Methodist church to overflowing. At the end of the service, the congregants sang Gramps’s favorite hymn, and they put all of their heart into it for him: “How Great Thou Art.” Last week, with my new little grandson, that’s all I could think of, that beautiful hymn. What a creation you made, God. :) :)
My point is that there are probably thousands of reasons hallucinations exist. I know a lot about paranoid schizophrenia, and I’ve seen it up close. It is complicated.
I’ll post the second point in a following comment. :)
[continued from comment 18]
Two, understanding. God created symmetry in the earth’s systems that we can learn from. Did he intend us to? Was that part of his grand plan? I suspect so. If we need to understand air currents, we can study water currents to help us because they work roughly the same way. If we need to understand cells, we can study atoms because they work roughly the same way.
Thus, we know from physics and chemistry that matter is neither created nor destroyed, and it is probably true that good and evil are neither created nor destroyed.
And we are probably surrounded by the spiritual agents of both constantly. That is probably the way the universe was built.
A few decades ago, a friend of mine became quite sick from “walking pneumonia.” He asked his doctor, “Why me? Why now?” His doctor explained to him that those pneumonia bugs were always around. People became sick from exposure to them when they were run down emotionally and physically.
I imagine it is a similar issue with paranoid schizophrenia. These agents of harm–some are evil, for sure, but most, like bacteria and viruses, are just problematic on a lesser level–are probably around all of us all the time, but for people in extreme emotional distress, they are far more problematic.
But I am open to myriad possibilities. We live in a chemical soup that is unprecedented in its complexity in human history. How are these chemicals interacting with our biochemistry?
Not to mention that we live in an unprecedentedly stimulating mental and emotional media environment. I can’t help wondering how the human mind and heart are processing the imagery we have created in the world of pretend–movies, books, media in general. That’s where our minds are living. In the arts. Wow. What happens to all of that imagery and sensory input? If matter is neither created nor destroyed?
And there’s all those electric magnetic fields we have built. I’m not paranoid, but I walked into my husband’s office a few years ago, and it caught my attention that he was sitting between two monitors. I said, “I’m not afraid of ‘chemtrails,’ but this can’t be good.” :) We both laughed, and he moved his monitors. :)
In short, I think Marzinsky has had a valuable flash of insight, but I am equally sure the answer is supercomplicated, that there are many sources and mechanisms involved in hallucinations, and that they are as unique as the individuals who have them.
Thank you for this essay; I’m going to read Marzinsky’s book. I have 25 years experience working in mental health, and for he past 5 or so I’ve worked as a psych nurse in inpatient settings. I’m also father to a son who, while he doesn’t have schizophrenia, has a history of hallucinations (probably related to mood disorders). What I read here is consistent with my experiences.
Somewhat of a counterfactual, for your consideration: I’ve know a good number of people with schizophrenia who are hyper-religious. But thinking back I’m not sure that any of them could be said to have paranoid schizophrenia – the people Marzinsky is talking about. I’m going to have to pay attention to that.
Regarding mind-body interaction.
Dr. John Sarno, author of “Healing Back Pain” talks about this in his books on pain control. In short, Sarno’s belief is that some people have high levels of psychic pain and anger. They develop, usually but not always, a work related injury such as carpal tunnel or back pain or even disabling headaches. There is no stigma attached to these diseases, and they receive care and concern from their friends and help from the government. And somewhere along the line when their therapy should have been effective by then, their deep repressed chronic psychic pain and anger asserts itself and punishes the person for their anger with a continuation of the disease process, usually through constricting local blood vessels to the original injury site, leading to localized cellular hypoxia and resultant inflammation and pain which can be detected by advanced imaging. It other words the disease may be psychogenic, but the result is physical.
I can attest to this with examples of people I know and my own experience, including severely damaged spinal nerve roots. Five or ten years later and I still have numbness and electric shocks in my leg, but I’m fully functional. And interestingly, when I touch my leg in one spot, I feel the (altered) sensation in another. Weird. Amusing.
Anyway, my point is that psychogenic disease and the mind-body connection is real.
Maybe next I’ll comment with thoughts on spiritual influence and possession. :)
My aunt whom I dearly loved had a back problem that was debilitating and the pain was serious. Without going into detail, I’m certain that her mindset only exacerbated the problem, and she lived in pain (possibly unnecessarily) for her whole life.
Great post and topic, fascinating! I’m not as versed on the Bible as I should be so I looked up Psalm 23 after I read through post and comments.
Psalm 46:10 always seems to calm me down and my runaway depression.
“Be still, and know that I am G-d”
Sounds like what I think I can recall Mayzinsky saying. They’re everywhere. If you’re at the top of a cliff and a weird thought pops into your head, saying you should jump, and it’s not like you to think that way, it’s probably them. Trauma makes us more vulnerable to them.
Oh, and politicians are crawling with them, he said in a podcast to Delingpole I think.
Not sure what you mean about good and evil not being created or destroyed.
My uncle, a great doctor in his time, once told us that every medical ailment has an emotional component.
And then there’s the bit about scaring warts we learn from a Ricochet author.
Was it Dr. Bastiat or Nanocelt the Contrarian? Dang. I can’t quite remember.
Robert A. Baker, whom I mentioned earlier said that a hypnotic direction was given to a person, I don’t remember for what, that involved the left half of her body. The suggestion didn’t have the desired effect, but all the warts disappeared from the left side of her body.
That’s believable.
A virtual certainty. Barely less probable than “I am not in the Matrix.”
This is not how I was trained as a therapist. The content of hallucinations can be quite valuable to understanding what is going on for someone.
Also, if someone is hearing voices and we put them into an MRI, we can see the auditory processing parts of their brains acting as if they are hearing something, even while their ears are not. We see physical activity in the brain around hallucinations we this is seen,
This is, at best, a very superficial understanding of what is going on and what the research actually shows. First off, it is in no way unreasonable, as this passage seems to suggest, that there is a physical cause for an illness. We do it for the rest of them, why not a brain illness. Secondly, there have been studies to show that people with schizophrenia may have brain features that can be seen on scans. Identical twins raised apart have a 50% of developing schizophrenia if the other does. There is clearly a genetic component but also something else.
Schizophrenia, and all mental illnesses are not fully understood. What we call schizophrenia might even be more than one illness, but with similar presentations. But, because we don’t know or understand it, resorting to demons as the cause is like saying fibromyalgia is a curse by a witch.
And, this understanding of medication is just wrong. I have seen medications have miraculous effects on patients. Not just temporary and modern antipsychotics have far less side effects. This man seems to ignore the existence of medications like Abilify.
The human brain may not be smart enough to understand itself. We certainly do not understand mental illness. We are groping in the darkness. But to fall back on demons or make up parasites that defy all known physical laws is pretty unscientific. It also flies in the fact of 30 years of experience in the field for me.
Thanks for all this. I don’t know when Marzinski was trained, it seems like forty years ago. I know that forty years ago I was told never to ask the content of any hallucinations, since it validates the hallucinations. I only happened to get involved because someone was complaining that there was a man in the bathroom who wasn’t actually there. The person had jumped off a building because the voices had told her to.
But I also don’t see how the brains neurology come explain the character of the voices of paranoid schizophrenics. Are you free to discuss specific experiences of yours regarding hallucinations of paranoid schizophrenics and what they signify?