Schizophrenia: Personal confrontations and a philosophical investigation
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What early questions did Paul Fearne ask about his psychotic experience?
I'm trying to understand how what is happening to me can possibly happen at all. How does a person's mind become so fragile and exposed to the outside world that to live is to take a leap into a sea of daggers, each one stabbing the fabric of your being? How can light pass from a person's eye to sear their very mind? It's obviously some sort of hypersensitivity. But how can it destroy parts of that mind? It seems an impossibility, a scary impossibility. My CT scan has cleared me of any structural damage to my brain, but my mind is still decimated. I still converse and write quite freely, but it is within the very perceptions which the mind makes which is impinged upon most dramatically. Not only does the light affect my mind, but somehow so does sound.
Even while I'm writing this I know how crazy it sounds. It's like a freakish nightmare dreamt and then quickly forgotten. I've neglected talking about this to anyone for fear of no one believing me.
Writer, poet, now doctor of philosophy, Paul Fern has recently been awarded his PhD thesis at La Trobe University, a philosophical response to the questions posed by schizophrenia. Now, that certainly caught my attention. He's also just launched Diary of a Schizophrenic at the Melbourne Writers' Festival this month.
So please welcome Paul Fern.
APPLAUSE
Well, thank you very much, Stu. This is a book about what is possible. It was written during a schizophrenic episode I had in 1998 and has many of the characteristic features of psychotic written expression. But it is not necessarily the book itself, which is the important thing here today. It is the story behind the book. A few months after...
It's very rare to get a glimpse inside the throes of a psychotic experience, but when Paul Fern pulled his old diary off the shelf, written back in the final year of his undergraduate degree, he discovered that's what he had. Today, he manages the illness with medication and the love of a good woman, and he's my guest on All In The Mind on ABC Radio National today. Paul Fern, welcome to the program.
My pleasure.
In the diary, Paul, you write, the journey of my mind is the most terrifying journey to take and I took the ride of a lifetime. Why was that year so terrifying for you?
was basically my first psychotic episode, and you don't really know what's going on. You're in a place that is riddled with anxiety and fear, and you don't really know where to turn. When you're experiencing a schizophrenic episode, you don't necessarily have an awareness that that's what you're experiencing. All you can see is the darkness around you. So it was a tough year, but we got there in the end.
Because interestingly, the diary never mentions schizophrenia. The blatant anxiety that you're experiencing is very present, but you never name it.
That can be part of suffering from schizophrenia, is a lack of awareness. And there's actually a technical term for that called asognosia. And someone who's experiencing an episode may deny that they suffer from schizophrenia. So that may be a reason why I didn't mention the word in the diary at all. I was perhaps trying to grasp at the experience on a different level. It's not until later when I developed insight into my condition that I was able to freely and confidently say, yes, I do suffer from schizophrenia. I can't understand what is wrong with me. It seems as if parts of my very being just drop out of my body if I happen to turn suddenly. How is this possible? I look to where my feelings once were, and there is just an inky blackness, whereas before there was passion and conviction.
I find myself struggling with the words to describe exactly what happens. Somehow my being has opened up and is exposed to the outside world, and is so tenuously linked with my body that it just removes itself whenever my momentum shifts direction. What does this mean? That the very fibers of a person's being can be affected somehow by gravity? It seems a nightmarish possibility, but this whole situation in which I find myself is so nightmarish that I'm hardly surprised.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What early questions did Paul Fearne ask about his psychotic experience?
0:04–7:30
2
How did Paul’s diary reveal the first terrifying year of his schizophrenia?
7:30–10:46
3
What does Paul mean when he describes his mind as “breaking” from light and sound?
10:46–26:07
4
How did the elastic‑band delusion illustrate Paul’s sense of being pulled away from reality?
26:07–29:56