Hamilton (00:01):

Okay, so I’ve started recording and if at any time you want me to stop or just want to stop in general, that’s okay. Sometimes we can go places we didn’t anticipate and that’s all good. Well, firstly, thank you for agreeing to participate. It was really nice of you to reach out, so I appreciate that a lot. And like I said, the first kind of question I have is with regards to delusion is has there been a time that someone has said to you that you are delusional or another label that has essentially the same implications?

SW (00:53):

I had my first psychotic episode when I was 21 and ended up in hospital. When I was taken to hospital, I was very out of touch with reality. That first time I was given a label of schizophreniform. I ended up with a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder.

Hamilton (01:33):

You could feel it, you get sensed.

SW (01:36):

A question I asked participants in my research was – when you were unwell, were you aware that you were in a different reality or not? Some people have a self-awareness that things are going on that are different to the normal reality. During the three psychotic episodes I had in my twenties there was no part of me that realised what was happening to me wasn’t real. I was in this whole immersive world that took a long time to crawl out of.

I lost touch with reality in a big way and accepted the label that I was given. And I didn’t have anyone discuss with me what the label meant. I was just given a label and put on medication and not much support beyond that. But when I crawled out of the psychosis, there wasn’t the word ‘delusion’ used. It was just the word ‘psychosis’ and the label of schizophreniform or schizoaffective. And the fact that I was on antipsychotic medication and a mood stabilizer.

Hamilton (03:30):

I think that was a similar experience to me as well. My kind of experience wasn’t spoken of. It was more of a, this is the diagnosis and you do these things accordingly. When you have that diagnosis, you take the medication. And I took me a long time to put together that there was a link between what was going on for me and what was happening to me, that it might be in response to how I was feeling and behaving. And for yourself, what did you think that they were responding to? Was there something that you were aware of that they were responding to you with these labels?

SW (04:27):

 When I arrived in hospital it must have been very clear from my behavior that I was unwell. I don’t remember this, but my friend visited me in the psych ward, and I’d lose it and need five people to pin me down and put a needle in me to knock me out. I don’t remember that sort of thing, but I would be screaming, and I’d have to be pinned down by these big guys, big male nurses and knocked out. So, it was obvious I had lost touch with reality.

What were the observable symptoms that they see when they get you to hospital? It’s hard for me to remember because I was in the experience, but I wrote a play about my first psychotic episode, which we performed in the late nineties. And one thing I wrote in that, which I did, they took me to have an interview with a psychiatrist when they got me to Caritas, which was a psychiatric ward in Darlinghurst. And I remember walking up to her and patting her on the head like this. And I’m sure my answers at that time to certain questions were bizarre.  Another time, it was my second psychotic episode, I lived outside of Katoomba, and I was following the train tracks. I was going to walk to Sydney in the middle of the night, but I ended up outside someone’s house and they took me inside and they called the police, and the police took me to the police station. I was inside this whole reality. I’d been the second coming and the antichrist, and I’d fallen down between the train tracks and had trains go past me that were cattle cars full of Jews. And I’d been the antichrist and I’d confessed into the earth, and I ended up in this house and it was a house of lepers, and it was like the Passover and people were putting lights on outside their houses and if they didn’t have their lights on, then the angel of death or whatever was, I don’t know. But I went into this house and the people took me in there and they had leprosy, and the kids were watching the TV and the police came.

And so, my mother, because my parents lived near Hornsby at the time, drove up and drove me down to Hornsby Hospital. And for me, my father had died and there was procession of cars, and I was in this whole reality. They got me to the hospital and took me to casualty or emergency or wherever they assessed me. I would look in a doctor’s eyes when they were talking to me. And in one eye he’s a doctor and he doesn’t know what’s going on. And in the other eye, he’s part of this huge initiation test and there’s this cheering and booing going on and he knows what’s going on. And it was on the verge of Armageddon. And so, I’m in these huge realities all the time. And so, my behavior must have appeared bizarre to the people who were assessing me or asking me questions, especially when I lose the plot and need to be sedated. By the time I got to hospital I hadn’t slept for however long.

They generally don’t ask about the sort of delusions that you’re having when you arrive in hospital. No one ever debriefs you and says, what was your experience and what did you believe? And what’s happening now? No one wants to know the first person lived experience, but I’m sure my behaviour, because I’m so out of touch with reality, it must be very clear that I’m very unwell. And I’m not terribly sure if I can say why that is, but when you’re so out of touch with reality, it is clear to the mental health professionals that you are psychotic.

Hamilton (09:55):

You talking about Hornsby Hospital gives me a whole lot of memories of spending some time at Hornsby Hospital as the younger person, terribly unpleasant place. But they did refurbish it in the past.

SW (10:09):

They had a smoking room. I was in there in about 93 I think. And at the end of the psych ward was this big room that we were, and I stopped smoking three years ago. But all my life, I’ve been a heavy smoker and a lot of psych patients are, and at the time I was on Hornsby Hospital Ward, we had a big smoking room and we all hung out there. And so it was actually, you’re saying it was horrible, but I just remember the smoking room and how great it was to have this smoking room.

Hamilton (10:46):

That does sound quite good. I did used to smoke quite heavily, and I remember being there and talking to people and they would say the strangest things. And it was my first ever time being in hospitals. I didn’t really know how to make sense of all of this. It was sort of fantastic and horrible at the same time.

SW (11:10):

Were you totally out of touch with the reality with your episodes?

Hamilton (11:18):

For the first time I was in hospital, I was admitted and it got worse and then it got better. So at the beginning I was like, oh, I don’t really like being here. I’m not really sure what’s going on. And then became pretty out of touch with reality and time was slowing down and my thoughts, my recognition was really terrible and just became fixated on thinking about certain things. And so my experience of sort of delusion or psychosis has been rather horrible. And sometimes people say it’s sort of mixed, but my experience of it was very, very miserable place to be in. And yeah, no one asked what I was thinking and feeling, or if they did, I maybe wasn’t very good at communicating it. Maybe that had something to do with it. But I’m noticing from some of the themes that you talked about, they’re really significant things to be feeling, right. I’m interested in this idea of being the second coming, but also the antichrist. How does that coexist?

SW (12:44):

Well, it goes from one to the other. So yeah, you’re the second coming and you can hear this cheering and booing in your head, and everyone’s retreated to the forest and Armageddon’s coming and you’re on this journey. I’ve written it all down. They were initiations. And in the first two I experienced being the second coming and the antichrist. But in the third one, I lived in Enmore and I realised I was getting unwell and I had the crisis team visiting me, and I was upping my anti-psychotic. But I sat for weeks with the voice of God in one side of my head and me in the other and having these conversations. And God kept telling me to think bigger, think bigger. And I ended up being the female aspect of God. God was human and walked the earth in human form, and he was my soulmate.

Hamilton (14:02):

That’s a very rich kind of description that you’re sharing with me. That’s quite beautiful actually, to hear that from you.

SW (14:17):

 They were all very religious, and I haven’t investigated this literature, but there are groups like Icarus, over in America who are people with mental illnesses who’ll talk about them as being spiritual experiences. I kind of think its mysticism gone askew or gone wrong. We maybe don’t have the containers to hold us. But they do feel like these mystical or religious or spiritual experiences, but I was so young and I didn’t really have the grounding. It was far too big. You’re in touch with these archetypal forces that are far too big and swamp the ego, and you identify with that stuff and it’s huge. And then when you come out of it, you’re so small and broken and shattered into a million pieces, and you’re just this very, very insecure small young person who’s had this massively big experience.

And the rest of your life, you’re trying to integrate that into becoming someone who is more whole within themselves, which is hard because you identify with something so huge like God, you identify with God, but you’re actually – your self-worth when you recover is shattered. And you’re a young person who can’t have a job, can’t have a career, can’t have a relationship, is experiencing a lot of depression and lack of self-worth because you’re struggling with the aftermath of these illnesses or it is still the illness, the negative symptoms of having these illnesses. And I think, I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I’m just saying I think it is a very hard journey to come and to reconcile those things and become more complete or whole within yourself. That’s a big task that we have to do. That takes decades. And I guess that’s why in a conference like that (reference to a conference on psychosis I attended), it’s not really acknowledging this kind of journey that we go on.

Hamilton (17:10):

Yeah, I’m so glad I’m recording because that was really beautiful, Shauna. I appreciate that. And as someone that’s trying to reconcile some of the things I’ve experienced and in many respects put myself back together, I appreciate feeling acknowledged like that. I was very, some of my experiences or what I will say is our delusions were very negative and about certain death, and I need to die on account of the essential badness or wrongness of the person that I am. And then for that, for me, that sort of really, that fixation went away, but now experience highs and lows where that is incorporated. So I’m trying to, yeah, it’s no longer as true for me, but it’s still something that I think about. And yeah, trying to put it together, put myself together has been hard. But I think I’m doing a half decent job at this stage. And yeah, those content, the kind of content of some of the things that I believed or thought has really stuck with me for better or worse for itself. Shauna, you talked about mysticism gone wrong or mysticism, you say mysticism gone askew. Is mysticism that’s been a part of your life prior or after some of your experiences?

SW (19:03):

I went to art school when I left high school, I finished high school, went to art school for a semester, then went for a trip to Europe for about nine months. That was pretty crazy. And then went back to art school. But when I was at art school, the art theory I did, there were some great theory teachers at art school and I was introduced to ideas like mysticism or Jung or whatever. And I was too young to follow up and do the reading, but I guess I was influenced by exposure to those ideas, so I was aware of them. And also, I used drugs, so I started smoking pot a bit when I was 15, fairly regularly when I was 16, I had a difficult time at home with my parents, and I had a lot of other issues going on that meant I was struggling as an adolescent. So those sort of traumas and the drugs are triggers. And I’d used other drugs before my psychosis.

What was the question?

Hamilton (20:35):

I was asking about your relationship and your life to mysticism, and you had spoken bit about, you introduced to at art school, but at art school you also started using, were you using drugs at the time?

SW (20:46):

 I guess knowing about mysticism or at least being aware of it and also having experienced altered states of consciousness, which you’re very aware of with drugs. So even though the drugs had a different effect on me to my friends in that I would get quite paranoid, or I’d get very unwell, so they were kind of celebrating and enjoying themselves. I was being very intense. But certainly, those experiences in altered states of consciousness and being aware of the theory behind mysticism, which is that we don’t have direct access to reality in our normal waking state. And when you use the drugs, you kind of have a sense that this veil is being lifted and that you have a more direct experience of reality. I’m not sure if I hold to those sort of beliefs now, but I think at the time there’s this sense that reality is not being revealed to us when we’re straight in the normal waking state.

And so this interest in consciousness that you have as a young person, and that continued in my life after I’d stopped drugs when I became unwell, but in my early thirties I got involved in Buddhism, and when you meditate, that’s another way that people can access these altered states. And so, with the psychosis, I guess the idea from my understanding with mysticism is you might have a direct experience of God, and that’s spelt out in different ways in the Christian mystical literature, but maybe it’s an experience of God or an experience of love or what have you. But with psychosis, and I still have this idea, but it doesn’t come through in my uni work, but are these psychotic episodes revealing something about the nature of reality that we don’t normally have access to?

I don’t want my consciousness to shift now. I took some Valium the other day for the first time, a low dose that the doctor prescribed, and it was horrible for three days. And it’s like I can’t risk my consciousness shifting because it can flip into something dangerous. So, I don’t want my consciousness changing now, but there’s still this question, or there’s still this very strong imprint from these psychotic experiences where I sense what occurred to me that was real and revealed something about reality that we don’t normally access. And when I interview people who have been psychotic for my own research, even if they’re saying, oh, it was just a chemical imbalance, which not all people are saying, but I’m kind of thinking, no, something real happened here. When people have these very deep experiences where they’re put through tests, they’re tested and they suffer so much, and it’s as though it’s a test of their endurance. And to me it’s like, that really happened. That experience is real.

Hamilton (24:55):

Shauna, I mean, if you haven’t gathered already, that is sort of a perspective that I share, at least hypothetically, I’m trying to investigate it, that psychosis or specifically delusions reveal something or at least instructive or give us a direction of some kind of insight or something that is valuable. And I mean, in part, I’m doing it because I’m not sure what it means. What does it mean for me? I’m not trying to understand my own experience better, but I want to hear from other people too. And if you think about some of the experiences that you mentioned, this idea of being the second coming and also antichrist or the idea of having God in one ear and yourself in the other, what does this sort of altered state of reality reveal about reality?

SW (26:05):

 What it reveals to me is that there is this other dimension of reality that may be nonphysical, that causally interacts with this reality and that it has conscious beings or consciousness – that the universe is conscious and has an intelligence that causally interacts in our lives. For example, when your thoughts are being heard by this other level of reality, and it makes sounds in the environment that are responses to those thoughts and that guide your behaviour. And the kind of coincidences that you experience when your consciousness shifts to these altered states, there is this interconnectedness of everything. And there are these coincidences or this synchronicity happening all the time – and maybe it’s happening all the time in the normal waking state, but we’re not picking up on it. But then I do philosophy and I learn about dualism and Descartes and having a physical substance and a non-physical substance, and the fact that most contemporary philosophers are not substance dualists because there’s no way for a non-physical substance to causally interact with a physical one.

And that most people will have a view, a physicalist who supports science will have a physicalist view of the universe where it’s causally closed. So, the whole universe is physical, and you need physical things to cause other physical things. This is the sort of stuff I learn in philosophy or philosophy of mind or consciousness studies. And I’m very persuaded by the science. So, I’ve got these very different views of reality. One that’s come from my experience of psychosis, where it’s like, well, I think there is some kind of consciousness in the universe, a higher consciousness that guides our lives and takes an interest in us, which is a very spiritual view, but it’s idiosyncratic in that it’s come through my psychotic episodes, but it’s not so different from what maybe some really literal Christian would hold.

And then you have what I’ve learned through my education at ANU and through philosophy. I get less tolerant of panpsychism, which is a view that the universe has consciousness as a fundamental element spread throughout the universe. And when I came into philosophy, I really liked that view. It seemed to be a way for my views, spiritual views to come into this legitimate area. But as I learn more about the science of consciousness, I become less tolerant of those positions. I’m rambling, but my point is you asked me what it says about reality. Well, I think I have these two very opposite views of metaphysical views of how reality is not constructed, but the nature of reality, and I’m not able to reconcile those views but somehow, I hold on to both of them.

Hamilton (30:21):

Yeah, I think I’m also enticed by the idea that experiences of unreality or psychosis are unveiling something important or another dimension of reality that is not usually contactable, and that’s also supported by doing psychedelics and talking to people that do psychedelics. There seems to be, you might be familiar, people that smoke DMT very commonly report meeting the same people in the hallucination, a series of bizarre, as it sounds, a series of mechanical elves is probably the most common experienced by about 25% of people that smoke DMT or quite large doses of DMT. And all of this appeals to me as someone that wants to think that there’s more than just my brain spewing out an unrelated mess when I’m not feeling very well. And I’m not sure you’re giving me a lot to think about Shauna for myself and this research. So, I really appreciate that.

SW (32:24):

 We’re told with this biomedical model, the people who are biomedical, say our brains are shrinking. There’s something wrong with our brain. Or people with certain types of epilepsy having mystical experiences, and it’s kind of like, well, this is because a certain part of the brain in the parietal lobe is activated or whatever. But what we’re trying to argue, it’s like, well, yes, something in the brain is causing us to access reality differently. But our experience says something about reality. In a normal waking state or with a neurotypical brain, we access reality in a certain way.

It’s like, yes, it’s caused by changes in the brain, but can we say that reality is different to what we normally access? We have a normal waking state or being on psychedelics or being psychotic or being on light anesthetic or in REM sleep, like I was saying, there are these dimensions in the literature, they vary along the level of arousal or how clear the contents the perceptions are and what your bandwidth is. So, on psychedelics, you have more contents than if you’re under light anesthetic. Or how you experience time – it can stop on LSD. Or how you experience the self or unity, there’s more unity on LSD than a normal waking state, or how accessible the contents like perceptions are. In REM sleep where you have conscious experiences, but they’re not available to things like verbal report or voluntary motor control. So, these are ways that in the literature we try and understand how these different ways of being conscious vary.

This is my research, but what are we saying happens? What happens when reality seems… what is being revealed when I say there’s this other dimension that’s intelligent, or like you said with people smoking psychedelics. I mean, what are we saying? We are saying that the universe has non-physical beings or that it’s intelligent or what shape is that reality that we’re tapping into? Or someone I spoke to told me that Indigenous people have a foot in two worlds. And I don’t know, I can’t speak for what that other world that Indigenous people are experiencing, but I guess it would be that world of synchronicities and being in touch where everything’s kind of linked up.

Hamilton (36:41):

Shauna, is there a belief or an experience that you’ve had that you maybe feel more confident in being able to articulate why it occurred or what it was revealing? Just so I can understand for you how this theory pans out?

SW (37:02):

Yeah, I don’t know if that’s a psychoanalytic reductive thing of saying, why did I have a saviour complex? And whether that’s something about..

Hamilton (37:19):

I don’t necessarily want to invite you into that perspective if you don’t want to be there, but if not that, what is it revealing or could you speculate about what it could be revealing?

SW (37:35):

 If you were to say to someone, I have these experiences and I think they’re true, then the response is, well, you’re very hubristic if you think you’re special and you’ve been chosen. Or someone else said to me, I said, in my view, these experiences reflect that the universe is a positive place and I’m being guided and I’m being tested. I was put through these tests, which were really hard and terrifying, but the beings were good. And someone said to me, well, there’s evil in the universe. And a good God wouldn’t put you through a test like that at a young age.

A good universe wouldn’t terrorise a young person like that. But I have to believe it’s a good universe. I can’t have this idea of evil in it. It’s just too hard for me to deal with. But if you were to say to someone, my thoughts were heard and I had these tests when I was younger, it seems very hubristic. Well, why were you chosen or why did you have these tests? And then it’s just like, well, it’s random. It just happened to my brain. But yeah, I don’t know why they happened. As I said, I don’t tell people that sort of stuff because it does sound delusional. It sounds like I’m special. This happened to me because I’ve been chosen, and that’s kind of crazy.

Hamilton (39:41):

It is. But you’re in good company. I sincerely feel about 50% of the time that I am a unique person that has been chosen to do a certain number of things and that I’m highly special and capable. I don’t always feel that way. I feel that way a lot. I don’t feel like that at the moment, but I hope that you would not feel shy to share anything, although I understand that you might be, but you’re certainly in the company of someone that’s been called most things and probably has some have drawn false conclusions about the world many, many times.

SW (40:23):

But look, I would say if I was tested, what was I meant to achieve with my life and have I failed? But I went through a course when I was 33, 34, I started a course in Jungian studies, and met a couple of very good mentors. One of them told me, stop being special, stop trying to be special. And he also told me, stop trying to be good because I think I tried. I was trying so hard to be good. Stop being good, stop being special. And there’s this little tale, someone’s quite young, and they walk up, and they find this cave that has a jewel in it, but there’s this big dragon guarding the jewel. So, they go off, they go back to the village, and then they lead a very ordinary life and they get old.

They go back to the cave, and the dragons turned into a little kitten. So, the idea is you don’t have to fight that dragon all the time. And that’s what I did when I was younger. My life was just this battle with this dragon, and it was this thing about being special, but I was also incredibly lonely and in an incredible amount of pain. And I think finding my husband and trying to be ordinary or realise that the richness of life is in the day-to-day. We don’t have children, but we have cats. One of them has passed away, but it’s in spending the evenings with my husband watching a movie, nursing one of our cats, these everyday ordinary moments are what make the richness of life. And so, I think maybe letting go of the specialness, and I kind of let go of my spiritual practice as well for a long time.

But I was still on a journey by gaining an education, which took up my time. And I’m not very good at it. I’m not good academically. But there was a reason to gain an education, and it was to strengthen a part of my personality that was quite weak, which was to do a rational or intellectual side, but letting go of all those spiritual practices. I think I was probably too young. I was trying very hard to be good and follow this sort of spiritual thing. But I think being good and trying to be spiritual when I was younger actually retarded my growth.

I had to let go of that. I had to move on from that. So, in terms of how I feel about why did these experiences happen to me or what was I meant to achieve with my life, or did I not live up to this? I think these are questions that everyone has because as young people, we all have big dreams about what we’re going to achieve, and then life happens. And I am content and happy with how my life has turned out, and it’s much better than how it was when I was trying to be special. That was lonely and difficult.

Hamilton (45:00):

And just so I’m able to track it. That kind of loneliness and feelings of specialness was in the vast majority of times that you were experiencing psychosis in your twenties and early thirties.

SW (45:21):

 The psychotic episodes happened three times in my twenties, and I came out of them. They took a long time to recover from. So, each took about a year out of my life. But at the other times, I wasn’t psychotic, although I had this background kind of delusion going because I still thought car beeps were responses to my thoughts, and I never talked about it to anyone. They talk about it as double bookkeeping is the term used where you’ve got one foot in the real world, but you’ve kind of got this delusional thing happening in the background at the same time. And I think that was my reality for a very, very long time, whether it is now, I think to a lesser degree. I don’t know that I was aware, it’s just thinking you’re going to do something special. You’re going to create this product that’s going to make life better or change the world or change people’s lives. And I’d still like to create something good, but I’m getting older and I’m tired and I just want to live a good life.

But I think when I was younger, there’s this very strong sense that you’re going to create this artwork or you’re going to create something that is, you’re going to speak some truth that, and I tried to do that.  I performed when I was younger, I did spoken word and I was very honest about my experience, but there’s a shelf life to that sort of introspection. You talk about yourself and that’s fine when you’re a young person, but as you get older, you need to get an education, otherwise people are just seeing through you. And so that’s why I have for 20 years tried to get an education very, very slowly.

Hamilton (47:56):

And I’m actually really looking forward to seeing some of your movie, I believe on your website earlier, to get more of this very rich picture that you’ve been making for me. I suppose before we finish talking to one another, I did want to ask you a question about some of your experiences. And the answer might be no, but sometimes even years down the track when asked about people might sometimes still feel in two minds about the experience. So I was just going to ask whether you said God had been speaking to you, looking back on it, was God speaking to you?

SW (49:04):

I don’t know what I take God to be. I don’t think God is literally a person, but phrasing the question differently, are there intelligent beings? Is there an intelligence in the universe that’s kind of on another dimension that can reach us in our dreams or in psychosis or… Yes, I have a reality where I think that reality is bigger than the physical world. I can’t let go of that. I have a strong faith, but I don’t draw on it much because my life is going okay. So, I hardly ever talk to God. But in the past, I have, and in the past when I really suffered, I needed a universe that cared for me, and I really felt that to be true. And I don’t like the idea of a physical universe that’s just going to kind of die. It scares me to think we’re alone in the universe. I have a spirituality where I take it that we’re not alone in the universe and that there’s some kind of intelligence that engages with us and is aware of us and has our best interest at heart. And that’s how I dealt with suffering in the past. I think it is my faith or belief, even though, as I said, I do this physicalist stuff in my university work, and I kind of have little tolerance now for Panpsychism. So yeah, I’m torn. I have different views of reality.

But yes, I think the psychosis revealed something that feels real to me.

Hamilton (51:48):

Yeah. Thank you, Shauna. That was really lovely to hear your perspectives and insights on these things. It felt very insightful and educational for me. Someone that knows a little bit about a few things, but not a lot really about any one thing in particular. So getting your insights will be really useful.

SW (52:18):

And don’t put yourself down. You’ve got all the same stuff happening.

Hamilton (52:26):

Yeah. From here, I’ll get the recording turned into a transcript, but I’ll write some basic reflections and think about what we can do from here. Because today you were very generous in sharing with me. But hopefully, and if you feel comfortable can be a good starting point for us to delve into some different things, maybe expand on some of the conversations we were having today, if that’s something you’d still like to do.

SW (53:08):

Oh, sure. Also, you said you wanted us to do some work for you, so maybe send in an email if you have some questions that I could write about them.

Hamilton (53:19):

Yeah, I would love that. And you sent me a website before, didn’t you?

SW (53:25):

I can send it again. I’ll send a link again.

Hamilton (53:28):

Thank you. That’d be really, really helpful. I’m going to stop.