Hamilton

Asking if there’s anything that you wanted to raise at the beginning before I say anything?

Shauna

No, how about you start with your questions?

Hamilton

I’ve had some time doing less interviews and doing more thinking and looking at the transcripts and comparing them. And one of the ideas that came out of it was the sense that some people’s experiences, it’s not even really useful or it may not even be useful to try and apply a kind of empiricism or objective judgment of their experience. Not because it’s not important because that’s almost beside the point or it doesn’t actually add anything to the experience. And because I’ve been interested in people’s experiences and where these things are generated from or where they’re related to, but there were some people’s experiences that I thought that it’s not that important or it’s not necessary to make a judgment of it because at the core of many of the symptoms of psychosis or delusion is like, is that thing actually occurring? If it was, then it might change it. But some people’s experiences, it seems like maybe that’s not even that important to look at or consider. It doesn’t add anything to the conversation. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that, because I know you think about this in your personal and professional life, but for your own experiences as well.

Shauna

Yeah. So empirically like scientifically proving whether the delusion is real or not real, is it important to prove that a belief is real or not real in terms of our best current evidence of how the world is? That’s the question.

Hamilton

Even if you start with your personal experience, it could be useful because for you it seems like it exists outside of a demonstrable, I don’t know, you can’t necessarily prove or disprove that. Where other things may be may a bit more concrete.

Shauna

Yeah. And you’re asking me do I think it’s important to prove…

Hamilton

Yeah, whether it’s important for you or important just in general or is it sort of beyond that kind of importance? Is it not actually relevant?

Shauna

I guess two things. You could compare it to people who have religious or spiritual beliefs that aren’t in line with our best current scientific knowledge about the world and is it important to disprove these? You can’t prove or disprove those beliefs if people hold them. So, you could compare it to that. But I guess the difference with something like psychosis or delusions is because we’re diagnosing people and saying they’re unwell. And that’s because one kind of definition is that these experiences are distressing, or they mean that people can’t function as well as they perhaps should be able to. And that’s why we give someone a diagnosis and then treatment because the goal of treatment is to ideally allow someone to function better.

So that’s the difference between someone with a religious belief that you can’t prove empirically and someone with a psychopathological experience or what’s being termed psychopathology. I guess that distinguishes those two sorts of camps in a way. And if someone, I don’t know the answer to this, but I would assume it has something to do with how well someone is functioning with that belief in their life. If a belief is causing someone a lot of distress… Do we try to talk someone out of a belief that is really causing them a lot of distress? Or what if a belief is aiding someone? And that’s what those delusion people (academics writing about delusions) are saying, if the delusion is giving somebody meaning in their life, it’s kind of…But yes, but that’s not the question. The question is, is it important to prove whether it’s real or not? And I guess we can’t prove these things. We can say there are some beliefs… For example, you push back on my beliefs about elders or higher beings or whatever. And the question is do we need to prove if that belief is true or not? Well, it doesn’t fit into an empirical framework so…

Hamilton

Well, from my perspective I’m leaning to… it’s not that important or relevant to try and think empirically about some beliefs systems, especially those that sort of operate outside of it, non-tangible things.

Shauna

Well, the majority of humanity has beliefs that are not secular and scientific and that’s not to say they’re right, but the secular worldview is fairly new. So, I guess humanity has functioned quite well with these beliefs for a long time. Maybe. I mean there’s been a lot of wars.

Hamilton

There’s still been scientific progress and sort of arguably moral progress. Things have gotten evidence, it’s kind of self-evident that some standards have improved even in the face of contradictory or just false kind of ideas that people held.

Shauna

Yeah, this question extends way beyond questions of delusions. If you look at the progress of humanity with science compared to holding superstitious beliefs but then argue that our advances are destroying the planet. If we’re lucky, if we are the 15% of humanity living in quite affluent western societies and we have access to everything, we’re living very lucky lives, but there’s a lot of humanity that’s not, and all those questions… I guess that’s why these questions around delusions are interesting because they lead to these bigger questions about how we view reality and what effect that has for the future of the species.

Hamilton

I think I’ve tried to be transparent with what I think, but I don’t want to shape things that influence you necessarily. But it just seems to me as though in order to have a kind of free and equal community, we either need to accept that some people will have beliefs that are not true and hold them very dearly and even maybe influence their lives or B, accept that it’s not even necessarily the role of beliefs to be true. They’re just, they’re motivating factors, but it’s not even necessarily desirable for them to be true. I know that the term ‘is true’ is loaded and vague.

Shauna

Look, it’s hard. I mean I have a lot of trouble with fundamentalism and Pentecostal Christians that are kind of running America and influential here and the sort of beliefs that go along with that and I want to hold…I mean we want to know what the truth is. And you and I have discussed this, science gives us this method which allows us to discover and test things about the world. So, what role do these other beliefs have that are outside the domain of science and that science can’t give us answers to or that science just blankly says are false? And what role do those beliefs play? And yes, people need to be allowed to have their beliefs and the difference, as I was saying earlier with delusions, is how are these beliefs impacting a person’s functioning? Do they need treatment and what form does that treatment take? And if the idea of a delusion is that it’s not in keeping with your community’s spiritual beliefs, for example, it’s an individual belief that is resistant to counter evidence and it seems irrational by everyone else’s standards.

Hamilton

I see why you say that. But I wonder though there does seem to be quite a lot of distress that comes from some more normative belief systems. Even if we look at spiritual beliefs again, seems to be quite a lot of suffering associated with…

Shauna

Hell. And yeah…

Hamilton

It sounds quite bad. It’s a heavy burden. I shouldn’t say it’s bad, but it seems like a big burden to influence your life forever. And I know it is keeping with norms, but I wonder…whether it fits in with a certain tradition to me seem like the most accurate or the best way to identify what is to be done with it, if that makes sense.

Shauna

And what do you mean by what is to be done with it?

Hamilton

If it’s keeping with the community set of beliefs or if it’s not, I’m not sure if the fact that just because it keeps with… just because more people believe it makes it more acceptable.

Shauna

And when you say what is to be done with it, you mean whether the person who has the delusion, whether or not it’s in keeping with, for example, a religious tradition or not, when you say what is to be done with it, you mean challenging the person’s delusion?

Hamilton

How it should be responded to by people in general but also the pointy end of assertive intervention from health services?

Shauna

Well, I mean I never discussed my beliefs with anyone, and the health services aren’t really interested in your beliefs, are they?

Hamilton

Yeah.

Shauna

And if someone who’s been psychotic or delusional is blurting out these irrational beliefs, they are just more heavily medicated. That’s the response. And in terms of therapy, if someone is lucky enough to get therapy beyond CBT, different therapists are trained in different ways, and if you’re lucky you’ll get some humanistic type of therapist who perhaps… I did therapy with a Jungian analyst and knew another Jungian academic and they certainly didn’t challenge me, they just accepted me.

Hamilton

How does Jungian or himself consider a delusional or is there a terminology that is more suitable within it? I’m not really familiar.

Shauna

Yeah, I can’t really tell you where to find the reference for this in Jung’s collected works, which are massive. But from what I remember hearing in class, I did a course on Jungian psychology. Jung of course worked in psych wards and spoke a lot to people who had schizophrenia or experienced psychosis or delusions. And he really sat with the experience like you and I are trying to do. Someone said something about the moon, something to do with something on the moon and he’s like, well, that’s true. I think he just accepted what a person said and sat with that and didn’t try to contradict it or correct it. He just sat with a delusion and accepted it. And another thing, Karl Jaspers, I’ve got his General Psychopathology, his great text on this. I haven’t read it, but when he takes quotes from patients in psych wards, they just sound like really intelligent people explaining quite interesting experiences, he’s really quite respectful.

Whereas you can come across delusion literature now and I think academics without first person experience, there can be an attitude of stigma and thinking that people who report these experiences or have these experiences are somehow… I mean obviously it’s a whole spectrum of people, but there seems to be this idea that they’re of lower intelligence or something. There is this stigma attached rather than just a whole range of people having experiences.

James Hillman was a post Jungian and he’d talk about how you work with dreams. And with dreams, you don’t jump in and interpret the dream, you put the experience on the table like a physical object. You look at the experience and you walk around it, and you sit with it and look at it. And this is the same with delusions. We don’t jump in and interpret them or try to say they’re wrong, they’re not reflecting reality. We sit with the experience somehow. I haven’t made sense of my psychotic episodes, and they happened 30 years ago.

I think that’s Jung’s approach. That’s why he worked well with his patients or clients. He would sit with them; he wouldn’t be talking down to them or telling them they were wrong. And that’s probably the way a lot of contemporary doctors are going to be working with patients.

Hamilton

I think telling…

Shauna

Telling them they’re wrong. That is.

Hamilton

Yeah, I think I tend to view it through, I think it’s still relevant, but through a sort of dialectical approach that there is the psychotic person and they’re interacting with the system and some it’s trying to resolve the tension, the tension’s trying to be resolved. But hearing about Jung and my experiences and yours as well, it’s sort of clear that maybe, well, I’ll speak for myself rather than you, but resolving it, it almost seems unresolvable things I think and believe are not going to necessarily get a neat resolution of, and they are sort of a bit contradictory and unusual, but resolving them maybe shouldn’t be the primary goal. Just observing them in some way, probably a good starting point.

Shauna

Are they questions or experiences like the ones I’ve described to you that I’ve had about the nature of reality?

Hamilton

Things that question what’s possible, but not in terms of angels or elders or things caring, hearing voices, yes. But yeah, just generally thinking that in the, what’s the word, parlance of psychiatry, like persecutory beliefs. And the best resolution I have for it is that I’m misinterpreting what’s happening. Everyone’s wearing this certain thing and that means that this is going to happen, and I want to try and make sense of it, but it’s probably not necessarily there to be made sense of.

Shauna

The reading signs. You read signs in the environment whether they’re visual cues or sounds or whatever, and they’re symbolic of some, they have meaning. They hold meaning about some other narrative that…

Hamilton

Ideas or delusions of reference I think is what it gets called sometimes.

Shauna

Yeah. What I was going to say is in the psychedelic research, I haven’t been really looking into psychedelic research, but if you look at that and mystical experiences… And I got a book by David Yaden called The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, which works off William James’s book a hundred years ago, The Varieties of Religious Experience. But the idea of mystical experiences in a way evolving so that we have these experiences for example of unity or different types of mystical experiences, but they play a role in the foundation of our ethical systems. So, when you lose yourself in this oneness, you feel you are one with everyone for example. And so, we treat others as we treat ourselves and the idea of all this psychedelic research saying we are going to have these experiences that mimic in a way these mystical experiences and they integrate the self, and all the reasons people are arguing in this psychedelic research now for psychedelics to combat things like depression or addiction. And this is what I want to work into my research at the end of it if I can… if psychosis is somehow a different global state to these. And it’ll take empirical research to understand how it’s different to these other two experiences, but it seems to be sort of like a mystical experience, but something goes wrong because we are distressed often in psychosis and that’s why it’s a problem.

But these ideas of reference, I think in levels of consciousness, or not levels, but global states of consciousness, like mystical experiences, there’s this interconnectedness. And I think something akin to that is happening in psychosis where we’re connecting things up and we’re reading connections. There aren’t normal causal relationships that you’d find in science where science tells us how… well in philosophy there are different theories of causation… but in science the idea is you need a physical thing to cause a physical thing and there’s a relationship between them. But what we’re getting with these psychotic experiences is like Jung was saying, synchronicity, you’ve got something happening. And it’s not really causally related in a scientific way, but it seems to be related.

And I think psychosis and ideas of reference or a similar sort of thing where we’re seeing these patterns, we’re seeing this interconnectedness because we’re in a different global state. It is not a ‘level’ of reality because I discuss things in terms of ‘global states’ because it’s not just arousal that’s different. There are factors that mean the state of consciousness that we’re in is obviously different to the normal waking state. And part of that can be this interconnectedness and these patterns that we’re seeing that we’re not normally seeing. And I think those patterns are there in reality, I just think we’re normally blind to them, but something is going wrong in psychosis because we are getting disturbed by those patterns. And like you said, they can be persecutory, or they can be grandiose or whatever. But I see those patterns when I’m psychotic where everything’s linking up and there’s a big narrative and there are signs everywhere and those signs tell me how to behave or there’s a connection between everything, the signs and what happens.

And I think reality probably works that way and we are not normally tuned into it, but I think with psychosis we are tuning into it in our own way. We’ve got our own frequency that we’re picking up on and it can be really disturbing. But I think there probably are global states like these mystical ones that are akin to psychosis where that kind of interconnectedness of everything is really revealing the true nature of reality in a way that has been really important throughout humanity as the core of mystical spiritual… Religions have grown out of these first-person experiences of mystical experiences. That’s been the foundation for these systems that have developed.

Hamilton

And so does that mean, I’m just trying to extrapolate on what you’re saying. Does that mean then that you think that psychosis is an attempt to reveal a truer nature of reality, but it has gone awry?

Shauna

Yeah, I think so. And as I’ve said in an earlier interview, I don’t think we are mystics, we haven’t done all that work as a foundation. This has just happened because it is something in the brain that’s causing us to access reality in a certain way. But in our normal waking state, our brains are accessing reality in a certain way. And I think that’s a fairly limited way. I think that reality is probably broader than what we normally perceive. But yes, I think something does go wrong with psychosis, but somehow it’s linked into these other global states. It is exactly what you said. It’s these experiences of interconnectedness or whatever, but something’s gone wrong and that’s why you are getting the persecution. I’m getting my experience of it, which is slightly different.

Hamilton

And you’re saying that… it reminds me Douglas Roff, who’s a media and tech theorist, talks about everything being connected, but he says that the paranoid person’s mistake is that they’re connected back to you personally. You are part of this, you are central to this link. And I was wondering is that core to how it’s gone awry or…

Shauna

No, I’ll just make a real clarification there. When you say the paranoid person’s ‘mistake’… We don’t control these delusions. It’s not our fault. There seems to be something in the delusion literature that says, oh, we make up these beliefs to explain our experiences. These beliefs are given to us in a really unconscious sort of way. They’re presented to our consciousness as being more real than reality normally seems. And it is not our fault. It’s not because of some personality flaw. The paranoid person hasn’t done something wrong to have this experience. It’s just something that’s not really made clear. And there seems to be something that blames the person who has persecutory ideas or paranoid beliefs or any sort of delusion, this idea that there’s some fault to be found in that person. There is no fault. I mean it is like yes, there’s no fault in our characters, do you know what I mean? It’s like the brain may be doing something askew, but it’s not because we’re bad people or we’re somehow, I can’t think of the word.

Hamilton

It’s a conscious choice. We have the option, and we can go down one path or the other.

Shauna

Yeah, that’s not the case. These things are given to us, they’re given, and we try to make sense of them, and they seem real and it’s not a shortcoming in us. And that’s a really important point that maybe some theorists, some practitioners, a lot of people… This is probably a really big cause of stigma, the belief that we are somehow culpable and we’re…

Hamilton

People certainly get treated like they’re culpable or it’s their fault in some way, especially with what can feel like punishment and what’s happened to you. But if you think about when you were talking then I was thinking about you saying you don’t choose these beliefs, they happen unconsciously. Is that then a different experience to how regular beliefs occur or is that your explanation of how all beliefs occur?

Is it different to your belief that you have faith in this person to be your good friend or you believe that tomorrow’s going to be a good day, or you’ve got the sense that it’s all going to work out in some work drama that you’re going through?

Shauna

Yeah, I think beliefs are formed in all sorts of ways. A lot of beliefs we hold we are not aware of until they’re made explicit. A lot of beliefs we accept because we’ve just been raised to believe that. And it’s not until we question it. And that’s a whole idea of acquiring knowledge is updating our beliefs as we get more evidence. So, there are terms for beliefs that I can’t remember, it’s not explicit and implicit. Yes, something…

Hamilton

Like that. I can pardon if it’s something like that, I can look into it when I go back.

Shauna

But yeah, we form beliefs in all sorts of ways. I mean you and I have a lot of beliefs at the moment that we’re not holding in consciousness. They’re just kind of part of our web of beliefs and they change, and we acquire them in all sorts of ways. I think in terms of whether we consciously update a belief or whether we hold a belief implicitly, that was part of our upbringing.

Hamilton

Now the reason I ask is because if your work and theory is that psychosis itself is a distinct global state, and if delusion is one of many features of psychosis, then is it also true to say that delusion itself is a distinct kind of belief state?

Shauna

So, psychosis has symptoms. Psychosis is different to schizophrenia, which is purportedly an underlying illness that can lead to psychosis. Psychosis itself has symptoms and these include delusions, hallucinations, disordered thoughts or whatever. And then a definition of delusion is a belief that is perhaps irrational and that is held despite counter evidence that contradicts it. So, when you look at psychosis and you look at delusions, you say, do these beliefs cause these unusual experiences that happen in psychosis, like hallucinations or other conscious changes that occur? That would be a top-down explanation. Or do these conscious changes that happen in psychosis, like lights are brighter or sounds are louder, or you hear voices…  do those experiences cause the beliefs? And that would be a bottom-up explanation.

That would be the relationship between delusions and psychosis… psychosis has symptoms and delusion is a symptom. And then you say, well, what is the role of delusions in causing or being caused by these other factors in psychosis that make psychosis different to the normal waking state? So, we assume psychosis is different to the normal waking state. We outline why, and when I say a global state, I’ll say the contents are different. So, perceptions may be sharper, there may be more contents than the normal waking state, attention may be different, the sense of self may be different. I have a list of things that constitute how a global state can change that have to do with the structure of consciousness and the contents of consciousness and how accessible those contents are to other systems in the brain like memory and decision making. And then a belief is something different to that. So, you’re trying to find out what’s the relationship between beliefs or delusions and these aspects of consciousness that I’ve discussed, like their number, their quality, their structure, I don’t know the answer to that. And the delusion literature discusses bottom-up approaches and top-down approaches. That’s my third research question though. To see if we can see any connection. Maybe it’s causation, maybe it’s correlation or maybe there’s no relationship between those beliefs and how consciousness changes.

 I just went into my research then, I don’t know if that’s answering your question, but I’ll say that I try to answer that by my survey where I ask people how they experience these different aspects of consciousness compared to the normal waking state. And I also ask them about the sort of beliefs they had when they were psychotic. Did you have religious beliefs or whatever. And so, within each subject you try and see if there are certain sort of patterns like changes in consciousness compared to the normal waking state and do they correlate with the sort of beliefs that people have? And I guess I don’t know if I’ll get… there may be no pattern. I haven’t analyzed this data.

Hamilton

It’s a much more rigorous approach and framework than a lot of other researchers have. Given the question of delusion, whether they be psychiatric researchers or philosophers, they tend to use case studies as exemplars of why a thing is in fact a distinct state or why a thing is just so marginally different that it’s not and it’s not a distinct state. So, your work seems like it might help me out quite a bit.

Shauna

Thank you. Well yeah, we need to keep talking to each other about our work and I am happy to do that.

Hamilton

There are many people that I am speaking with that I would struggle to really describe. Whilst they have been diagnosed with various conditions and experienced various things in their day-to-day life, it seems as though they have a belief that is sort of functionally quite a lot like any other belief except that it’s just really unusual. Large portions of the rest of their life is very normal and benign. But a very small portion of it is just really bizarre. And I only have certain types of questions to ask about where this might’ve come from and what’s influenced it, but it doesn’t always seem distinct. But in contrast, other people, it seems to be a central point of a distinct experience that they live ongoing that is kind of noticeably and observably abnormal, I’m trying to think of a better word when I realize these words I use are important, but non-normative experience they have.

And the central piece of that is a belief system. So, I feel like I’m being exposed to more than one thing rather than saying it’s both. I feel like I’m being exposed to a number of different experiences, and I only was looking at it this morning, which is why it’s at the top of my head, but Foucault talked about the three ideas of abnormal. Abnormal, sick, and deviant. And he said that psychiatry collapses those three into the same thing, but in fact we’re all quite different. And so, when I look at the people that I’m speaking with, they’re all really different. And the more that I talk to them, the less clear things get about making any kinds of strong claims or inducting any kind of wisdom. Well, there’s plenty of wisdom, but anything that applies across the board, it all seems really different.

Shauna

I don’t know how you do this. You need to somehow draw up a taxonomy where you are classifying these different participants in a grid somehow, clustering them and saying why some are similar and why others are different. And understanding what you’re looking at to make those distinctions, what the points are you’re using to distinguish groups or cluster individuals together. And if those points are like how…I mean, they talk about monothematic delusions. So, someone will, they’re functioning normally in their life, but they have a monothematic delusion, like their husband looks like an imposter. And I think something like that, they’ll be able to say it’s more of a neurological defect that…

Hamilton

Especially with regards to the imposter belief or the belief that one is dead, this is all made more complicated. And I’d be curious what you think about this for what this means for a definition, but there are a couple of people that I’ve spoken to that they were labeled as delusional, but subsequently were then exonerated based on the fact that they were right as much as anyone can be right. They were able to demonstrate that the thing they believe was in fact the case. Because then for me it raises the question of, well, I guess then some portion of people that are delusional are right, and therefore that’s a part of being delusional or maybe more conventionally that just the label was misapplied. Does that make sense, that distinction?

Shauna

Yeah. And also, the distinction between the experiences of psychosis. I haven’t found it in the literature because I’m not across it enough. It’s in the philosophy of psychiatry literature, I think. But the difference between someone who’s experienced psychosis and someone who has had psychotic symptoms in that they have a delusional belief but haven’t really lost touch with reality, apart from having… you are talking to people who have been labeled as having a delusional belief but may not have been psychotic. So, psychosis is really a break with reality. But even with that break with reality, some people can still have their foot in the normal waking state, the real world, and there are strange things going on and they’ve got some kind of self-awareness that something is happening to them, whereas other people have a total break. And so, the reality, they’re totally immersed in this other reality, and there’s no question that’s not real. And then again, with a delusion, you can be immersed in the normal waking state and be functioning quite well, but with a belief that is considered delusional. I haven’t really read how this space can be carved up, but that is an interesting thing that if we had time, we could do or you could do with your work, you do it with your participants who have been labeled delusional.

But I think delusion and psychosis, this whole area could be carved up and made more explicit how these experiences are similar or different from each other. There’s a whole taxonomy that needs to be worked out here. And I don’t know whether that has been worked out.

Hamilton

Not to a standard where as someone looking critically, I’m being quite critical of it, but not to a standard where I think it’s done sufficiently because much of it is contradictory, much of it looks good and seems logically consistent, but is in contrast to other perspectives, no definitive, well, there are definitive attempts to define delusion, but they’re often in contrast to other definitive attempts to define delusion even broken up geographically. So, there’s a struggle to even define it. And that’s contrasted with my experience of talking to clinicians when they try to define it. Some say it’s more like a vibe.

Shauna

A vibe. That instills a lot of confidence, doesn’t it?

Hamilton

No, one person said it was a vibe, but another person said you can get a sense of someone from communicating with them whether they’re delusional and I actually resonate with that because the written definitions aren’t that there are caveats and instances where it’s not applicable or it’s different in different jurisdictions. But a general observation of it seems maybe better, I’m not sure.

Shauna

Yeah, we would hope practitioners are experienced and trained well enough that they can sit and observe someone in distress and understand what they need. But yes, I’m sure there’s a lot of times that system doesn’t work. Look, I’m not bashing the system, I don’t bash the system because I know that these disorders can be very distressing, and that people need treatment. But I don’t know what the answers are to all the shortcomings of the system in terms of having mental health practitioners who are trained in perhaps more humane therapies or…

Hamilton

Yeah, I mean I do bash it a bit, but I also try to recognize that it’s an impossible position to be in. You have inappropriate tools to respond to sort of impossible questions. Yeah, I think I might have mentioned I worked in a psych ward for two years and it’s pretty impossible. Probably return to doing so in the future, but hopefully with more insight into how to do it better…

Shauna

A lot of people really suffer and are not helped by their experience in the system.

Hamilton

Suffering is so real. That’s kind of the obvious thing, that there is immense suffering associated with this. So, I’d never want to romanticize it, but I also don’t want to, suffering feels like, well, it’s a very human state and I don’t want to, I’d like to minimize people’s suffering, but I don’t think trying to resolve it entirely is achievable. Like I was saying before about the ability to resolve someone’s delusion seems kind of impossible at times anyway.

Shauna

Yes, and it’s a case-by-case situation in terms of how a delusion is affecting someone’s life.

Hamilton

Yeah, I don’t know if this is preferable, but it’d be great if it had a consistent onset course and duration and clarity and when it would stop. And actually, that wouldn’t be good, that wouldn’t be preferable. But all other kinds of conditions like health conditions seem to have at least something similar or something that you can rely on.

Shauna

I don’t say that I’m typical at all. But these experiences were really the biggest experiences in my life, and they have determined the course of my life in terms of my goals and what I’ve strove to learn about or understand. I mean, my path has been determined by these experiences and it feels like a meaningful path, and I am very grateful for them despite the struggle I had for a very long time. Now, again, I don’t say that’s typical, but we can get a lot from these experiences. And yeah, it’s not everyone who has mental health challenges.

I mean, some people, a lot of people kill themselves, which is tragic. Some people don’t get beyond them (the challenges), but other people grow through them. And you help others working in psych wards or help others in other ways. So, I think there can be a lot of value and insight that comes out of these experiences despite the amount of suffering. So, I don’t think on the whole we can want to eliminate them. We’ve just got to find ways, not me personally, but we need to find ways of helping people when they’re in distressed states and finding ways to help people recover and flourish in their lives.

Hamilton

Agreed. Yeah, I’m pretty bitter, but I feel like I can see things better than I otherwise could. Previously. My view, how I see the world is improved as a result. I’m able to see it more clearly or observe it in a way that I wasn’t able to previously, which I don’t really know how to articulate aside from that. More of a felt sense.

Shauna

It’s an interesting thing that you could, doing research, you could ask participants. But participants are going to self-select. The people you get to interview have come through a lot of stuff.  But seeing how many people really value their experience.

Hamilton

Yeah, actually that’s one of the themes that’s emerging, ranging from it was very meaningful to, it was fun actually, and good, or it is still, which was an unexpected kind of outcome, which I don’t really relate to, but I do relate to seeing that there’s some kind of, it not all, it’s not some pathetic experience where I’m pitiable forever. I get stuff out of it too. You’ve been very helpful for this project, and I know you spent a lot of time working on things in addition to the conversations we’ve been having. So, I’ll send you some reimbursement later on and I’ll send you a transcript of today because it’s gone a bit over, but we’ll close.