HW: Various

[Doug Pearson]

On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 20:32:02 -0400, Nick Medford <nickmedford at HOTMAIL.COM>
wrote:

>On Fri, 2 Jul 2004 19:18:09 -0400, Doug Pearson <jasret at MINDSPRING.COM>
>wrote:
>
>In the 60s there was a vogue for some psychiatrists to take LSD, allegedly
>so that they could get better insights into the experiences of their
>psychotic patients, although this may just have been a handy "acceptable"
>reason to put before more conservative colleagues who would otherwise have
>judged their curiosity and experimentation "unacceptable". (Leary, of
>course, made no bones about *his* reasons for taking it, but that's another
>story).

It IS frustrating that the cultural baggage associated with these drugs
prevents legitimate research/treatment with them (with ecstasy being of
unquestionable value in counseling/negotiation situations, and LSD having
potential therapeutic value for addiction treatment & mental well-being of
terminal disease patients).

>However one has to be cautious about overstating the similarities between
>LSD and schizophrenia...

Thanks for the list of some pretty significant differences :^) ...

>... schizophrenia almost always
>involves auditory hallucinations ("hearing voices"), whereas the perceptual
>distortions induced by LSD are often illusions rather than true
>hallucinations* ...
>*illusion= distorted perception of something that _is_ actually there e.g.
>seeing a table as a four-legged animal. hallucination= percept in the
>_absence_ of a stimulus.

Same with audio?  Hearing voices in your head = hallucination (amphetamine
psychosis/schizophrenia), normal sounds sounding distorted or echoed =
illusion (LSD)?

>>>Amphetamines, on the other hand, are well-known for producing a psychosis
>>>that is pretty much indistinguishable from schizophrenia.
>>
>>'A Scanner Darkly', by (notorious speedfreak) Philip K. Dick provides an
>>incredibly disturbing fictionalized version of this phenomenon ...
>
>Didn't he also claim to have been contacted by extraterrestrial
>intelligences... weren't the "Valis" books based on these experiences? I
>haven't read any of his later work but everything I've heard about it does
>indeed suggest that it bears all the hallmarks of speed psychosis.

Yes on both accounts.  The Valis books are seriously out there, involving
the aforementioned psychoses, along with revolutionary alien intelligences,
some sort of gnostic christian time travel (with Nixon's Amerika being the
Roman Empire), and uncomfortably-autobiographical melodrama (like most
speed freaks, he had horrible relations with other people and was difficult
to get along with).  The concepts expressed in even his earlier books
(about the nature of reality vs. perception, individual identity, etc., all
with massive paranoia) might seem to be evidence of a "pre-" or "proto-"
schizophrenic state?

>Anyway Doug I'm glad you popped up because I recently came across this
>rather fine site:
>
>http://www.cameraobscura.com.au

Yes, great psychedelic music label.

>and somewhere in there is an MP3 from one of your bands Primordial
>Undermind, though as far as I can make out you didn't play on that
>particular track.. unless it was under a pseudonym? Anyway it's interesting
>stuff, how do I get to hear more?

No, that track's from the third PU album on the label (I'm only on the
second, 'Universe I've Got'), although their latest is on Emperor Jones
(the label run by King Koffee of the Butthole Sutfers, which put out a
couple ST37 albums).  Coincidentally/incestuously, I've been playing with
Tom Carter (Charalambides, ex-Mike Gunn), the second guitarist on that MP3,
recently.  I think that 'Universe' is still in print, or I might still have
extra copies.  Drop me a line offlist ...

    -Doug
     jasret at mindspring.com