See, the thing is, I’m a communalist who failed at community.

Okay, okay, at least 50% of me now recognizes that this is not entirely true. But on an emotional level, it’s the “truth” that has been resonating in my mind and body for the past two years.

It’s very awkward as a self-identified communalist to have failed at community. Very “who am I now?”

I left my former community abruptly in the midst of a manic and psychotic episode. In truth, I had been recently considering whether a different communal environment might be more suited to my particular needs, but I didn’t intend to leave when I did or the way I did. I felt forced to leave - not directly by the community members, but because of my own high support needs while in an altered state. While communal living did wonders to stave off depression, it contained no magical panacea to prevent mania or psychosis or to manage them.

I still feel an immense amount of shame for the way I left. Disregulated, delusional, paranoid, traumatized after an involuntary hospitalization, I had taken off in the middle of the night on a road trip where I was partially in search of some kind of peer respite or psychiatric rehab facility to ride out my episode that actually felt safe - the kind that doesn’t exist in Pittsburgh - and partially because of a desperate need to put many miles in between myself and anyone who could possibly harm or coerce or constrain me. This sudden road trip led to my former housemates and parents needing to pack up my things from the collective house on my behalf. This particular thing haunts me. Why couldn’t I have just literally and figuratively gotten my shit together just enough to do this one thing? Everything would be different now if I had.

My former housemates watched silently through the window of social media as I liveblogged, raged, rambled, and overshared my way across the country and gradually wound down from psychosis. Their silence never broke. Not when I was hospitalized. Not after I returned home. Not after the episode ended and my polarity flipped into the familiar place I had been fighting so hard to avoid: severe depression.

One year of community. It was good while it lasted. And then it was over. I was back at my parents’ house because I needed direct support with daily living. The year in community dissipated like it never happened at all.

The piercing pain of judgment and shame doesn’t always come through words. Sometimes it comes through a silence louder and sharper than the harshest words could ever be. It comes through the weeks and months of waiting for a text, a call, a letter. A “we miss you, hope you’re okay.” An invitation to the weekly potluck or the annual fall and Christmas parties. I was acutely aware that I could be the one to send those texts, make a call, write that letter. But I was too ashamed and afraid and traumatized to utter a single word to anyone.

Part of me knows that not everyone there wanted to cut me out in the way they did. I imagine that some probably thought that I would reach out again when I was ready. When I never did, they probably assumed I didn’t want to.

But I did want to. I wanted to so, so much. I could not.

Not like, “the idea of doing so was difficult,” but “I literally was not capable.”

In the end, I have not spoken to my former housemates for two years.

In three years, I had lost my community twice due to mental illness.

I was done.

I believe that post-mania bipolar depression is partly neurobiological. It makes sense to me that months of manic intensity would have an impact on the brain - drain the dopamine reserves dry, as it were. And mania exhausts the body, certainly. But I believe that the length of post-manic/psychotic depressive episodes is the direct result of a lack of infrastructural and social support.

The mental health industrial complex doesn’t offer much for bipolar people beyond a regulation of mania. Most doctors don’t care about alleviating bipolar depression nearly as much as they care about stamping out and preventing manic episodes. There are no specific post-mania/psychosis support groups or IOPs. Egregiously, there is effectively no support for cognitive rehabilitation after these manic and psychotic episodes despite post-mania cognitive issues being a nearly universal problem. There are no accessible spaces in which to process and make meaning of the wildly intense and complex experiences we have in psychosis.

Despite the many, many studies emphasizing the importance of social support in long-term recovery and quality of life for people who experience mania and psychosis, barely any infrastructure for this exists.

In the moment we need support the most, we get lithium.

Why do you think one in five bipolar people end up killing ourselves?

It’s not some trick of biology. No one knows what to “do” with us. Not the doctors. Not our friends. We are left completely on our own to try to navigate our way out of the darkness.

When I clawed my way out of the darkness this time, I wasn’t actually trying to recover from depression.

Actually, I had given up on the idea that recovery was possible.

Clawing my way out of the darkness began like this:

Giving up. Letting myself fall to the bottom of the well. Accepting I would be alone forever. Knowing the rest of my life would look this way. Quitting my job. Applying for disability income. Losing my house. Not caring. Staying in bed. Relying on my parents for everything, like a child.

I have been posting a series of videos on Instagram about the unconventional and very tiny incremental changes that allowed me to crawl from the bottom of the well toward something that looks like recovery. The most important aspect is that I was never trying to “recover.” I wasn’t trying to brute-force myself into new habits or doing any of the then-inaccessible things you are “supposed to do” to help with depression. Instead, I was only ever trying to make my day-to-day life more tolerable. Eventually, after a long time, I built momentum. Once I regained the ability to do certain things that previously seemed impossible (grand exploits like “going to the park and taking a walk”), the possibilities of what I was capable of seemed to multiply very quickly. The horizon opened up and I allowed myself to dream about the future.

Toward the beginning of this depressive episode, I’d watched a Youtube video from psychologist Dr. Scott Eilers with some thoughts about what to do when your depression makes you feel completely hopeless about the future. In his own severe depression, he was miserable and hated his life. He wanted a different life. He thought about the types of life that actually seemed obtainable. Those lives didn’t seem worth living. And then he observed others with seemingly amazing lives - lives that he wished he could be living - but those lives were impossibly out of reach.

So he started considering alternative lifestyles. He said to himself: okay, there is no preexisting model or path to a lifestyle that is both obtainable and tolerable for me. But maybe, just maybe, I can pull in a bunch of different elements from a bunch of places and hash together a weird unconventional life that doesn’t make me miserable.

This stuck with me, even as it still felt impossible for much of my depressive episode. But once I started recovering a little bit, this idea came back. I considered the resources I actually had, and an idea began to form.

I do not have a vehicle. It would be useful to have one.

I have enough money to buy a used vehicle.

What if that vehicle was a van?

I recovered from depression this time without any community beyond my immediate family (and thank God for them.) I ultimately recovered by building a camper van as a path to a life that wouldn’t make me miserable.

Building the van helped improve my mood and general functioning in myriad ways. It brought me back into my body after many months of dissociation and depersonalization. It deeply engaged my reward and motivation centers. It began restoring my confidence, my sense of autonomy, my belief in my own ability to problem-solve.

It gave me hope about the future.

It was a (literal) vehicle to a life in which I envisioned I would not be miserable. Crucially, a life that did not require a community to be worth living at a time when community felt entirely inaccessible.

I wrestled with this for a long time during the process of building my van and beginning to take trips. For a large part of me, it felt (and sometimes still does feel) like a betrayal of my values. I am a communalist. What I was doing was a hyper-individualist thing. A car-centric-culture thing (ew). I should be working my way back toward community-building, communal living, direct activism. Especially in this political moment. The world is falling apart and you’re traipsing around in the woods in your little van making coffee in your little French press, how utterly privileged.

Part of how I “justified” myself was rationalizing that I was actually trying to do all of these things through van life. I was using what was available and accessible to me as a way to rejoin the world in a basic way after years of intense depression, disconnection, isolation. Vanlifing around is closer to being in community than hiding in my room at my parents’ house. I didn’t quite believe myself about all of this, but I tried.

The truly wild thing is that it was true - it worked.

I’ve only taken one longer trip so far, but a few weeks in, something snapped into place. I was taking care of myself without help. I was calm and regulated, spending all my time in the natural world, making simple meals, dragging my solar panels around for power. I was taking long walks everyday, getting exercise. I started being able to feel again. A dog on the beach reminded me of my dog who passed away recently. I cried. I took a ferry to Galveston, Texas. I felt awake. I felt actual happiness for the first time in my recovery. It was a revelation.

With the space to do so, I was also developing self-compassion in a way I was not able to do at home in the depths of depression. Some recognition of the context that created my depression.

A bit of understanding that abandonment is not my fault.

Therapist N. Oumou Sylla recently posted an Instagram reel with a very simple message:

This hit me like a brick.

This idea alone brought so much together. It dissolved so much of my self-judgment about “choosing” to recover in solitude rather than forcing myself back into community when I’ve been multiply-traumatized by communities I thought were safe.

Some truths are:

• Isolation was never actually a choice for me. Isolation has been forced upon me by a lack of proper community support on one end and my own PTSD on the other, which prevented me from reaching out to anyone.

• I have been doing the best I can with what has been available to me.

• There is nothing wrong with choosing to recover alone when finding a safe community to recover in feels impossible.

I didn’t “fail at community.”

In many ways, my communities failed me.

I deserve not just community, but safe community.

The sad reality is that not all communities are safe for everyone.

The sad reality is that for many of us, it’s hard to find a safe community.

Honestly, I felt like I constantly had to mask my neurodivergence to fit in at the intentional community where I lived. That I was constantly being judged for ways I was struggling and not “doing enough” for the house.

Once, a few months into living there, I was called out in a house meeting for saying I was struggling to do one of my house chores. I was still adjusting to being in the house, assessing how often it was necessary to do this chore, and exhausted from working full time. I was actually the ONLY person in the house working full time. The person “calling me out” worked a fully-flexible part-time job. They cried and lamented that “the people with the highest income in the house (me, working full-time because I had massive amounts of debt) are doing the least amount of work.” There was no grace around lower energy levels, executive dysfunction, adjusting to a new lifestyle. My cognitive impairment, mental health issues, and neurodivergent limitations were framed as personal failings.

I heard the way some of my housemates talked about others with mental health issues and neurodivergence. One of the house founders questioned a former housemate’s ADHD diagnosis, writing it off to “being on their phone too much.” In regards to mental health issues and existing in that house, they once said “this isn’t a rehab.”

I could have been more open about the reasons I was struggling - but it didn’t feel safe to be. It seemed likely that the end result would be the same and I would just be framed as “making excuses.”

In part, I bolted the way I did in the altered state because I knew I wouldn’t get the support I needed there in mania and psychosis, and it would cause a bigger rupture and more trauma to stay and try to get that support from my housemates than it would if I ran.

The only people who were truly welcome in that community were the fully-functional, the high-achievers, the non-struggling. People who had it together. And though I was improving over time, that wasn’t me. I was trying my best. And it did help me to be there in so many ways, but I was also sacrificing pieces of myself to exist in that environment.

The truth is, my former community was deeply ableist.

Not every individual there - but some individuals, certainly, and the entire place structurally. While I was there, the house created a system for - no joke - “performance reviews” for each community member. The reviews were directly modeled after the performance reviews that a housemate used in their workplace. For me - struggling with a variety of invisible issues - this felt like a humiliation ritual. This supposedly anti-capitalist intentional community was utilizing a practice lifted directly from a capitalist enterprise to rate people at how “good” they were at existing in their own home.

The thing is - I never did anything egregiously bad or harmful while living there. I wasn’t the kind of terrible roommate you hear horror stories about. I didn’t cause conflict or fight with anyone. I adjusted to my chore routine. I kept shared spaces clean. I never missed my assigned day to cook for my housemates. I chatted at dinner. I helped with and attended the weekly potluck. I missed one monthly workday and one-or-two unofficial workdays in that whole year. I forgot things sometimes. I tried to be open to feedback. I tried to “improve my performance.” I was never doing “enough.” It was never clear what “enough” was. As a neurodivergent person, this was crazy-making.

I could go on, but I think my point is clear:

I deserve better than the way I was treated by that community.

I deserve better than the way that my communities have abandoned me after psychiatric crisis.

Once I accepted my status as a solitary communalist and started living a life that didn’t make me miserable, something interesting happened: finding community actually started to feel like a possibility again.

It’s been made possible through the recovery of my basic functioning via living a simple life in my van, shaking up the daily routine that kept me feeling stuck, having enough space from my normal life to rethink things and develop some self-compassion, being publicly vulnerable and claiming my truth by sharing writing like this.

It’s been little things like conversations with gas station cashiers on the road and cool older vanlife women striking up conversations in campgrounds and Walmart parking lots. It’s been bigger things like finally feeling brave enough to respond to some messages I was terrified to check, sending voice notes back and forth with an old friend, actually hanging out with a human being one-on-one for the first time in two years (hi, if you’re reading this!)

As I said at the beginning: I am still a communalist. I still believe in the power of community and communal living, especially for mental health. But I also care about myself. I believe that being in an unsafe community can be worse than having no community at all. I plan to move forward by crafting my next community more carefully rather than pigeonholing myself into an unsafe community because I am desperate not to be alone.

It’s possible to recover alone.

Isolation is morally neutral.

It’s okay to be a solitary communalist.

It is February 2024 and I know I am entering mania. Two years have passed since my first manic episode and I recognize the signs.

In the time since that episode, I’ve consumed a lot of research and theory and anecdotes about altered states. At this moment, I am particularly interested in the framing of the altered state as a spiritual awakening, in how non-western cultures interpret experiences of psychosis, and in evolutionary theories about the purpose of these states—the idea that they might not simply be random malfunction, but the brain actively trying to accomplish a purpose.

It’s a deeply compelling narrative. There is a constant feeling in the altered state that you are just on the verge of discovering something important. During my first episode, when I was involuntarily hospitalized, it felt like a process had been halted before it could reach its natural conclusion. This time, I’m determined to figure out what my brain is trying to tell me. I will utilize medication so that I don’t spiral out of control, but I won’t just stamp the mania out completely this time. I refuse.

From there, I set out on an experimental journey to understand my altered states better, and I documented everything.

…And then promptly fell into (another) episode of severe depression once the altered state ended, convinced that I had, once again, been misled by my own mind.

I stayed convinced, and depressed, for a year. Until my curiosity led me backwards in time to re-examine my experiences. In the process of examining them by writing about them, some vestigial frameworks that had begun to take shape toward the end of the altered state began to come back into focus. The more I wrote, the clearer they became, until eventually, they evolved into this essay.

Brain Anarchist offers a rough framework for understanding mania and psychosis using existing models from computational neuroscience and concepts from psychedelic therapy, weaving them together through my lived experience. In this essay, I argue that episodes of mania and psychosis can be understood using the same explanatory mechanism proposed to underlie the function of psychedelics in the brain: the REBUS Model. Guided by the REBUS Model, I was able to break down my own cognitive processes in mania and psychosis and explain how my beliefs and behaviors unfolded throughout the episode. I explore what this perspective means for how we talk about and treat manic and psychotic altered states, including the idea that principles from psychedelic therapy could be adapted to help guide these experiences toward healing rather than trauma.

I hope reading this helps you to understand manic and psychotic altered states better. And if you’ve experienced these altered states yourself, I hope some of these concepts give you a new way to make sense of what happened—of why you believed, said, and did all those things you did.

Psychosis is Psychedelic

From the outset of the episode, I am consciously seeking to understand and interpret what is happening to me as it happens. Intellectualizing. I notice right away that there are a lot of similarities between psychosis and the experience of using psychedelic drugs. Later, I learn I’m far from the first to notice this; some of the earliest research on drugs like LSD actually used them as a temporary model of psychosis.

While researching these similarities after the episode ended, I discover a framework which will eventually allow me to put what happened during the altered state into words: the Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics (REBUS) Model. Developed by two computational neuroscientists, this model not only provides a framework and language that allows me to understand my experience better, it explicitly speculates that the authors’ proposed mechanism for the therapeutic function of psychedelics (relaxed priors and beliefs, which I’ll go into later) is likely also the mechanism underlying psychotic experiences.

As I continued to research, I couldn’t help but notice the striking disparity in the way these two different kinds of altered state are discussed, addressed, and researched in scientific literature. I am fascinated by the divergent ways the literature describes the same phenomenological experience depending on whether it is caused by psychosis or psychedelics.

Psychosis is framed pathologically. It is something to be curtailed, stamped out. So psychosis has symptoms—“aberrant salience,” “disorganized thinking and speech,” “inappropriate displays of emotion.”

Psychedelic experiences, on the other hand, are of deep scientific interest because of their recognized therapeutic potential. They are framed as something interesting to be explored, something that may teach us more about the brain. Psychedelics have effects—“enhanced sensory experiences,” “altered thought processes,” “intense emotion.”

And yet, we know that experiences of psychosis are widely variable and can be euphoric, mystical, or spiritual.

We also know that some psychedelic experiences are traumatic and terrifying—the classic “bad trip.”

And here we have the REBUS Model, on the cutting edge of computational neuroscience, speculating that we are likely talking about the same underlying processes in the brain on psychedelics and in psychosis.

If that is the case, it stands to reason that it is possible for experiences of psychosis to be healing, and that their therapeutic potential should be considered.

Conversely, the medical mainstream should be considering the implications of what research into psychedelics tells us about how to avoid negative and harmful experiences in altered states.

Psychedelic Altered State Basics & Dichotomies

While we don’t yet understand the exact mechanisms by which psychedelics work to heal trauma or provide insight, the efficacy of psychedelic therapy hinges on a few underlying premises about psychedelic altered states.

1. First, these altered states of mind allow us to access new perspectives—on the self, on previously existing struggles, on past traumas, and so on.

2. Second, the altered state is highly vulnerable. Set and setting are crucial. Going into the experience with the right intention, in a comfortable environment, and perhaps most importantly, with an experienced guide, are all necessary to ensure a positive experience, rather than an overwhelming and distressing “bad trip.”

3. Third, in order for psychedelic therapy to offer the most effective long-term healing, one must go through a process of integrating the insights of the psychedelic state into “real life.” A critical role of the psychedelic therapist is to help with this through talk therapy after the psychedelic session.

Assume for a moment that we know for certain that altered states on psychedelics and in psychosis are functionally the same. Now consider the radical difference in the way the medical mainstream responds to an altered state depending on the cause of that altered state.

Psychedelic Therapy

“In the quiet, dimly lit room, a patient sits comfortably, surrounded by soft music and gentle voices guiding them through a journey of self-discovery. This isn’t a scene from a science fiction novel but a groundbreaking approach to mental health treatment known as psychedelic-assisted therapy. As research continues to unveil the significant effects these substances can have on the human mind, therapists and patients alike are discovering the transformative potential of psychedelics to heal trauma, alleviate depression, and provide profound personal insights... The idea is that with the inclusion of psychedelics, the person will have an altered state of consciousness and be open to more profound emotional healing and personal growth.”

—Psychedelic Therapy: Transforming Mental Health Care, McLean Hospital, 2025

Psychosis Treatment

“Inside the ER I was strapped to a gurney and shot with three large vials of Ativan in the thigh. At first I blacked out and could see nothing, but oddly spoke in binary code, ‘One, zero, negative one, zero, one…’ My mind was trying to balance itself and stop the trauma from unfolding. When my awareness of my environment focused I was both calm and wired from the drugs. It enabled me to talk when the ob-gyn came to interview me. I spoke in circles of past guilt, compounded trauma and worries, revealing accounts of self harm from my early twenties, unfounded fears for the lives of myself and my family and the current state of the world. This unraveling of emotion, referencing past events from before I had my children, was enough to make me vulnerable to meet their qualifications of an unfit mother in need of extended inpatient care. I was completely misrepresented on my medical record as ‘abusive’ and hospital staff even falsely concluded from the temporary meltdown that I had an obsession with numbers.”

—”Abduction” by Ivy Chaya Shiffler, Mad in America, 2017

Imagine for a moment that Ivy was not a person experiencing psychosis, but a person seeking psychedelic therapy. If this were the case, she would be experiencing egregious medical malpractice.

Her example is stunning to me. What emerges in her altered state is precisely the type of content that would be desirable in a psychedelic therapy setting—guilt, trauma, worries, difficult past experiences. A psychedelic therapist would find ways to offer gentle guidance as these thoughts and experiences emerge and help her to avoid the “going in circles” she describes. Instead, Ivy is misunderstood, ignored, and belittled. Her brain is clearly trying to process deep feelings. Instead of helping her to process those feelings, or even just giving her a safe space to exist while they play out, her vulnerability is actively used against her.

In mainstream medical environments, people in psychotic altered states are routinely being forced to have a bad trip.

It’s fairly common to have one psychedelic bad trip and never touch psychedelics again—naturally, after one bad experience, you may associate the psychedelic altered state with feelings of terror and distress. People who are prone to psychotic altered states often don’t have a choice about whether they have psychotic episodes. And after a single traumatic experience in psychosis, we may be similarly primed to associate the highly vulnerable psychotic altered state with the fear, shame, and violation of the bad trip. This has a ripple effect on the hallucinations and delusions that emerge as episodes progress. Later, I’ll break down examples from my own experience to illustrate how my frame of mind and my feeling of safety in the altered state changed the content of my delusions.

On the flip side, we have the possibility for manic and psychotic altered states to be therapeutic, or at the very least, less traumatic. Let’s go back to the REBUS Model and talk about what it is and why it’s important.

Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics

“Via their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical activity—psychedelics work to relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs thereby liberating bottom-up information flow.”

—REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019)

Don’t panic, I’m going to break down what this means. To do that, I have to get a little heavy with theory for a bit. Stick with me!

Priors and Beliefs

“Prior” is a term that comes from statistics. In this context, it basically means “something your brain knows about how the universe works.” For example,

The “precision” of a prior refers to your brain’s confidence that the prior is true, represented as a percentage. “Prior” is used somewhat interchangeably with “belief” in the context of the REBUS Model.

“High-level priors and beliefs” are the things your brain is MOST certain about, beliefs or presuppositions where you might say “I have 99.9% confidence that this is true.”

The field of computational neuroscience treats the brain as a giant prediction machine. It assumes that basically, the brain is trying to make sense of the world by developing predictive models of how everything works. It uses those models to guess how things will happen in the future. The typical way that the brain processes information is hierarchical—high-level priors and beliefs are at the “top,” and they are used to make predictions about the nature of everything coming “from the bottom”—raw data from our senses, as well as “mid-level” data like passing thoughts and daydreams.

If there’s a mismatch between the brain’s model of how something works, and something that the brain observes (a prediction error), the brain will update its model to be more accurate.

Back to REBUS

Research into psychedelic therapy is interested in understanding how and why psychedelics are therapeutic. What is it about them that gives insight and allows people to reframe their experiences?

The REBUS Model proposes that psychedelics work because they relax the precision of—your confidence in—your high-level priors and beliefs.

Take those beliefs you normally have 99.9% confidence in. You consume psychedelics. Now you have 95% or 85% confidence in those beliefs. This allows you enough wiggle room to consider alternative beliefs and update beliefs that are harmful or detrimental. This is especially desirable because overly-precise (confident) high-level negative beliefs about the self are at the core of many mental health issues. Beliefs like “I am a bad person,” “I am socially awkward,” or “I am inherently unloveable.” These are normally very rigid thoughts, difficult to change or update.

Friston and Carhart-Harris refer to this psychedelic brain state as the “anarchic brain,” because when the precision of high-level priors and beliefs is reduced, the brain’s normal top-down processing and prediction hierarchy breaks down. The old high-level priors are no longer at the “top”—given the most weight, the most credence, when making predictions. Now they’re given the same degree of “importance” in the brain as the “lower-level” information coming in from our senses and our passing thoughts.

This is why the psychedelic altered state can be an overwhelming experience on a sensory level. A normal, non-psychedelic brain uses its priors to filter out what information is important and what isn’t. Without that filter, raw data from our senses and passing thoughts takes up a lot more “space” in the conscious mind. On psychedelics, sensory input becomes more gripping—things become more colorful, patterns more fascinating, music sounds completely different. You can get “lost” in the senses very easily because in the anarchic brain, sensory data is “bigger”—it’s louder, more captivating, more enthralling.

Brain Anarchy & The Great Unknown

The concept of the “anarchic brain” appeals to me in part because I am a political anarchist. A common misconception is that “anarchy” means “chaos.” What it really means is no hierarchies, no rulers. Anarchist societies and groups don’t exist in perpetual chaos. If you’ve ever spent time in real-world anarchist spaces, you know that just like non-anarchists, anarchists create systems to make decisions and get things done. They simply use alternative systems that don’t require a higher-up authority figure to make decisions, such as the consensus model or Sociocracy.

Similarly, the psychotic brain is assumed to be a place of pure chaos. Our thoughts, delusions, and behaviors are considered to be unstructured, disorganized, random.

Those assumptions come from the fact that normally, you only see what’s happening on the “outside” of psychosis. Nearly all of the research that attempts to understand what is “going on” in psychosis is based on observation—not lived experience, not first-person accounts. This means you are only ever seeing the tip of the iceberg of psychotic cognition.

For that reason, I want to use my lived experience, my “data,” to shed light on the cognitive processes that occur during mania and psychosis and dive deeper into these processes. Certain parts of my “data” seem to match 1:1 with the REBUS Model. For other parts, I branch into more speculative territory—the place where all science begins.

My experience is that there is much more structure and logic underlying psychosis than most of the literature and research assumes. Understanding more about that structure could be critical in creating more healing experiences and fewer traumatic experiences for people who experience mania and psychosis.

“The underlying brain states of early psychosis... share similarities with those underlying the psychedelic state. We speculate that reduced precision weighting on high-level priors may underlie these commonalities.”

In this essay (and in general) I take the view that, indeed, we’re talking about the exact same core process happening on psychedelics and during psychotic episodes. This perspective helped me understand and reframe nearly every aspect of my experiences in mania and psychosis. The REBUS Model gave me the language to describe the way that every thought-fixation, every delusion, every unusual interpretation-of-events that my brain invented and latched onto in the altered state emerged through a gradual loosening of old beliefs and an increased openness to new ones.

Suddenly, I understood why the first thing I find in my own altered states is always liberation.

The high-level core beliefs that normally shape my self-concept are constructed from shame. Every beam, every wall, every corner of the mental structure I live inside is made with shame as its raw material. When everything collapsed after my first manic episode in 2022, shame was all I had left to build with. As a result, I spend most of my time, most of my days, trying to minimize myself as much as possible. Taking up space in any capacity, even simply being perceived by others, involves an exhausting battle with these rigid beliefs.

Ironically, when mania and psychosis return and relax my confidence in these beliefs, it’s like I can suddenly see myself clearly for the first time in years. Looking back using REBUS as a lens, it was never “just” manic self-confidence or grandiosity. It wasn’t “just” feeling good because of a dopamine surplus. It was the sudden ability to consider new possibilities—possibilities that my ordinary, shame-built framework would never allow—made accessible by the altered state.

REBUS & Manic Kindling

My core self-concept when I’m not manic could be summed this way:

Note—it’s not the way that I want to live. It’s the way I feel I have to live to avoid pain.

So what happens when my priors are relaxed and my confidence in that assertion goes from 99.9% certainty to, say, 90%?

What happens is that I consider other possibilities that are more in alignment with the way I want to be. I gravitate toward possibilities that seem more appealing.

And I start experimenting.

1. I start going more places. Walking, exploring. Nothing bad happens. (80%)

2. I start speaking to more people, and more often. Looking them in the eyes. Smiling more. Nothing bad happens. (70%)

3. I write and share more, less afraid to be creative. Nothing bad happens. (50%)

4. In fact, I’m having a ton of fun. (30%)

5. Everything seems better this way. (10%)

6. It feels like a superior way of existing compared to the old premise. (0%)

In this way, I form and test a new self-concept:

This is an example of how the processes described in the REBUS Model may be implicated in manic kindling over the course of an episode. Rarely does a bipolar person wake up with immediate grandiose plans to rule the world. There is, instead, a gradual process in which possibilities are expanded over weeks and months under the influence of relaxed priors.

“Mania” vs. “Psychosis”

I want to add a quick note here about my use of these terms, which is somewhat interchangeable. Based on my lived experience, I take the perspective that all hypomanic and manic episodes involve relaxed priors on a spectrum. In other words, rather than distinguishing between “mania with psychosis” and “mania without psychosis,” I believe that all mania involves some degree of “psychotic thinking”—which is really just relaxed priors. It’s like a microdose of shrooms vs. a heroic dose. If priors are “somewhat” or “a little” relaxed, as in some cases of hypomania, they will manifest more like “I think I can accomplish more projects and tasks than usual” than “I think I could be the next Messiah.”

Of course, symptoms can escalate and priors may become more relaxed over the course of an episode. Which brings us to one of the most salient differences between the psychedelic experience and manic/psychotic altered states: the effects of psychedelics last for hours, while mania and psychosis endure for an indeterminate amount of time. In 2024, my altered state lasts for four months. So of course, there’s much more to the story.

The Impact of Long-Term Relaxed Priors in Psychosis

In the psychotic altered state, having relaxed priors impacts me on a few different levels.

Perception

In the “anarchic brain,” old high-level priors take up less space, while information coming in from my senses and passing thoughts takes up more space. This means that having relaxed priors changes what I notice in my environment. I also give more credence to quick passing thoughts than I normally would—they become “sticky.”

Attention

The brain is constantly in the process of determining what information is important and what isn’t. It flags important information in our bodies, our nervous systems. We don’t just “think” something is important—we know when something is important because we feel it.

Imagine you’ve landed at the airport and you’re waiting to be picked up. In the crowd, your eyes are drawn to someone holding a big sign with your name on it. You immediately feel a mental jolt—you pay attention.

This moment happens quickly. Your high-level priors—expectations about what’s relevant to you—are constantly predicting what incoming sensory data might matter. Before you even have a conscious thought about the sign, your brain has:

1. Taken in the vague shape of your name on the sign in your peripheral vision.

2. Made a prediction that the shape is your name.

3. Given you a mental jolt (a salience response) that tells you to pay attention.

That’s how fast these processes play out.

Now imagine that your brain and body are alerting your attention in a manner that feels exactly as clear and directed as the above example, but the alerts come from a variety of unusual stimuli and observations compared to normal. A billboard on the highway, a song on the radio, a work of graffiti that catches your eye. You encounter them, and—jolt!

You don’t actually know why it’s for you, or important to you. Your brain and nervous system are simply telling you that it is.

In psychosis, this is called aberrant salience.

Beliefs

In mania and psychosis, having relaxed priors means I become less certain of my high-level beliefs concerning the likelihood of the existence of things like an afterlife, ghosts, reincarnation, God, and fate. This means I am much more open to alternative spiritual and mystical beliefs.

How Delusions Take Shape

The process of forming and acting on delusions while in an altered state is a cognitive process, shaped by the interplay between how relaxed priors change my...

1. Perception – unusual sensory experiences become more prominent because sensory data is taking up “more space” in my conscious awareness.

2. Attention – aberrant salience flags unexpected stimuli as meaningful, drawing my focus toward them.

3. Interpretation – with high-level priors relaxed, I become more open to alternative or unusual explanations as to why these things might be important.

I spent about 75% of my time in the altered state riding the line between hypomania and full-blown mania with psychosis. In this sliver of space, I’m quite good at doing what some experts call double-bookkeeping. This means I am, to varying degrees, simultaneously aware of my unusual and delusional thoughts and of more rational explanations for those thoughts. Hovering in this liminal space is how I’m able to recall much of my cognitive process from the altered state. For the rest—the more severe moments of psychosis—I’m able to put together a clear picture because of my extensive documentation.

In my altered states, delusions don’t arrive fully formed. They unfold.

All delusions begin as an attempt to understand and make sense of aberrant salience. I notice a string of unusual things that appear to be connected. My body and brain are telling me that these things are important and relevant to me—but I’m not sure why or how. So I begin to come up with theories. Those theories may be unusual because of my REBUS-created openness to ideas.

My theories rarely have anything close to 100% precision at first. The ones that linger long enough to become delusions often reach just enough precision that it seems like it is in my best interest to assume they are true and act in accordance. They often linger because they are emotionally compelling in a deeply somatic way. This can make it difficult to “choose” to believe or act on the “rational” thing, even if I’m double-bookkeeping. After all—“knowing” anything at all is always just feeling (in your body) that it is true.

Theories may become delusions because I’m racking up “evidence” for them (and thus increasing their precision) or because I am becoming more symptomatic. As the altered state deepens and my psychosis becomes more severe, my short-term memory erodes and my awareness shifts to such a degree that I forget that I was ever operating under a theory or assumption. At this point, the theory is now a delusion. It just feels true.

So in deeper psychosis, the theorizing step collapses. My brain often leaps to the first passing explanation for aberrant salience that comes to mind. In this stage of psychosis, awareness and short-term memory operate the same way as in dreams. This is not to say that life feels like a dream overall—it is much more sharp and vivid even that normal life. It’s more like this:

A dream is a chain of moments. In a dream, there is no awareness of what you did yesterday or an hour ago, there is only the moment that you are in, which is shaped by the moment just before it. In a dream, you have a thought, such as “I am driving a car,” and then the dreamscape shifts and you are driving a car. You do not question this. While dreaming, you do not have access to the level of metacognition that would allow you to question it. This is deep psychosis. You flow from one idea to the next, and last moment’s theory becomes your present reality.

But even then, the delusions that form aren’t random. They remain anchored to the theories, interpretations, and emotional “truths” that emerged earlier in the episode. They’re like ripples spiraling out from some heavy, emotionally significant stone tossed into the water when I still had more insight. I just can’t see the stones anymore. I am lost in an ocean of ripples.

“Common phenomenological features of early psychosis and the psychedelic state, such as a fragmented sense of self and a basal anxious uncertainty... if sufficiently persistent and intolerable, may be brought under control through the formation of an overarching delusional belief system.”

There is an inherent anxiety that builds during the altered state, one that comes from a looping process of observation and interpretation. This anxiety contributes to the way that delusional beliefs evolve and become more complex over the course of an episode. It looks something like this:

1. I have some kind of unusual sensory experience due to altered perception (remember, raw sensory data is taking up more space in my brain.)

2. I try to make sense of the unusual experience. I come up with theories to explain it.

3. With relaxed high-level priors and beliefs, I’m more open to alternative beliefs and theories, and sometimes the only explanations that seem to fit such strange experiences are supernatural or highly unusual.

4. This causes some massive prediction errors in my old high-level priors and beliefs, which can be incredibly alarming.

   “Oh my God, maybe ghosts ARE real?!”

5. When just one of these highest-level priors starts breaking down, there’s both a felt sense and conscious thought:

   “Well, if ghosts are real, anything might be possible!”

Just like that, my confidence in all my prior beliefs starts to erode.

This cycle of cascading uncertainty is why beliefs and delusions may become progressively bizarre, unusual, or fantastical over the course of a manic or psychotic episode. Once you accept one unusual belief as true or possibly true, other unusual possibilities seem to carry more water. The gates are open. “Who even KNOWS what’s true anymore?”

My Brain and “The Rules” of Reality

Long ago, I went through a religious deconstruction. It was exhilarating and terrifying. I was free from so many constraints around what I was allowed to think and do. At the same time, I no longer had an overarching framework I could use to make sense of the world, of big concepts like my purpose or what happens after death. So while it was exciting in many ways, the process of religious deconstruction also involved very visceral dread and fear.

The altered state produces the same level of existential anxiety as religious deconstruction, but it can happen very quickly. Deconstruction took years and years. In the altered state, the world turns upside down in a matter of weeks. Things that previously seemed impossible now seem totally plausible, and I have no reference point to make sense of it all.

I think our brains demand to understand the “rules” of reality. Without working predictive models, we are inherently unsafe, like children who don’t know how anything works yet. And our brains know this—our anxiety is their anxiety. That anxiety fuels a drive to create a new ruleset to work from. I believe that a lot of phenomena that occur in psychotic thought and behavior may actually be adaptive responses as the brain attempts to rebuild its predictive models in the midst of heavy uncertainty.

There are two particular methods I noticed my brain using during my experience of the altered state: pattern-seeking and writing narratives. These narratives may be, or become, fixed delusions. Though I’ve written a lot about delusion up until this point, I want to make a linguistic distinction here, because alternative ways of conceptualizing reality in psychosis are not inherently delusional.

Further up and further in—next, I’ll dive deeper and go into more detail about the interplay between those two methods of meaning-making in the altered state.

“There are patterns I must follow just as I must breathe each breath”

—Paul Simon, “Patterns”

In psychosis, patterns become extremely striking. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Based on what I understand about the premises of computational neuroscience, I believe that what is happening is something like this:

In the brain’s drive to create accurate new predictive models, it is trying to map out any connections it can find as an adaptive response, as part of an effort to build new frameworks to make sense of the world.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that, in the altered state, a lot of my intellectualizing and theorizing involves returning to my academic roots in anthropology and sociology. My brain in the altered state is doing a form of axial coding.

Axial coding is a method used in qualitative research—a method I’ve used in my own qualitative research in the past.

It works like this. Imagine you have a bunch of transcripts from research interviews to analyze. How do you find the “big picture” in the raw data? At first, you might do some open coding where you add labels and keywords to each transcript that summarize its content. Then, you take a look at all the labels across all of the interviews and identify categories and themes. From there, you can map out relationships between these categories and themes to see what emerges.

This almost perfectly encapsulates my inner process of noticing aberrant salience in the altered state. Though you can’t tell from the outside, any time I experience aberrant salience in psychosis, I am actually mapping.

Patterns, Symbols, & The Inner Map of Salience

In psychosis, the entire world is a rich network of symbolism, a web of meaning that I find myself traversing and mapping in real time. Everything I see, hear, touch, taste, smell becomes symbolic, linked to something significant from my inner world. I observe something, I label it, I categorize it relative to a particular experience or personal value or ideal, it becomes a node on the inner salience map I am building. The “map” exists separately from specific narratives or delusional content.

My brain is always engaged in a process of determining what is relevant to me, what matters for my safety, identity, and sense of meaning. Inside the altered state, the absence of functioning predictive models to interpret and filter out extraneous information, that system breaks down. So instead of filtering out what’s irrelevant, it works under the assumption that anything and everything may be relevant to me. In moments of aberrant salience, it connects what I observe in the outside world to anything in my memory that feels emotionally or symbolically related.

Seen another way: when my high-level priors are relaxed, my brain doesn't stop predicting, it just uses a different set of tools. Instead of drawing on stable, abstract models of how the world works, it begins to “predict” the meaning of low-level sensory input using emotionally charged memories, values, and ideologies. It automatically predicts that anything I observe has a connection to something significant from my personal history. These emotionally significant inner constructs act as substitute priors, a kind of emergency fallback framework. And because they're deeply important to me, the sensory world starts to feel personal, symbolic, and hyper-relevant.

Everything has a connection to me; I am connected to everything.

When I tried to research pattern-seeking in psychosis, the results I found indicated that people in psychosis often see connections where there are none. This is a misunderstanding that comes from a lack of lived-experience perspective. The patterns we see are very real. The confusion arises because in psychosis, we may make false attributions about the meaning of the patterns we find. We often externalize their meaning, when they are really constructs of our inner worlds, pertaining to the self.

It can be a magical way to exist, like an intensive form of mindfulness. It’s a constant awareness of the connectedness of everything and the ways that I am specifically, directly a part of that connectedness. It makes me feel plugged-in, like I am a thread in the woven tapestry of reality. I have a part to play in things. I have a place. I belong.

It can also feel targeted, distressing, or overwhelming, leading to the formation of paranoid fears and delusions. In the next sections, I will share two “narratives” from my altered state and discuss how my overall frame of mind shaped my interpretation of aberrant salience.

Healing Narratives

Here is an example that demonstrates the unfolding of a generally positive and healing narrative during the altered state.

Set, Setting, and Intention

I’ve set off on a little vacation to Virginia to ride out the early days of mania and I’m staying in the mountains in a place that has a jacuzzi and a sauna, which are doing an incredible job of managing my symptoms by regulating my nervous system. At this early point of the episode, I’m fully in “altered-state-as-healing-experiment” mode. I am largely on top of my symptoms, though hypermotivated and energetic. I’m spending a ton of time in nature. Overall, I’m in a decent frame of mind and approaching my mental state with a lot of healing intention. As part of this intention, I have been openly exploring past experiences of loss and conducting “grief rituals” to memorialize past loved ones who are departed through death or no longer a part of my life. I am feeling highly emotional, but not anxious or fearful. Ultimately, I’m feeling hopeful about the future.

It is in this context that I make the classic manic-person decision to adopt a dog.

I do so because my anarchic brain has written a narrative.

Outside of the altered state, I’d like to believe in reincarnation, but remain skeptical and agnostic about spirituality in general. I’m kind of an optimistic agnostic—like Mulder, I want to believe, but need more evidence.

In early psychosis…

• My spiritual skepticism is relaxed, so reincarnation feels like more of a possibility.

• I’ve just discovered that most of Pazu’s weird and unique personality had probably come from the 12% of him that was Chow Chow, after watching a bunch of Chow Chow videos and realizing their behavior was incredibly familiar.

• I find another Chow Chow mix up for adoption a few hours away, Allie. (❗️)

• Chow Chows are a rare breed in the US. (❗️)

• Allie is the right age to have been born shortly after Pazu had died. (❗️)

• And she came from the same geographic area—a particular region in the Appalachian mountains. (❗️)

• “Allie” is the name of a song that appeared through my Spotify algorithm in the weeks immediately after Pazu died in 2022, containing the lyrics “Where you been, Allie?” (‼️)

• Despite my usual skepticism, in 2022—not in an altered state, at the time—I had asked Pazu to return, if he could, both before and after he died. Just in case reincarnation is real.

• In 2024, in the altered state, I reaffirmed that desire and asked Pazu’s spirit again, shortly before discovering Allie. (‼️‼️)

With my reincarnation skepticism relaxed in the altered state, these coincidences form a picture I find myself unable to ignore or walk away from. My brain and body are screaming “all of this is important!” These are not just coincidences, they’re signs.

If we treat

as a prior, it was not a prior that ever reached anything close to 100% precision. It started as just a small hunch. And I was never so confident in the “truth” of this belief that I would have attempted to argue about it with a reincarnation skeptic, for example. Nor did I explicitly share my hunch widely at all. But each incident of aberrant salience (❗️) increased the precision of the prior. It felt more and more like it could be true.

When I went to meet Allie, she was in rough shape because she had been attacked by another dog in the shelter, which was an overwhelmingly loud and crowded place. So there was additional rational incentive to remove her from that environment. And when I considered Allie’s current state through the lens of the prior, the idea of leaving “maybe-Pazu” in an overwhelming and dangerous environment felt unconscionable.

The original Pazu was five when I adopted him and showed clear signs of having been abused or neglected in the past. So I had the thought “maybe I got to him sooner this time.”

All of this added up until it pushed my confidence in the prior past a tipping point and into action. Though I’m aware that it’s an impulsive decision, I decide I’d rather be wrong about reincarnation being real and take Allie home regardless (and save a random dog from a bad situation) than ignore Allie and potentially miss out on Pazu if he had truly decided to return through reincarnation.

The Inner Therapist

There are a few key underlying elements to note about what enabled this narrative (or unusual belief, or delusion, depending on your perspective) to come into being.

1. I was in a positive frame of mind and felt safe overall. My nervous system was fairly regulated.

2. I was specifically interested in ways to address and heal lingering grief—I’ve set this as an intention.

3. I’m aware that reincarnation exists as a concept; I’m familiar with it as a belief system. (In order for this possibility to even occur to me as an explanation for aberrant salience, I have to be aware of it first.)

4. At my core, I want reincarnation to be possible and real. (This is critical.)

When my priors are relaxed in the altered state and I am in a generally positive frame of mind, the narrative explanations that my brain “gravitates” toward concern things that I want to believe in, that I want to be true. When I have the mental freedom to explore what’s possible, I am naturally attracted to the possibilities and explanations that seem to offer the most healing. Reincarnation ties up a lot of anxiety and sadness about death and the afterlife very neatly. I deeply want to be able to believe I will meet my departed loved ones again.

This strongly echoes the concept of the “inner therapist” in psychedelic therapy—the idea that we have an innate capacity to move toward healing, insight, and integration during altered states of consciousness. A belief in reincarnation and the idea that my departed dog is already here, in the flesh, provides a very tidy resolution to my grief.

Allie and her narrative are just one example of the many places my inner therapist led me during mania and psychosis. In the full story of my altered state, I dive deeper into the discovery that most of the narratives my brain was writing in the altered state were attempts to heal and resolve past traumas.

Paranoid Delusions

How I interpret aberrant salience has a lot to do with my overall mental state and the degree to which my nervous system is regulated. If I’m in a generally positive frame of mind, I’m seeing signs from the universe, feeling connected, feeling groovy. If I’m anxious, agitated or irritable, it’s extremely easy to translate the seeming “directedness” of aberrant salience into a feeling of being watched, and to become paranoid as a result.

And of course, once I am feeling paranoid, my brain starts looking for an explanation and writing narratives to explain what it’s experiencing.

Here’s an example of a situation in which I formed and acted upon a distressing delusion, and how that process unfolded on the cognitive level.

Quick Backstory

In 2023, I had an incredible experience attending the Institute for Social Ecology’s summer intensive in Detroit. I met a lot of very cool people. Some of those people were legitimate activist radicals who had participated in groups that were historically infiltrated by the FBI and consequently disbanded or fell apart. Here, I am exposed to perspectives from people who have really, actually been “targeted” by the government due to their political beliefs—this possibility is made very real.

This is still pretty fresh in my mind in early 2024, in the altered state.

The Paranoid Delusion—Set, Setting, and Intention

At this particular moment in time, I am deeply anxious. I am attempting to move back into my old house, which was the location of a variety of traumatic events. In the altered state, the process of moving back in is triggering visceral post-traumatic flashbacks and memories of these events. Because of this, I am feeling unsafe. I am having nightmares and not sleeping well overall, which exacerbates my manic symptoms and dysregulates my nervous system. My “intention” in the present moment is simply to brute-force my way through the negative feelings that are arising by whatever means possible and get myself moved in. I’m determined to “overwrite” the negative feelings and memories and make the house an emotionally safe place to live again.

A few things happen:

• In the news, the Boeing whistleblower dies under mysterious circumstances.

• Due to relaxed priors, I am sharing all kinds of content on social media at a time when there is also widespread censorship of specific topics such as the genocide in Palestine.

• At certain points, I’m sharing a lot about online collective action and my theories about how to get ideas trending. Specifically, I had started a trend in one section of fandom Twitter where I used ideas from the Gamestop movement to encourage people to sell—or pretend to sell—their Warner Brothers/HBO stock after HBO cancelled my favorite show. This coincided with their stock price actually plummeting. Whether these two things are genuinely related, I’ll never know, but I certainly viewed this as successful collective action in that moment, as did others in the fandom.

• Around that time, I have a very negative and distressing experience involving public harassment from someone in that fandom. I actually was directly targeted by someone.

• I am a political anarchist—part of a group which has been known to be specifically targeted by the US government.

In my anxious state, as these things add up, my thoughts begin to veer toward the paranoid. Any time I encounter a technical issue or glitch online, it feels magnified. Sometimes, it feels targeted. And in the back of my mind, possibilities start to grow:

In my mind, it would be so easy to frame the death of a mentally ill person this way.

A new, speculative prior forms:

Again, it’s not a prior with particularly high precision at the outset, but when it emerges, it holds enough weight that I act on it almost immediately. I post a video on social media to clarify that I may be in an altered state, but I am NOT suicidal. I do this because in the event of my hypothetical death or disappearance, I want people to know the truth—and I also hope that putting this out there openly might dissuade any possible bad actors who are “watching.”

The inherent danger if this prior turns out to be true forces me to a “tipping point” of action more quickly than the situation with Allie. I’m not certain that I’m actually in any danger, but I am taking preemptive measures in case I am.

This particular paranoid fear shifts and evolves, abating and rebounding during various moments of high anxiety. It is one of the “theories” that becomes a full-fledged delusion when I later enter a peak state of psychosis. At certain points in time, I am 90% convinced I am being followed by someone while traveling, which leads me to do things like sneak out of a hotel very early in the morning to “evade” them.

It might sound strange, but this particular moment is something from the peak psychotic state that I’m proud of. To manage the anxiety of this delusion, I make a few videos using “Somebody’s Watching Me” as my paranoid anthem. I take agency by playing with my fears and turning the camera back on the “other”—“I see you watching!”

Distressing Narratives in Psychosis:
The Inner Guardian

Let’s consider the underlying factors that shaped this narrative.

1. I am in a negative frame of mind. I am anxious and my nervous system is dysregulated.

2. My “intention” involves simply pushing past my negative emotions and triggering flashbacks to get moved into the old house.

3. I am aware—perhaps uniquely aware—of the possibility of government interference in civilian affairs as something real that happens. I have also been recently “targeted” by someone online.

4. At my core, I want to be safe—I don’t want anything bad to happen to me.

If a positive frame of mind leads to narratives and delusions shaped by an “inner therapist” who leads me to healing thoughts, it seems that a negative or anxious frame of mind leads to narratives and delusions shaped by something like an “inner guardian” who leads me toward safety and away from nervous system dysregulation.

The inner guardian is closely in touch with my fight-or-flight instincts. When they are in charge of writing narratives to explain aberrant salience, they seem to be attracted to the first plausible explanation they find. The guardian is more concerned about acting quickly to keep me safe than about getting the specifics exactly right or dwelling on alternatives.

Just like my example with Allie, there are four key factors that shape the delusion: frame of mind, “intention,” awareness of the possibility as a concept and—in place of wanting a certain possibility to be true, there’s simply a drive to keep myself safe.

Take note: western and industrialized cultures make it extremely easy to be paranoid. The average American has a ton of reference points for ideas about surveillance, tracking, government intervention, and even government experimentation on individuals. We have copious amounts of dystopian sci-fi to draw on, and ongoing advances in technology that quickly catch up to the dystopian sci-fi. It is extremely easy for a paranoid brain to jump to these concepts as an explanation when feelings of paranoia combine with experiences of aberrant salience.

Key Ideas About the Cognitive Process of Delusion Formation in Altered States

1. I had to be aware of a concept, belief, or idea’s existence before it emerged as a pre-delusional “theory” in psychosis. This explains a lot about why psychotic delusions are very different across various cultures. The theories that our brains “jump to” to explain aberrant salience are heavily informed by culture. The creation of the movie “The Truman Show” literally invented a whole new genre of delusion that many western people, myself included, have experienced during psychosis. People who haven’t seen this movie or who aren’t aware of the concept of The Truman Show do not have this delusion.

2. My frame of mind, set and setting, whether I felt safe, and my intentions in the moment drastically changed the nature and content of my psychotic narratives and delusions, including whether they were healing and insightful or distressing and paranoid.

3. With a positive frame of mind, a regulated nervous system, and when setting a particular healing intention, my narratives and delusions drifted into the realm of the psychedelic “inner therapist.” (Where does healing need to happen, how can we get there?)

4. With an anxious or negative frame of mind, a dysregulated nervous system, and an ill-defined or unhealthy intention, my psychotic thoughts and delusions drifted into the realm of the “inner guardian.” (Are we facing any immediate threats? How can we take action to be safe?)

In the process of writing the full story of my altered state, I noticed a pattern: whenever my intention slipped or I spent time in a setting that felt unsafe, my manic and psychotic symptoms became more intense, and my delusions more distressing.

The worst, most terrifying, and traumatic parts of my 4-month episode of mania and psychosis all surfaced when I tried to move back into my old house.

This is the same house where I had experienced physical violence from a partner, and where, in 2022, the police forcibly removed me for an involuntary hospitalization.

The Results of the Experiment

So, was this a successful experiment? Did I “prove” my original theory about the healing potential of altered states, at least to myself?

Well, yes and no.

Let’s go back to that particular big difference between psychedelics and psychosis: duration.

The inner therapist is meant to be a guide, not to run your entire life. In psychedelic therapy, you access their guidance in limited quantities and integrate your newfound knowledge immediately afterwards. You consciously—in a non-altered state—choose how psychedelic insight fits into the rest of your life.

In even the most positive, euphoric experience of mania and psychosis, the inner therapist is running the whole (Truman) show. She doesn’t and can’t really know or care how her actions will be perceived later. She wants healing and justice now, by any means necessary. Her logic and methods, which make sense in the moment, may actually contradict my values outside of the altered state. The inner therapist is meant to inform, not drive immediate action.

So of course, I ended up doing and saying a variety of things in the altered state that I regret—things that are shameful, embarrassing, and legitimately agonizing to think about afterwards. And in the aftermath of the episode, any potential healing was undermined by shame. For a time, shame led me to disregard my entire process of experimentation, meaning-making, and documentation as a delusional byproduct of mania. For a year after the altered state ended, I was convinced that I’d simply made a massive mistake and had been “swindled” into a manic episode like so many other bipolar people.

However, developing this framework, this lens, has allowed me to understand that past the regret and shame, all of the insights provided by the altered state are still available to me if I’m brave enough to sift through the many things that came up during mania and psychosis. And that is a process that I’m currently undertaking—one that was only made accessible with these new perspectives on what I’d experienced.

Living with a neurodivergent brain often involves learning to hold several seemingly-contradictory truths at the same time. In my case, the truths are these: I regret certain things I did in the altered state, and I still believe that the altered state was a transformative and necessary experience that provided profound insights. Both of these things are simultaneously true, and the regret does not mean that following my intuition was inherently the wrong decision.

I may be, by definition, crazy. But the idea that my altered states had something to teach me was NEVER crazy. The impulse to follow the natural curiosity I have about my altered states was not misguided.

The Reality of Accessing Support During Manic/Psychotic Altered States

Though I would have done certain things differently in hindsight, I also have grace for myself. Let’s return to the key components of psychedelic therapy: set, setting, guide, integration. These are often the factors that distinguish a distressing psychedelic experience from a therapeutic or insightful one. While at times I was able to intentionally create the right mindset and put myself in the right setting to foster a therapeutic experience, I never once had access to a guide to keep me safe while I was in the altered state. Thus, it’s no wonder that at times, my state and symptoms spiraled beyond my own control.

Bipolar and schizophrenic people and others who experience natural altered states and other neurodivergencies are expected to manage their brain states perfectly within an extremely dysfunctional mental health landscape. When things go wrong, when things get out of hand, we are blamed as individuals for not doing enough.

Here’s the reality: if I knew of one single safe place where I could get help and support during my manic and psychotic episode without being traumatized, coerced, or demeaned, I would have gone there in a heartbeat right at the beginning.

I’ve done extensive amounts of research to find long-term psychiatric facilities that seem like they would provide the right support without being harmful. I tried to find these places while I was in mania and psychosis and again after the episode ended. I was even building a directory at one point.

They just don’t exist for people like me.

There is one single Soteria House in the United States, for Vermont residents only. One single place in a country of 300 million people where a person with average income can ride out an episode of mania or psychosis safely, voluntarily, and without being forced into a specific type of treatment.

There are peer-run respites—but none locally, and you can only stay for a week or two maximum at any of them. The local walk-in crisis center in Pittsburgh is run by the psychiatric hospital!

Every other psychiatric facility I’ve found that seems like it may be less harmful is insanely (like, $10,000/month, minimum) expensive.

When the “inner guardian” is in control, do you think any part of me is going to gravitate toward the danger, abuse, humiliation, and infantilization of psychiatric institutions? It’s never going to happen. On a visceral, bodily level, everything about psychiatric hospitals and similar environments triggers my fight-or-flight instinct. So, particularly in those moments of the altered state in which I don’t have all of my reasoning capabilities available, I am going to run, not walk, away from these institutions.

So I ask: where am I to go?

Am I expected to subject myself to trauma in order to “manage” my natural brain states?

The answer is yes, that is exactly what I am expected to do as a bipolar person in this society.

I am a Brain Anarchist

So much of my severe depression over the past year has come from regrets about “allowing” my manic episode to spiral out of control, feeling I didn’t do enough to stop the mania because of my original idea that mania may be important. I’ve felt this way even though I did seek mainstream medical help and was taking a mood stabilizer during the manic episode.

It wasn’t enough.

I wasn’t a “good bipolar person.”

Good bipolar people STOP their episodes, whatever it takes, no matter how much trauma they incur in the process, no matter how many permanent side effects they get from the meds, and no matter how hard their inner therapist is knocking at the door, screaming “I NEED TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING IMPORTANT.”

In the 1960’s, social scientist Erving Goffman described the way that psychiatric institutions socially conditioned mentally ill individuals into becoming what he calls the “good patient,” someone “dull, harmless, and inconspicuous.” As the medical model of mental illness has become more socially hegemonic, wider society has taken on the role of enforcing this social conditioning of the mentally ill. The concept of the “good bipolar person” is not actually about what’s best for me and my healing, it’s about making me into someone more socially acceptable.

So fuck being a good bipolar person.

The process of writing this, of coming to understand my experience on my own terms, has solidified a reality in my mind: the medical model and its social conditioning have done little-to-nothing to help me live with bipolar disorder. So I vehemently and categorically reject the so-called authority of the hegemonic psychiatric and psychological mainstream to dictate the choices I make concerning my own brain.

I didn’t choose to have an anarchic brain, but I choose to be a Brain Anarchist.

The idea that I am not allowed to let my brain’s natural altered states play out as they naturally would is a false premise.

• I have the right, as the person living with and in this brain, to allow mania and psychosis to play out.

• I have the right to use tools to limit those altered states or stop them from happening.

• I have the right to take insights from my altered states.

• I have the right to have regrets about things I did in altered states—even while upholding the value of the insightful pieces.

• I have the responsibility of living in alignment with my own values, regardless of my mental state.

• I have the responsibility to accept the consequences of being out of alignment with my values, regardless of my mental state.

And there are things that I deserve:

• I deserve accessible psychological and psychiatric care that isn’t traumatizing. I deserve access to the tools that can help with my symptoms and ease my distress.

• I deserve safe spaces to be when I’m in an altered state—places that don’t trigger my fight-or-flight instincts.

• I deserve that regardless of my choices around medication. I deserve care options that keep me emotionally and physically safe in altered states that do not require medication.

• I deserve nonjudgmental and empathetic guides during altered states who can help me make safe choices, assist in managing fear and anxiety, and help me process and integrate insights afterwards.

For now, I must be my own imperfect guide to the messy, complex, confusing, and beautiful experience of living with an anarchic brain.

The Necessary Background

Our Flag Means Death has been responsible for a lot of positivity in my life over the past few months. For the unfamiliar, Our Flag is an HBO Max romantic comedy featuring fictionalized versions of legendary real-world pirates Blackbeard (Taika Waititi) and Stede “The Gentleman Pirate” Bonnet (Rhys Darby), supported by a delightful ensemble cast. In the show, Blackbeard and Stede become an unlikely romantic pairing Rhys Darby has compared to Danny and Sandy in Grease—bad boy meets pretty loser.

I initially watched season one of the show when it came out in early 2022. I loved it and recommended it to others, but due to a difficult time in my personal life, it got put on the backburner. My full-on hyperfixation with the show began more recently, and started as many have for me in the past. I watched season two of the show in the fall of 2023 while recovering from a breakup, seeking an engaging distraction. When I didn’t want the experience to end, I started reading fanfiction, then I made an Our Flag Means Death-specific Twitter account so I would have a dedicated space to engage with content around the show.

One day, someone on Twitter posted a “fan map” where users could drop a pin on their general location, and I realized there are other fans of the show who live near me. I started following a few of them, which evolved into conversations on Twitter with folks who had written fanfiction set in my city. I found myself walking around my neighborhood and seeing it in a new light, imagining my favorite characters in a familiar setting.

After that, I did something I’d never done with any other fandom: I took my participation into the real world. I found out about “Calypso’s Birthday,” an Our Flag-themed event at a local queer bar based on a celebration that takes place in the show. I went with a good friend who is a more casual fan, and made a several new friends there as well. Some were people I had spoken to on Twitter, others were individuals I was just meeting for the first time. I had an absolute blast.

It was after Calypso’s Birthday that things really started taking off with my involvement in the fandom. A friend I met at the event added me to a wonderful, absolutely unhinged Twitter group chat for other hardcore fans. Upon entering, the members immediately and aggressively welcomed me by name and launched into a primer of deep group chat lore that had me laughing out loud at the coffee shop I was in. It’s rare, I think, to be welcomed into a group so thoroughly that participants are eager to explain all of their inside jokes to you right off that bat, but that’s the general spirit of the Our Flag Means Death fan community.

It was a silly, fun time all around. I was thrilled to be an active participant in fandom for once rather than a consumer and bystander: it feels really good to be able to share a deeply-held interest with others.

And then…

Our Flag Means Death is critically quite successful and has been the subject of many articles praising it for its straightforward depiction of queerness, hilarious and heartfelt writing, diverse cast of characters, and its overall originality. For this reason, the cancellation felt shocking and abrupt. The show was always intended to have a three season arc, at minimum. Though season two does not end on a cliffhanger, it was clearly not intended to be a finale.

To say that fans of the show were disappointed is an understatement.

We all know capitalist culture can be extremely dark and isolating. In a world like the one we live in, a work of media like this can be an anchor and a source of joy—in this case, a particularly queer joy. There has never been a show like Our Flag Means Death for queer people. The majority of the fanbase seems to be around my age, in our thirties and older, eagerly drinking in a type of queer media we’ve been craving for our entire lives.

Adequately describing the magic of the story itself and the ways it uniquely inspires joy requires a separate essay—one I also plan to write. Meeting the character of Stede Bonnet is why I started this Substack in the first place. He is why I have been speaking out more, writing more, meeting more people. And I don’t mean because I wanted to be involved in the fandom: it’s bigger than that. Stede is enthusiastic, earnest, awkward, often mediocre, but ready to try and fail, a deeply caring and thoughtful character. These traits are framed as desirable, good, worth celebrating, and something to fall in love with. Seeing Stede through Blackbeard’s eyes—and through the fandom’s eyes—has radically reframed my sense of self.

For many, including myself, the show and its fandom became a crucial source of community. After the news of cancellation, I came across many posts from people who were terrified that the Our Flag fan community would fall apart without the show to bind it together. As a person who values community above all else, and who is fortunate and grateful to have community as a core part of my daily life, seeing this reaction triggered something in me.

It’s actually quite ridiculous how quickly I shifted gears after my initial moment of deep devastation. Minutes after reading the annoucement, I came across a post from Renew as a Crew. Renew as a Crew is a grassroots, fan-run organization that has existed in some form since late 2022, though it only went public shortly before season two aired. The organization has utilized a variety of creative methods to push for renewal, and has quickly become one of a few central hubs for general activity within the fandom. After the cancellation announcement, Renew as a Crew reacted quickly, shifting tactics from renewal to fighting for a reversal of the cancellation.

This solidified the sense of hope and resolve that had already been building in me. Someone is telling me there’s still a chance? Okay, I’m all-in.

Successful Collective Action: What Does It Take?

For years, I have been studying what makes social movements effective. I’ve wondered: how do we build a better world? Is there really any hope of doing that given present circumstances? After immersing myself in social ecology and other theory, I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, there are paths forward and ways to create change.

At present in the United States, we do a lot of demonstrating around our causes. This can be an important way to show social support for or against something and is often crucial in raising morale, the importance of which should not be understated. However, I’ve long been frustrated that the modus operandi for activism in this country seems to be show up, chant things, go home. Social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose theoretical roots lay in anarchism, felt the same. He voiced his distaste for indirect, performative activism among self-identified anarchists quite vehemently:

Anarchists [are] losing contact with the need for an organized, collectivistic, programmatic opposition to the existing social order. Invertebrate ‘protests,’ directionless escapades, self-assertions… [this is] little more than introspective personalism that denigrates responsible social commitment… [these are] encounter [groups] variously renamed a ‘collective’ or an ‘affinity group’; [this is] a state of mind that arrogantly derides structure, organization, and public involvement; [a] playground for juvenile antics.

—Bookchin, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism, 1995

To challenge Bookchin here, there are a lot of legitimate reasons for the trend toward lower-stakes activism that may be perceived as performative, certainly not least of which is a deep history of US government infiltration in and dismantling of successful social movements. However, and especially given the oligarchical state of our political system, this has left most of us feeling stuck, paralyzed, like there’s no way to create meaningful change in our systems or institutions.

I am far from an expert, but there are a few things I’ve learned about what makes a movement effective. First of all, there must be a clear goal, and a clear sense of the person, organization, or system that you need to target to achieve your goal. Then, succesful organizing must involve direct action that has a tangible impact on your target, which often requires a sense of boldness and a willingness to take risks. One example is the 1970 takeover of a neglected hospital by street-gang-turned-political-organization The Young Lords in a demand for better healthcare after attempts to fix their hospital in socially-sanctioned ways went ignored. A central organized group like The Young Lords is key to a successful movement: the group can strategize on a plan of action, serve as a model, and cause ripple effects far beyond what the group does by itself.

Beyond that, there really is no playbook. Each successful movement is a unique response to a specific problem, and a tactic that works for one revolution may not work for another. Movements must be flexible and reactive. There must be a willingness to throw a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks, and this involves a lot of brainstorming and bouncing ideas around.

Though building a successful movement may not be a science, there are a few key ingredients I’ve identified. One is a sense of creativity, which is necessary in order to craft a solution built for the particular problem your movement aims to address. Another—extremely core to success—is building a strong sense of community within your movement that goes beyond the specifics of activism. Strong movements are built when participants eat meals together, throw parties, sing, dance, laugh together.

That last part is a crucial piece on its own. Successful movements must make fostering a sense of joy, hope, and optimism a core part of their operation, otherwise participants burn out. If you can keep hope alive, allow people to take breaks, and maintain a sense of humor in the face of obstacles and setbacks, you can keep the fire of momentum burning for a long, long time—and this is often necessary to create change.

Of course, before you can do any of this, you need a group of individuals who are fired up about a cause. Let’s get back to Our Flag Means Death.

#SaveOFMD

A central hashtag emerged early on in the campaign to reverse the cancellation of Our Flag Means Death: #SaveOFMD. While there have been many “moments” like #SaveOFMD on the internet, where a trend effectively creates a limited-duration world of its own, I have never personally participated in anything like this before. Watching this all go down has been endlessly captivating, frequently ludicrously funny, often powerful, empowering, and always deeply communal. I never know what insanity the next day will bring and find it hard to tear myself away.

Participating in an active trend like this is like being one neuron within a neural network. A person, or a group like Renew as a Crew, conceives of an idea. The idea goes out, others endorse and respond, it spreads and transforms. It inspires other ideas that build upon it, or potentially, disagreement that takes on a life of its own. Things ebb and flow and keep moving forward.

To use a different, social ecology-based metaphor: this movement is operating like a flock of birds, or a school of fish. There are no hierarchical leaders, but there are some birds towards the front of the group. The birds are all swirling around, but there’s movement in a general direction. There are smaller sub-groups within the larger one. The flock can course-correct and change direction—and yes, we manage this quite effectively without an authority to direct us. It is an endless demonstration of the possibilities of the combined power of thousands of minds working together, a sped-up microcosm of every city, every culture, everything humans have ever collectively built together.

#SaveOFMD has every single component of successful grassroots movements.

It has:

1. A large, devastated fanbase who wants the show back—one that is heavily queer and politically progressive (we have a personal, identity-politcs-based stake in the story), millennial-age and older (we have some combined life experience and maturity), and neurodivergent (there is a lot of obsessive dedication among us.)

2. A central organizing group, Renew as a Crew, working on large-scale efforts like the petition (please sign!), fundraising for billboards in Times Square and flyover banner planes in Los Angeles, running letter-writing and fax campaigns and phone banks, soliciting art, and facilitating a wide variety of other endeavors that keep fans motivated and working toward our goal in ways that are achievable for the average person.

3. There are also smaller, decentralized groups making waves (sub-groups of birds.) My original Twitter group chat is comprised of individuals who create a lot of fan works and have a large collective following, and we have often been coming together to boost each others’ ideas. (Proud to say we are the origin of the Ziploc post.)

4. The neural-network-flexible-creativity of the #SaveOFMD trend, which has generated an impossible-to-catalog array of sub-trends. #SaveOFMD has appealed to celebrities for help, tried to get the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team on board, posted bizarre art, wished entertainment executives a happy birthday, led a “pirate raid” on posts about the Emmys, and successfully engaged brands—leading to an ongoing and hilarious conversation between the campaign and personal lubricant brand Astroglide. Tune in on Friday 1/19/24 when Astroglide will be live-tweeting their first watch-through of the show.

5. On that note, the neural network is inherently a 24/7 meme factory, so spirits are generally high and everyone is in a constant state of laughter. Even bad news or setbacks are quickly meme-ified. This has the additional result of keeping the campaign trending and in the popular consciousness.

6. We’re a community that already came together for something outside of activism—a love for the particular work of art that is Our Flag Means Death, giving the movement indefinite staying power.

The initial, obvious target of the campaign is HBO itself, and the campaign has impacted the company on a variety of levels, coming from seemingly every angle. Renew as a Crew is focused on a persistent, positive, and creative approach in getting HBO to pay attention. HBO’s phones are ringing off the hook, their email servers are strained and bouncing responses, their physical mailboxes are flooded. They cannot get out a post on social media without being inundated by Our Flag Means Death fans. As of today, 1/18/24, Our Flag Means Death has been nominated for a GLAAD Award, but HBO has yet to acknowledge this because they know what will happen. We’ve made ourselves an incorrigible nuisance—a group of polite menaces. HBO has no choice but to listen.

Though HBO as a whole is the campaign’s primary target, a specific executive was singled-out early on as allegedly dealing the show its killing blow: Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav.

For better or for worse, having a particular individual to target, or feel you are targeting, tends to galvanize people. Changing the mind of one individual feels more concrete and doable than changing whole systems. Anger toward Zaslav has remained a locus in the campaign among fans—he is a perfect figurehead for every wealthy executive at every entertainment conglomerate who doesn’t blink twice before destroying beloved works of art.

The discourse surrounding Zaslav’s decisions broadened the inherent possibilities of this campaign for me. I already thought we had a decent chance of either getting a reversal of the cancellation by HBO, or making our numbers look appealing enough to get Our Flag Means Death picked up by another network. Now, I think we may have formed not just be a successful campaign to save a show, but a central hub for all kinds of future collective action. First order of operations: boldly demonstrating that entertainment companies must listen to consumers about the art we want to see.

Discourse around Warner Brothers Discovery stocks (NASDAQ: WBD) has been prominent within the campaign. The day before the Our Flag cancellation announcement, January 8, 2024, WBD stocks were sitting at $11.40. They have fallen to $10.26 at of the time of writing. Using public information from the US Government’s SEC Edgar Database, I did the math: top shareholders of Warner Brothers Discovery as identified in their 2023 proxy meeting (which include BlackRock, Inc. and The Vanguard Group) have collectively lost nearly -$700 million dollars since Our Flag Means Death was cancelled. This is following a general downward trend for WBD over the past 6 months, likely due to Zaslav’s pre-existing reputation of poor business practices. He is so infamous for this, criticisms of his decisions as an executive are highlighted in the first section of his own Wikipedia page.

So we have Renew as a Crew leading the charge on a positive, relentless appeal toward HBO to save the show, and fan discourse against Zaslav’s art-apathetic business practices on the other side slowly driving down WBD share prices. With all angles covered, is any of this working?

After an initial wave of press lamenting the show’s cancellation, a fresh batch of articles began to emerge, advocating for the show to be renewed. Shortly after, the campaign to renew the show had enough success that it is now receiving media attention of its own. Showrunner David Jenkins and cast members Vico Ortiz and Con O’Neill have directly or indirectly shown support for the renewal campaign by liking posts or sharing articles. Rumors continue to swirl about interest in the show from other streaming services.

With WBD stock prices down, HBO inundated by upset Our Flag Means Death fans, and the bad press David Zaslav is garnering, HBO Max has no shot of continuing as a competitive streaming service without taking a cold, hard look at its practices. If HBO wants to be successful and recoup from its losses, it must not only reverse its cancellation decision and renew Our Flag Means Death for season 3, it must reconsider its entire business model, prioritizing creators like Our Flag showrunner David Jenkins, who deeply understand the kind of stories that inspire this kind of cult fanaticism and dedication.

Let this campaign serve as a warning to HBO and all other streaming services and entertainment conglomerates:

We’re here.

We have what it takes to win.

And we’re not going anywhere

I’m not done. This is essay 1/? on #SaveOFMD and Our Flag Means Death more broadly.

Subscribe to stay tuned.

Woke up crying in my childhood bed
Terror in my soul and terror in my head 
Used to wake up perfectly content
Blood moon rising heaven sent
Father
Forgive me for my
Forgive me for my…

—Dose Me Up, Vox Rea

It was December 2022 and I was the most isolated I’d ever been. During the course of a manic episode the previous summer, my support system had exploded in my face. Partners, childhood best friends—my therapist, even—were all gone. In the shame and humiliation of the aftermath, I was so severely depressed I went to live with my parents for about 8 months at age 30. Basic care tasks had become impossible, and to be blunt, I knew I wouldn’t harm myself at my parents’ home out of consideration for them. 

There’s a concept from sociologist Charles Cooley called the looking-glass self. It’s the idea that we form our self-concept by internalizing the ways we are perceived and treated by others. Put more simply: other people are the mirror in which we see ourselves.

Things start to go haywire in the human brain when we don’t have a looking-glass. In 2022, I became so disconnected from regular human contact I began experiencing dissociation and depersonalization. Without anyone to perceive me, I quite literally did not feel like I was a real person. 

It is terrifying to realize you need people and not know where to begin. Trying to build a new social network from scratch organically, in the way that most people do, felt like the most daunting possibility imaginable. My brain likes structure, lists, steps to follow; waiting in line for my turn as opposed to trying to catch the attention of a bartender. It doesn’t like the messiness of forming human relationships, the confusion, the uncertainty. Do they like me? Am I boring them? Am I being too forward? Was that an awkward thing to say? Why am I like this? 

It was partially the seeming impossibility of building community “the normal way” that led me to apply to live in the nonprofit housing cooperative where I currently reside. There was an application process: first a written application, a social meetup, and then a more formal group interview with the current residents. Of course, all of this made me almost paralyzingly anxious, but at least it was very concrete—there was an order to the operation.

But also, my move into this cooperative had been a long time coming. I believe that intentional, communal living is the way forward on many fronts, one cure to our cultural epidemic of loneliness, a major solution for capitalist degrowth, pivotal in the fight against climate change, and a novel option for the treatment of depression and other mental health issues. These ideas have been swirling around my head for years, and in 2024, I’m going to start writing about them, beginning here.

My interest in communal living started taking shape when I spent 3 months in rural Tanzania as an 18-year old. Everything about that experience stood in shocking, exhilirating contrast to the life I had known as a sheltered, suburban homeschooled child growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Life at home was sterile, confined, lived inside the house and in other buildings—shuttling to church and classes and friends’ houses. After childhood, I rarely interacted with my neighbors. 

Life in the small village of Milingano was uncontained. Houses there are pressed up together with minimal privacy and the bulk of living happens outside—cooking, chores, coralling children, running errands to the local stands. People flow in and out of each others’ residences, yards, the church, the school, the central squares. Most people are related in some way, and those who aren’t are still aunties and uncles and cousins. 

Structurally, life in Milingano is much closer to the way humans have lived for most of our history than the way we live in the United States, siloed in our homes within unwalkable neighborhoods. For about 90% of human history, we’ve lived in small bands of foragers. It makes intuitive sense: for most of our existence, we have had to work hard at subsistence. We have needed to rely on one another—for food, for shelter, for childcare, for survival—in a direct, pressing way. It logically follows that humans structured our societies in such a way that this work could be shared by the collective. 

It has occurred to me many times over the years that, had I been born in a different time or place, I would not have had to struggle to find community, I would most likely have been born into a collective and lived my life that way, as most humans have done. I would have had an organic place in the world, a role to fill.

After thousands of years of living communally out of necessity, I believe our brains are wired to expect that kind of lifestyle by default. It makes sense, then, that many of us struggle to eke out community within the structures of capitalist society. We are expected to patchwork together meaningful social networks out of the disparate groups of people we meet at our 9-5 jobs, on dating apps and social media, through hobbies and affinity groups. On top of that quagmire, we have the media constantly reminding us we are not good enough, leaving us, always, with something to prove to ourselves and each other. The closest thing we have to organic community, the nuclear family, often ends up becoming a pressure chamber, expected to fulfill the roles of the entire village we actually need.

Alienation from community is the cause of a wide variety of issues. We all know loneliness has a detrimental impact on our mental health—there’s a reason that solitary confinement is a punishment. But the science is also conclusive and consistent that loneliness has a severe impact on our physical health as well, on par with risks like smoking cigarettes or lack of physical activity, leading to a significantly increased risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and premature death from all causes. Being disconnected from others literally hurts us—physically, mentally, spiritually.

2022 wasn’t the first time I’d found myself isolated. 

I am, to use a term I have mixed feelings about, neurodivergent. I have a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, type I, but even beyond that, my brain has always seemed to operate a bit differently than the people around me. 

I was a bookish child who trended deeply toward hyperfixation on my interests, and I still do. Like many of my peers, one of my earliest special interests was the website Neopets. I have a distinct memory of my childhood best friend irritably expressing “all you want to do is talk about Neopets.” There was an early, burning shame in that. I quickly learned that it’s bad to like something too much. It’s bad to be too much. For a long time, I thought the worst possible thing I could be was annoying. 

It’s almost a cliche among offbeat millennials at this point, but I now suspect that I fall somewhere on the autism spectrum. One reason among many is that “normal” social interactions have never come naturally to me. If I know someone well (like, for years) I do just fine, but meeting and getting to know new people is always mentally taxing, even if I’m enjoying myself in the process.

When I was a teenager, I took musical theater classes at the CLO Academy in Pittsburgh. I found myself deeply analyzing every word that came out of my mouth as I tried to befriend unfamiliar teens out in the big, scary secular world. As is often the way with the the second arrow, I was intensely frustrated by and ashamed of my own discomfort, confused about why talking to the best friends I’d known since childhood was so easy, but interacting with people in my theater classes felt like trying to speak a foreign language—one I was expected to already be familiar with. 

I started dissecting the easy interactions with my best friends and attempted to apply what I’d learned to other social interactions. I quite literally turned conversations into an algorithm:

function interactWithAHuman(){
 introduceSelfAndMakeSmallTalk();
 function questionResponseLoop(){
  if (givenASocialOut == true) {
   conversationIsHappening = false;    
  }
  thinkOfAndAskAQuestion();
  listenToResponse(function(){
   makeEyeContact();
   nod();
   smallInterestedSounds();
  }).then(function(){
   thinkOfSomethingRelatableToSay().then(function(){
    questionResponseLoop();
   })
  });
 }
 while (conversationIsHappening = true){
  questionResponseLoop();
 }
}

In English:

1. Introductions/small talk (the hardest part)

2. Think of/ask a question

3. Listen to response

   • Eye contact

   • Nod

   • Small sounds of interest

4. Tap into the mental reservoir and come up with a short anecdote showing you relate (awkward because this is sometimes a slow process)

5. Loop back to step 2, repeat until you’re given an out

(No, I didn’t actually know Javascript in high school.)

This led to a deep sense that social interactions aren’t about connection or relating to one another, they are about creating a convincing performance of normalcy. I am listening, I am paying attention, I am sharing just enough to be relatable but this isn’t really about me. But please like me.

The neurodivergent tendencies, social difficulties, mysterious recurring depression, and the general state of the world snowballed throughout my twenties. I started working from home in 2018 and quickly became deeply agoraphobic. I had a nightmarishly poor self-concept and little-to-no confidence in my ability to form or maintain relationships. And then, the pandemic. There were many periods of depression during this time.

Ironically, my interest in intentional communities and communal living was growing as I became increasingly isolated. My partner at the time, who I’d met at my tiny work college (functionally an intentional community itself) introduced me to the works of Murray Bookchin and The Institute for Social Ecology, Bookchin’s organization. I took a class with the institute in 2020 (Ecology, Democracy, Utopia) and was captivated by the political ideology of communalism—the idea that an aspirational ideal society might be comprised of a network of small, autonomous communities that can each support the majority of their own needs. 

A commonly-repeated refrain among social ecologists (which inspired the name of this Substack) is “a better world is possible.” That concept has bolstered me during dark times when I couldn’t see a logical reason to carry on, when my life or society at large were seemingly falling apart around me. In the midst of even my most severe periods of depression, there was still a lingering possibility that maybe, one day I’d be well enough to work toward a communalist society, and I should keep living just in case. Maybe that was even my life’s purpose. This idea kept me moving forward in tiny, stuttering steps, an anchor.

In consideration of my own mental health, I’ve spent a lot of time on the question “now what?” 

A common path in leftist framing of mental health issues looks like this. First, our mental health is individualized and pathologized. Depression, for example, is conceptualized in mainstream society as an innate personal problem, an illness to be treated via a variety of methods—medications, therapies, exercise, etc.

Many of us try these treatments with varying degrees of success. I have trialed upwards of 15 different medications. I’ve spent a cumulative 3.5 years in therapy and paid out-of-pocket to see a trauma-informed somatic-oriented PhD psychologist for about 2 years. I have undergone a course of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment where strong magnets are applied to a portion of the brain responsible for emotions. I’ve tried psilocybin and ketamine. During my 2022 depression, I was offered electroshock therapy as an option and actually considered it. I’ve also done the things we all know are supposed to help: regular cardio, trying to maintain a reasonable diet, journaling.

Depression continued to rear its hideous head. 

When these treatments fail, we, the mentally ill, start asking questions. Like: why is my anxiety being framed in medical terms when my external reality is that I’m constantly unsure if I’m going to be able to survive month to month? Is it really dysfunctional to be generally hypervigilant when random acts of gun violence are so normalized that I merely shrug when I read about the latest and then keep on scrolling? Doesn’t it make a kind of sense to be depressed, paralyzed, with climate change and pandemics and wars always looming when we’re trapped in political systems that offer us very little direct impact on these issues? 

We start to realize that, as Mental Hellth author and editor P.E. Moscowitz puts it, “[we’re] not crazy, the world is.” Initially, there’s a deep sense of relief that comes with that realization. It’s incredibly validating to know that you aren’t simply failing to get better when you can’t snap yourself out of a depressive period with yoga and running and therapy. It’s liberating to realize that your emotional reaction to the world makes sense. 

But then, here it comes: the now what? 

We begin to realize the enormity of the dysfunction in the way our social structures are organized, how thoroughly society is failing all of us. We realize that many of our mental health issues are directly tied to macro-level social issues. We understand that society needs to change in order for us to be happier, healthier. It’s daunting. It’s overwhelming. And here we are: still depressed, still anxious. 

How are we to build a better world when we are unable to manage the basic tasks of living? Or in the words of Johanna Hedva in Sick Woman Theory, lamenting that her disability precluded her from participating in protest actions, “how do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?”

Mental Hellth

What Happened to the Communal, Revolutionary Spirit?

Gareth Watkins is a writer currently based in Manchester, UK. He has written for The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tribune, Commune, Vulture and MEL. We’re miserable. Individualized solutions are at be…

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4 years ago · 35 likes · 1 comment

In the essay What Happened to the Communal, Revolutionary Spirit?, writer Gareth Watkins suggests one possible answer to the question now what? 

“What is needed is something that is neither individual therapy nor holding out for a global revolution that the sheer level of mental illness in our society is making increasingly unlikely. A way for people to collectively work through the damage that living in this world inflicts that goes beyond sharing our pain and towards making material changes in our lives and being able to act politically.”

Watkins lays out part of the anarchist manifesto The Coming Insurrection, which spoke of the commune as the core unit of revolutionary struggle. The kind of commune that the authors speak of is not necessarily the free-love-and-drugs hippie enclave that might immediately spring to mind, it’s something far more practical.

“Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways.” 

The manifesto’s authors advocate for communes that are “organize(d) for the moral and material survival of each of their members.” On this, Watkins adds that “in practice, [this means] each comrade is fully committed to doing whatever it takes to get all others to a point where the psychological harm of capitalism has been detoxified.” 

I came across the Watkins piece in the aftermath of my manic episode and reading it was like being able to breathe for the first time in months. It wove together so many concepts I had been trying to articulate for years. I knew in my bones that that intentional community was perhaps the only path toward my continued survival.

Going through the steps of the application process when I barely had the ability to leave my bed for more than 10 hours at a time and hardly remembered how to hold a conversation was bar-none the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was also the best decision I’ve ever made for my mental health.

Let me be transparent: living in community is not all butterflies and rainbows, not by a long shot. For me, there was an extremely steep learning curve when I moved in, as I knew there would be. I spent the first few months still mostly dissociated, feeling like a blank shell of a human being. I was fully detached from my sense of self, no longer quite sure who I was or what I enjoyed. I was sure everyone could see it—could see right through me. I was learning to be a person again at the same time I was learning to live with other people. 

Coming out of a severe depression and a traumatic year made me an unreliable housemate. I have failed to communicate, missed meetings, not followed through on commitments, disappeared at times, didn’t articulate my needs. I’ve had terrible brain fog since 2022 and find focus very challenging. My executive function is severely impaired. I worry that the amount of alone time I need is too much and that I’m being judged for it. I feel self-conscious about the time I spend on screens and I self-medicate more than I’m comfortable with. I compare myself to those around me, though I try to have grace for myself. All things I’m slowly working on; I’m still a draft, a work in progress. 

There are also the general issues that you might expect from any group of human beings. There are conflicts; we don’t always see eye to eye. We have different lifestyles and interests, even as we’re unified by this way of living. We get frustrated and sometimes make each other cry. We run into financial struggles and have to make choices between existing as we ideally want to and continuing to survive as a collective in capitalist society. It can be hard to live collectively when none of us have been taught to do so. In our hyper-individualistic society, most of us been taught to have a rugged self-reliance, not how to communicate, compromise, and advocate for ourselves while also prioritizing the group.

But just because it’s not all butterflies and rainbows doesn’t mean they’re not present. There are, in fact, butterflies, rainbows, flocks of crows, pet pigeons, beautiful native flowers, abundant vegetables. Sometimes, in the garden, there are even hummingbirds.

Every day, I get to sit down with my housemates and eat a home-cooked vegan meal. On Mondays, friends and neighbors come for a potluck and we pass around a little bowl of questions and cry laughing at everyone’s responses. Laughter is the background soundtrack to my life here, echoing through my home like audible light. I’ve learned how to use new power tools and put up lathe and plaster walls and frame a window and power-sand a floor at our monthly work days. I’ve helped host parties, cried and ate pie for breakfast after a breakup, stayed up late around the fire trying to figure out how to fix the world, danced in my room. The extended community of neighbors, partners, friends, and family stops by to visit, trade things, drink tea, watch movies, make kimchi, shoot the shit.

Sometimes, things here are so good they hardly feel real. I’ve always been captivated by stories that feature the kind of community I longed to be part of. Almost any major franchise of the last few decades involves a group (a commune) working towards a goal together: banding together to defeat Voldemort, bringing a friend back from the upside-down, rebelling against the Capitol, fighting evil by moonlight (winning love by daylight.) Currently, I’m obsessed with the series Our Flag Means Death, a delightfully progressive romantic comedy about pirates, featuring a ragtag cast of characters who form their own little community of outsiders aboard the ship The Revenge. As my love of the show has grown, it has been thrilling to realize that I have my own comparable, eclectic group of real-life found family, our personal and collective narratives and interactions as rich and full of shenanigans as I could ever find in fiction.

There’s a kind of therapy for bipolar disorder that emphasises building routine and structure. Life in this cooperative has those things in spades—dinner at 7pm, then do dishes, put leftovers away, sweep, wipe down counters. Walk the dog on Tuesdays, buddy system tag-team chores on Wednesdays. One cook day a week, one workday a month, grocery shop for the house every 6 weeks or so, house meetings on Sunday nights.

Difficult as I frequently find it to be consistent, it’s these routine responsibilities to my community that have had the most direct positive benefit to my mental health. I know that I have an impact on the lives of others here, even if it’s just making food that people enjoy and keeping the bathroom clean. Knowing that others are counting on me gives me the kind of external motivation I need to stay active and moving. As much as I’d love to have more intrinsic motivation, I recognize myself as a person who needs an outside push to live my best life. 

I know there are a lot of people out there like me, people who want this kind of life and have no idea how to find it. I once made a Lex post gauging interest in a hypothetical intentional community of my own and was inundated with interest. My goal, here and in the real world, is to create guidemaps for those need community but don’t know where to start, to be a beacon for those who might be coming from a place of extreme loneliness. I think that if I can make it here and do okay, a lot of other people can live this life too.

I just passed the anniversary of the first time I visited my house for a potluck. My 1-year anniversary of moving in is coming up on February 26^th.

One year ago I was so depressed I was being offered electroshock therapy. 

Today, I’ve been off of antidepressants for 2 months. 

A better world is possible. In fact, it’s already here.  

Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like you could disappear?
Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

Well, let that lonely feeling wash away
Maybe there's a reason to believe you'll be okay
'Cause when you don't feel strong enough to stand
You can reach, reach out your hand

And oh, someone will coming running
And I know, they'll take you home

Even when the dark comes crashing through
When you need a friend to carry you
And when you're broken on the ground
You will be found
So let the sun come streaming in
'Cause you'll reach up and you'll rise again
Lift your head and look around

You will be found
You will be found
You will be found
You will be found
You will be found

—You Will Be Found, from Dear Evan Hansen