Local man Jameson DeChambeau has decided to discontinue his monthly injections of Invega Sustenna. While he recognizes the drug’s efficacy in reducing auditory hallucinations, it turns out that the actually existing voices he was now able to give his focus to were more annoying, intrusive and detrimental to his well-being than those voices that only he could hear.
“Good Lord, take me back! I’ll even deal with the worst of it: the threats of harm, the vitriol, the graphic language. Anything besides listening to these people talk and talk and talk!” he said.
DeChambeau describes other people’s voices as “incessant, unreflective, manipulative, propagandistic, insincere, distracting, interrupting, redundant, preprogrammed and trivial to the point of soul death,” amongst other things. He now has a theory that schizophrenia is in large part a natural response of the brain to protect itself. By retreating so far into one’s one psyche, he argues, psychosis preserves a degree of trueness to oneself that would otherwise be hijacked by the self-involved bullshit of other people.
“I can’t believe I’m diagnosed with a mental illness for this, like it’s an unhealthy adjustment. Far from it. The rest of you listen to this noise all day, go along with it and somehow conclude that it is sane behavior. No thanks. Not for me. I’ll crawl back into the spirit world that my mind has made for itself, thank you very much.”
DeChambeau adds that therapy and psychoanalysis have taught him how to enter into dialogue with his voices. After years of committed practice, the content of his voices has become less harmful, and they have lately told him they want to support him on a special journey only he is meant to fulfill. He tried to think of any occasion in which other people’s voices responded to dialogue with growth and change, and he could not come up with any.