The benefits of a physical, mental and emotional exercise are well documented and publicised. Memory is part of the complex biological functioning of the human organism. The human body is more like a city of disparate cells, that may or may not chose to co-operate, than a monad independently operating and autonomous unto itself.
Memory is conflicted by stress, auto-immune responses, fear, pleasure, and of course abuses of trust. John Ralston Saul and others have commented upon the fact that a memory is required to be a functioning adult in a complex and dynamic social structure. Creating a body of ciphers and zombies requires the suspension of disbelief and a disinfecting of the mind through various forms of thought reform.
One of the mechanisms of thought reform is an effective "cloaking mechanism", a way of hiding the truth from the analysand/querent/neophyte/mark/sucker and a veritable flag to alert others to the presence of said "fresh meat".
Exercise, fresh air, green spaces that fulfil the savannah hypothesis, decrease in stress caused by noise, pollution, disagreeable social settings, etc., all contribute to the rehabilitation of someone who has undergone, or is undergoing the worst these cloaking mechanisms seek to occlude, from the target as well as their 'support network'.
And as always it is the poor who have the lions share of the fiscal burden to deal with: as early as the 1950s social analysts such as Vance Packard noted that the poor were eleven times more likely to suffer from mental illness as the rich. And it was Professor Richard Taylor who noted that suicide - the marker of mental illness - spiked under conservative governments in Australia and Britain.
A cynic would say follow the money trail to see who benefits and who pays.
A cynic would say follow the money trail to see who benefits and who pays.
Schizophrenia Costs
"Schizophrenia - the cost revealed . . .
A landmark new report from SANE Australia - 'Schizophrenia: Costs' - reveals the alarming human and financial costs of schizophrenia.
pdf 866.48 Kb Download the full report
The report - 'Schizophrenia Costs: An analysis of the burden of schizophrenia and related suicide in Australia' - was commissioned by SANE from Access Economics.
The human cost
One of the most alarming facts noted in the report is that people with schizophrenia are 12 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, and that they are particularly vulnerable when not receiving appropriate rehabilitation and support in the community. Yet over 80% of those affected are not receiving rehabilitation . . .
The financial cost
The real financial costs of schizophrenia in 2001 totalled $1.85 billion - over one-third of this cost is borne by people with the illness and their carers. Within 10 years this cost is calculated to spiral to $10 billion per annum unless action is taken.
Where to from here?
By investing increased funding in effective treatments and support, government will no only reduce the human cost of schizophrenia and related suicide, it will also reduce the financial cost to health systems.
SANE is distributing this landmark report nationally, and calls on Australian governments to take urgent action to reduce the appalling cost of schizophrenia."
Published in 2002 by Access Economics you would be right in concluding that this is but one of many such damning reports published in the last twenty years, and going back to Stan Alchin's revelations of the abuse being meted out to inmates of Rozelle Hospital (Callan Park: Kirkbride and Broughton Hall) all of which point in the one direction: we are a despicable species who can time and time again convince ourselves and others that our ideas are worth killing for and that the end justifies the means.
The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric
Highly creative people often seem weirder than the rest of us. Now researchers know why
...Schizotypal personality can appear in a variety of forms, including magical thinking (fanciful ideas or paranormal beliefs, such as Schumann's belief that Beethoven channeled music to him from the grave), unusual perceptual experiences (distortions in perception, such as Dickens's belief that he was being followed by characters from his novels), social anhedonia (a preference for solitary activities—Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton, for example, favored work over socializing), and mild paranoia (unfounded feelings that people or objects in the environment may pose a threat, such as Hughes's legendary distrust of others).
Schizotypal personality is a milder version of the clinical psychiatric condition called schizotypal personality disorder, which is among a cluster of personality disorders labeled "odd or eccentric" in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The schizotypal diagnosis grew out of large epidemiological studies in which researchers noticed that the relatives of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia were more likely to exhibit odd behaviors and beliefs than relatives of those not afflicted with schizophrenia. Schizotypal people, for instance, may dress in an idiosyncratic style; their speech patterns may be somewhat out of the ordinary; they may respond ineptly in social situations; their emotional responses may be inappropriate; they may believe in supernatural phenomena such as telepathy and omens; and they may be hard to get close to—both physically and emotionally. In short, schizotypal individuals are eccentric.
Not all schizotypal people have a personality disorder, however. They are often very high functioning, talented and intelligent. Many of my students at Harvard University, for example, score far above average on schizotypal scales, as well as on creativity and intelligence measures...
Schizotypal personality is a milder version of the clinical psychiatric condition called schizotypal personality disorder, which is among a cluster of personality disorders labeled "odd or eccentric" in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The schizotypal diagnosis grew out of large epidemiological studies in which researchers noticed that the relatives of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia were more likely to exhibit odd behaviors and beliefs than relatives of those not afflicted with schizophrenia. Schizotypal people, for instance, may dress in an idiosyncratic style; their speech patterns may be somewhat out of the ordinary; they may respond ineptly in social situations; their emotional responses may be inappropriate; they may believe in supernatural phenomena such as telepathy and omens; and they may be hard to get close to—both physically and emotionally. In short, schizotypal individuals are eccentric.
Not all schizotypal people have a personality disorder, however. They are often very high functioning, talented and intelligent. Many of my students at Harvard University, for example, score far above average on schizotypal scales, as well as on creativity and intelligence measures...
Brain-imaging and electroencephalography (EEG) studies support the theory that highly creative individuals tend to experience more cognitive disinhibition than do less-creative control groups. Beginning in the late 1970s, researcher Colin Martindale of the University of Maine initiated a series of EEG studies related to creativity. He and his colleagues found that highly creative people tend to produce more brain waves in the alpha range (a frequency of eight to 12 hertz, or cycles per second) during creative tasks than do less creative people. Martindale and his group interpreted alpha power as a marker of decreased cortical arousal and defocused attention and suggested that creative people were allowing more information into their conscious awareness during creative work...
Another brain-imaging study, done in 2010 by investigators at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, suggests the propensity for both creative insights and schizotypal experiences may result from a specific configuration of neurotransmitter receptors in the brain. Using positron-emission tomography, Örjan de Manzano, Fredrik Ullén and their colleagues examined the density of dopamine D2 receptors in the subcortical region of the thalamus in 14 subjects who were tested for divergent-thinking skills. The results indicate that thalamic D2 receptor densities are diminished in subjects with high divergent-thinking abilities, similar to patterns found in schizophrenic subjects in previous studies. The researchers believe that reduced dopamine binding in the thalamus, found in both creative and schizophrenic subjects, may decrease cognitive filtering and allow more information into conscious awareness...
Clearly, however, not all eccentric individuals are creative. Work from our lab indicates that other cognitive factors, such as high IQ and high working-memory capacity, enable some people to process and mentally manipulate extra information without being overwhelmed by it. Through a series of studies, we have, in fact, shown that a combination of lower cognitive inhibition and higher IQ is associated with higher scores on a variety of creativity measures...
Human and Non-Human Telepathic Collaborations from Fluxus to Now
Jacquelene Drinkall
...Telepathy challenges the agency of the individual artist/author, as does collaboration. Miller‘s conceptual work with hypnosis and Hiller‘s conceptual art telepathy experiment both unleashed potentially unsettling, even dangerous, automa-tised agencies, other to the self, in the creative process...
Like Schneemann, members of the activist terrorist group Weather Underground, in operation from the 1960s to the 1980s, also famously en-gaged in self-liberating and group bonding sexual orgies. The orgies of both Schneemann and the activist/terrorists worked to shatter individualism and monogamy, and to create a new group-based countercultural identity in which the boundaries of bodies and minds are violated, overlapped and synchronised. Modern social theorists such as Gustave le Bon and Mikkel Borche Jacobsen associate group telepathy with galvanised groups, crowds, political collaborations and public demonstrations.12 Borch-Jacobsen states, ―… the mass bond may have to be thought of as a tele-pathic umbilical cord.‖13 Borch-Jacobsen posits that a group and crowd un-conscious fuses and melts subjectivities: ―Taken to the extreme, it is thought transmission, telepathy.‖14 Artists such as Gianni Motti and Jean-Jacques Lebel have placed telepathy at the centre of their work with par-ticipatory group collaboration and revolution work. Motti‘s artwork Psy Room (1997) was an insurrection that succeeded to telepathically threaten the president of Colombia, and Lebel‘s text On the Necessity of Violation (1968) situates telepathy as a crucial intensification force within both artistic Happenings and the Paris May 1968 riots.
Schneemann‘s more recent work from the 1990s titled Vespers in-volved collaboration with her telepathic cat. Her familiar, called Vesper, would ritualistically kiss her amorously in the morning and before sleep, and this is captured in the video Vesper’s Pool and in 140 wall photos. Schneemann‘s occult-like body-based work engages with this problem of an artistic partnership, psychic contact and interspecies-communication. Schneemann loves her cat, Miller loves his deceased mother, Beuys cares for the environment—including dead and feral animals—and Miller is a friend with Second Life avatars/fleshtars. These artists grasp collaboration and telepathy simultaneously as they reach beyond their own known world for a special connection with another co-creator being.
There is something similar in the role-play of the real life (yet robotic-looking) performances of Gilbert and George and avatar performance art, and both are clearly influenced by Fluxus. Gilbert & George‘s The Singing Sculpture (1970) performances are semi-autonomous, like puppets, auto-mata and mime artists. Green explains that elimination of personality is an important part of this process of roboticised tele-acting.15...
Men generally find it more difficult to work with hyper-feminine and/or ―crazy‖ forms of creativity and identity that are not valued within a persistently patriarchal aesthetic value system. Women artists such as Yoko Ono who have worked with conscious femininity and/or feminism in collaborative art prac-tice stemming from Fluxus have been quick to acknowledge the pitfalls of working with telepathy...
In both France and Australia telepathy discourse can be found em-bedded in political discourses, including within very the attempts for it to be quarantined and demonised as outside the realm of political, collaborative or aesthetic usefulness. Telepathic collaboration is ancient and complex enough to invite and survive fierce political debates. The promise of tele-pathic collaboration to transcend cultural difference is potentially dangerous and threatening for certain political situations, but this is what it offers and it can sometimes be what is necessary...
Psychoanalysis has always been troubled by the idea of telepathy, despite its being founded on the concept of telepa-thy and transference. As Lisa Blackman shows, telepathy and psychical re-search is recently shown to have important relevance for contemporary af-fect study, 77 but within most respected disciplines telepathy remains a very difficult thing to discuss. By inviting spiritual leaders to collaborate with them, Abramoviç/Ulay were able to relate their work with telepathy to exist-ing spiritual practices outside of gallery walls...
Te-lepathy may just be an extreme and unusual form of empathy (perhaps also combined with awe, wonder, excitement, sympathy). However, Abramoviç/Ulay‘s collaborative exploration of physical and mental extremes has resulted in numerous witness reports and extensive art historical com-mentary on the artists‘ heightened telepathic powers...
Telepathy is more aligned to the realm of dreams, imagination, per-ception and spiritual enlightenment (and even psychosis); whereas collabo-ration is more aligned to professional exchange, bureaucratic tasks, fac-tional empowerment, strategic coordination (and even conspiracy). Tele-pathic collaborations as political collaborations certainly exist, as do mo-ments of resistance and political moments opposed to certain forms of col-laboration, telepathy and various other factors and issues. Like the old combination of politics, sex and religion, telepathic collaborations are capa-ble of creating some dangerous fireworks.
Telepathic collaboration occurs in unlimited media, but manifests as a particularly strong fusion within a dyad/twin/couple and performance, or a work that features and documents the energy and/or symmetry of the two artists‘ bodies. Artistic telepathic collaborations are contagious, and since Fluxus they have mutated like a virus and gained virulence and the ability to enter diverse representation within art and art history. Telepathy and col-laboration share the ability to multiply and share subjectivities. Artists, me-dia, and contemporary art institutions are recognising the power of tele-pathic collaboration more quickly, in part due to the ongoing mythic mem-ory of Abramoviç/Ulay‘s enduring recuperation of telepathic collaboration within international and Australian art scenes as well as the art-historical work of Green. Younger generations of artists such as the Manganos, Kildall/Turner and the Mattes are quick to build on Abramoviç/Ulay‘s legen-dary practice-based evidence that powerful telepathies and collaborations build their fusion through the energy generated between dyadic and twinned bodies; and they are doing this through new digital and social me-dia. The technological mediation of all human telepathies is further appar-ent through the connective contrast between Fluxus and current art. In-stead of it being unusual for artist twins and couples to collaborate and work with telepathy, such work is now quickly supported and not viewed as just a passing curiosity or celebrity fashion. Telepathic collaborations are recognised as having important cultural value and providing crucial insight into how art works as a knowledge discipline of shared subjectivity.
Tourist
Eats Native
Review essay by Paul
Brennan
The Edge of The Sacred -
Transformation in Australia
by David Tacey
Harper Collins 1995
...Tacey
has no time for secret blokes’ business. “As the masculinist
pubs, churches, convents and barber-shops go broke or close down in
Australian cities, new age book shops and awareness centers are
popping up everywhere, offering the public a broad range of largely
non-Christian, non-patriarchal esoteric arts and sciences such as
astrology, tarot, I Ching, karma sutra, sacred sex, herbalism,
naturopathy, meditation, yoga, psychic massage, channeling,
neo-paganism and wicca, martial arts, reincarnation, eastern
religions and philosophy, native American vision quests and goddess
spirituality. The values of eros, soul, body, are held in high
esteem, whereas mind and intellect logos are regarded with a good
deal of suspicion.”
“Some
may laugh,” warns Tacey, “but they will not be laughing for long,
because a teleologically oriented... new age spirituality, feminine
theology and deep ecology are on the way. Then we will all be shown
the “Feminine face of God.” A new spirit will be born, savage,
untamed and primordial... also scarlet, bloody and sacrificial”...
Philosopher
No 5
p
48
Revealed: Australia's suicide
epidemic
“Ruth
Pollard Investigations Editor
August
21, 2009
AUSTRALIA
has dangerously miscalculated its suicide statistics - by as much as
30 per cent in NSW and Queensland - leaving a silent and growing
epidemic of mounting deaths.
The
figures are in stark contrast to years of backslapping by state and
federal governments, congratulating themselves for reducing suicide
rates from a peak of 2700 in 1997.
The
Herald can reveal the suicide toll is as high now as it was in the
1990s - if not higher – with experts predicting a further rise as
the impact of rising unemployment and other economic factors bite...
John
Mendoza, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Sydney
faculty of medicine, said the real rate of suicide was about
2500-2700. “With this economic downturn we can expect that to
increase by around 10 per cent, so we are looking at approximately
3000 people each year,” he said. “None of this takes into account
suicides by way of single vehicle accidents - these are the only
aspect of road accident deaths rising as a percentage of total
deaths...”
Friday, 27 November 2009
The obvious danger is that in an effort to be amusing and provide entertainment, artists are in fact being induced to kill each other off - in the real world - in a sort of neo-colonial neoclassical Dionysian frenzy of sadistic proportions. Something that approximates warfare and so create the arena to justify the imposition of various forms of antiquarian and contemporary martial training.
Meanwhile experts in the field of terrorism and counter-terrorism say their is no way to train troops for defense against torture and/or interrogation. Moreover, going back to Victor Papanek in the 1970s, it had been known that toughening people up, as per bastardisation, does not work, and that it is the existence of a support network, sympathetic and compassionate peers and not burly, hard bitten and laconic thugs, that enable soldiers to reconnect with the citizenry after a period of service.
Fascinating?
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