Content note: this post discusses psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, psychiatric labelling and coercive psychiatric practice.
I experience hallucinations, I experience what psychiatry would call delusions, I’m saying that because, when someone like me says it, the conversation usually moves straight away from what I experienced to what is wrong with me.
So here is my position, and I want it on the record before anyone rephrases it for me; the boundary between “real” and “not real” is entirely subjective. My hallucinations and my delusions are real to me, they are part of the reality that forms what I become moving forward.
This is a philosophical claim, and I mean it as one. I’m not confessing anything.
Who Draws The Line
Most accounts of psychosis start from the same assumption; there is one reality, shared and observable, and a mind that perceives something outside it is malfunctioning. The hallucination is the error, the delusion is the false belief held against the evidence, the person is where the fault lies.
The word “reality” is doing a great deal of quiet work in that account. In practice it means consensus reality; what the majority agree is there, or what the people with the authority to adjudicate agree is there. That is a social agreement, it is not an observation made from nowhere. Like every social agreement, it is enforced, and the enforcement falls on the people who don’t share it.
Shared reference points have their uses, they are how we cross roads and catch trains, but we have mistaken a tool for a metaphysics. Being outside the consensus tells you that you are outside the consensus, it does not tell you that nothing happened.
Symphrenia
This is the ground that symphrenia was built to stand on. Helen Edgar and I coined it together, and it comes as three terms rather than one.
Symphrenia is the experience of the connected mind; the embodied awareness of existential diversity. It describes a bodymind that thinks and feels with the world rather than apart from it, in porous kinship with people, creatures, places and things, both living and non-living.
Symphrenic is the identity of people who perceive connections outside normative reality, perceptions that are usually named as delusions or hallucinations, while usually also carrying labels of Autistic and ADHD.
Symphrenic cognition is what that perception does when it is worked with rather than suppressed; neuroqueering from within altered states of consciousness.
The word comes from syn, meaning with or together, and phrēn, which in Homeric Greek named the breathing chest, the place where thought and feeling were held. It was a bodymind word long before we needed one. We set it deliberately against Bleuler’s schizophrenia, the split mind, which named this same territory as a fracture.
Psychiatry already has a word for seeing meaningful connections where others see none. Klaus Conrad called it apophenia and classed it as a symptom; symphrenia asks the question that apophenia hides, who decides which patterns count as insight and which count as illness, and on what authority?
Real To Me
When I say my hallucinations are real to me, I am not saying that everyone else should see what I see. I am saying that the experience happened, it happened in my bodymind, it carried feeling and meaning, and it changed how I moved through the hours and days that followed. Its effects are as real as the effects of anything else in my life.
In the language of existential diversity, it propagated. Our existence is not contained within the skin, and neither is our experience., what I perceive changes what I do, and what I do changes the people and places around me. Something that changes what I fear, what I understand and who I become has a strong claim to being real by any measure that matters to a life.
The clinical question is whether the voice exists outside my head; I am more interested in the fact that it exists in my life.
What I Become
My work keeps returning to the Chaotic Self; a self in a permanent state of becoming, through intersecting lines of flight between the self and the relational world around it. There is no finished me for an experience to be subtracted from, everything I live through is material for what I am becoming.
That includes the experiences psychiatry would rather edit out. The clinical story often tells us that the hallucination wasn’t really us and that it was the illness talking, that sounds kind, and it is still an erasure. It asks me to disown part of my own history and to treat a section of my life as noise in the signal.
I refuse. Those experiences are lines of flight like any other, they have taken me somewhere, and where they took me is part of who I am now. To borrow the axiom that runs through The Wider Existence; all things are becoming, and nothing has become. I don’t get to become anything without the whole of what I have lived.
This Is Not A Romance
None of this means these experiences are pleasant, some of mine have been terrifying. The definition of symphrenia carries a clause for exactly this reason:;the Symphrenic person embodies the overwhelming nature of felt existential diversity, and this frequently results in distressing experiences. That sentence stays in every version of the term, because without it symphrenia turns into a romanticisation, and I have no interest in romanticising anyone’s suffering, my own included.
Calling an experience real doesn’t make it easy, what it changes is the question;“How do we get rid of this?” becomes “What is this doing, and what does this person need around it?”
That shift is creative, because much of the terror around unusual experiences comes from how others respond to them. People are disbelieved, they are restrained, secluded, detained and medicated against their will. The Ecosystemic Model of Distress says distress belongs to the coupling between a person and their environment rather than to the person alone. When a frightening perception meets a frightening response, it is not obvious which one is doing most of the harm.
Symphrenia also has constraints, and they are part of the term rather than caveats to it.
It is claimed, never assigned. No clinician, researcher or author gets to call someone Symphrenic, people take the word up for themselves or not at all.
It names a neurocognitive style, not a diagnosis. It does not replace a clinical account for anyone who wants one. If medication or clinical support helps you, symphrenia has no argument with you.
It is unfinished. A word that touches psychosis has to be shaped with a wider community of people who live it, not just the two people who coined it.
Asking A Different Question
This is an epistemic problem before it is a clinical one, it is about whose knowledge counts, who gets believed, and who gets to tell the story of what happened in someone else’s mind. People who hallucinate have spent a very long time being treated as unreliable witnesses to their own lives.
So I am asking for something fairly simple; when someone tells you about an experience you don’t share, ask what it was like rather than whether it was true. Ask what it meant to them, ask what it is doing in their life, and what would help.
I am not asking you to see what I see. I am asking you to stop insisting that what I see is nothing.