Content note: this post discusses psychosis, psychiatric diagnosis, burnout and dehumanisation. It does not describe self-harm or crisis in detail. Support links are at the end.
In Brief
Symphrenia means "connected mind". In this post we ask how far that connection reaches: through our thoughts, through time, through the lives we touch, and through the world we make with others. We are not saying that every connection a person senses is true. We are asking who gets to decide, and we would love you to help shape the answer.
Five words We Use
Rhizome: a network of roots with no centre, where any part can connect to any other (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).
Smooth space: open ground you move through by feel, rather than by a fixed map (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).
Durée: time as it is felt from inside, rather than measured by a clock (Bergson, 1889/1910).
Sympoiesis: "making-with", the idea that nothing makes itself alone (Haraway, 2016).
Transliminality: an unusual openness between inner experience and the outside world (Thalbourne & Maltby, 2008).
In our recent post we spoke of, symphrenia, meaning "connected mind", for experiences psychiatry has long described as a "split" mind. Since then the two of us have kept talking, and one question keeps coming back. If a mind is connected, how far does that connection reach, and where does the body fit?
This post is our first attempt at an answer. It is still a draft, and we would love you to help shape it.
A Mind That Does Not Stop At The Skin
The idea that a mind reaches beyond the body is not new. Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998) argued that a notebook can hold part of a memory, and that tools and other people can become part of how we think and feel. If they are right, the edge of a mind is harder to find than it looks.
For us, that edge has never felt very firm. Helen describes her thinking as less like a constellation, hopping from star to star along fixed lines, and more like a rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) borrowed this word from plants such as ginger and couch grass. A rhizome has no centre and no single starting point, so any part can connect to any other. Helen finds room in that picture for synaesthesia, hyperphantasia and the moments when one sense opens straight into another and mingles, something she has written about in Mingling with the Universe: Autistic Perception (Edgar, 2025a).
David puts it a little differently. His thought does not walk from point to point. It swims through a whole field of ideas, what Deleuze and Guattari called smooth space: open ground crossed by feel rather than by mapped roads. This is why a connection can arrive whole. No steps were skipped. The thought simply moved through a field that others cross by a fixed road.
Our two pictures are not quite the same. Helen's rhizome describes the shape of connection: a web where senses and ideas meet and mingle at any point. David's smooth space describes the movement: how it feels to drift through that web rather than travel along it. Yet they belong together, and Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) treated them as kin. A rhizome is the ground, and smooth space is how we move across it. Between us, we realised we were describing one shared experience: how we live and perceive reality, including the reality other people tell us is not real.
Time That Folds
If thought can move across a field rather than along a line, time can loosen too. Henri Bergson (1889/1910) contrasted clock time with durée, time as it is lived from inside. Many of us know this through monotropism, when attention gathers deep into one channel (Murray et al., 2005) and a single moment opens out to hold a great deal.
Helen has written about how this shapes memory (Edgar, 2025b). For her, memory is less like a filing cabinet of dated events and more like an ever-expanding, shifting spiral of felt sensations that folds back on itself. A moment from years ago can feel close, while yesterday drifts out of reach. Remembering becomes less about recall and more about re-navigation: finding the right thread, often a smell, a texture or the way the light fell, and following it gently through the rhizome.
What can look like forgetting is often a different kind of map. In our experience, this is one of the hardest things for others to understand about symphrenic lives like ours.
How Far A Life Reaches
If memory folds back through time, so does influence. The idea that a life is not contained within the bodymind sits at the centre of our work on symphrenia. Who we are, what we do and how we think carry on in how others perceive us, and through them in the lives they go on to touch. There is no clear point where that influence stops. Even sunlight is changed by us: it bounces off our bodies and travels on along a different path.
Clark and Chalmers (1998) argued that cognition reaches beyond the bodymind. Our concept of existential diversity takes that a step further. We suggest that existence itself reaches beyond the edges of the bodymind and the span of a life, and that each of us alters the world in a unique and irreplaceable way. When we first set out the idea, we put it like this:
Our lives and experiences are not contained solely within our bodyminds, therefore the nature of our existence expands not only beyond the physical boundaries of our bodymind but also the chronological boundaries of our time alive. Existential diversity, then, is the diversity of how our existence influences the space and time that surrounds us during and beyond our lives. (Gray-Hammond & Edgar, 2026)
Put simply, our existence changes the world in countless ways that do not end when we do, like drops that together make an ocean. For David, symphrenia is feeling all of this at once, constantly, like living in that sea. For Helen, who is also bipolar, the intensity waxes and wanes over time.
We should a knowledge the influence of a quote that David returns to frequently from a meaningful novel in David's life titled The Revelation Of Sonmi-451 (Mitchell, 2004).
To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time.
- Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
Making-With The World
If a life reaches this far, it is never reaching alone. On 8 October 2026, Helen attended a Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice workshop led by KR Moorhead and team. There she was struck by a word from Donna Haraway (2016): sympoiesis, meaning "making-with". Haraway's point is that nothing makes itself alone. Living things, and many non-living things, come into being together through tangled, interdependent relationships. The word shares its sym- with symphrenia, and that echo is what started this conversation.
Most psychiatry places the mind inside one human head. Sympoiesis widens the frame. It lets us see the bodymind, a word popularised by Ken Dychtwald (1977) and later taken up in disability writing (Price, 2015; Clare, 2017), as one participant in a web of people, animals, plants, rivers, buildings, objects and stories. As David says, at the level of molecules a tree and a person are made of much the same star stuff. What separates them is how we atteibute features to them, how we think and the words we use, thus how we influence the existence of fhe tree.
Humans are neither the same as trees or rivers, nor wholly different from them. Yet some of what we sense can be real for us without being solid or measurable; a kinship with a place, or an object that seems to have an inner life. Many Autistic people describe giving meaning to non-human and non-living things in this way (White & Remington, 2019). These experiences are real as relationships, whatever we decide about them as facts.
Many Indigenous peoples have long understood the world as alive and related (Kimmerer, 2013). We learn from that knowledge as guests, and we do not use it as proof. What it shows is that the line between accurate perception and error is drawn differently in different places.
When Connection Floods
Making-with is not always gentle. David describes his symphrenic episodes as monotropism spread across a whole field, with depth and breadth arriving at once. That can be beautiful. It can also be far more than one person can hold.
Researchers have described something close to this as transliminality; an unusual openness between inner experience and the outside world (Thalbourne & Maltby, 2008). Isabel Clarke (2010) has used the idea to bridge psychosis and spirituality, and we want to build on that work. What symphrenia adds is kinship, a name people choose for themselves, and a question about who gets to decide what these experiences mean.
Pushed To The Edge Of The Human
That question of who decides takes us beyond our own bodyminds and into how society treats us. Philosophers use the word posthuman to question the picture of "the human" as white, male, able-bodied and rational (Braidotti, 2013). David is clear that Neurodivergent and Mad people are not posthuman because we are more evolved, we end up in a category of "other", of not-quite-human, because society keeps refusing to treat us as fully human, thus to be viewed as Neurodivergent and/or Mad, Symphrenic, is to be posthuman. We acknowledge that our existence and experience are relayionally bound to the non-human world as much as they are the human one. When what you say is read as symptom, and what you sense is read as hallucination, you are already outside the circle. If some of what we describe here seems unfamiliar, that unfamiliarity is part of what we are trying to name.
That exclusion is not shared equally. Helen is white, female-presenting, British and educated. David is of Greek heritage, male-presenting and also educated. We are aware of our positionality, and of the privilege involved in simply being able to write about this so openly.
In England in 2024–25, Black or Black British people were detained under the Mental Health Act at nearly four times the rate of white people (NHS England Digital, 2025). Race, class, gender, disability and immigration status shape whether unusual perception is met with curiosity or with detention (Crenshaw, 1989; Metzl, 2009). Any celebration of the connected mind has to hold that.
This is also why we believe the neurodiversity movement and Mad Studies belong together. Kassiane Asasumasu, who coined the term Neurodivergent, meant it to include madness, as Nick Walker (2021) records. Symphrenia is one attempt to bring that wider reach back.
Holding The Edges
Bringing that reach back also means being making consideration of the cost; connection can hurt. As we said when we first offered the word, the Symphrenic person embodies the overwhelming nature of felt existential diversity, and that often brings real distress. Feeling linked to everything can be frightening and exhausting, and psychosis can take years from a life.
David and Tanya Adkin's work on the burnout–psychosis cycle (Gray-Hammond & Adkin, 2022), drawing on Tanya Adkin's idea of the monotropic spiral, shows how deep attention under overload, without safety, can tighten into a spiral. Rest, sensory safety and time for the interests that restore us matter as much as any theory.
Nothing here is anti-medication or anti-care. Many people find clinical support life-saving, and nothing we say takes that away.
Symphrenic is a word you can choose for yourself if it resonates. No one else can give it to you. It is not a test anyone passes or fails, and it is definitely not in the DSM.
A Web, Not A Split
We began with a question: if a mind is connected, how far does that connection reach? Our answer, for now, is further than psychiatry has allowed; it reaches through a rhizome of thought, through time that folds back on itself, through the lives we touch, and through a web of people, places and things that make us as we make them.
For more than a century, minds like ours have been described by what they are said to have lost. We would rather describe them by what they are woven into. That does not make the weight lighter. It does mean the weight can be named, held and shared, rather than carried alone as proof that something is broken.
A single drop does not choose the ocean it belongs to, but it does change it. We hope this word can be one small drop, and that others will add theirs.
To quote Mitchell (2004), again:
No matter what you do it will never amount to anything more than a single drop in a limitless ocean.
Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?
Help Us Shape This
These are ideas in progress, if your mind has ever felt less like a split thing and more like a web that will not stop connecting, we would love to hear from you. Symphrenia and Symphrenic as concepts should be nurtured by the people for whome they resonate.
We have already had some wonderful feedback from the community, including this from an anonymous reader:
I feel this is a beautiful invitation for us ~ like a mycelial bridge that invites us to sense into the spaciousness of our expansive ecosystem. I deeply appreciate the nourishing modelling you both offer with your lived experience. I've already shared this and will continue to share it widely.
If You Need Support
You do not need to be in crisis to reach out. The Hearing Voices Network offers peer support for people who hear voices or have other unusual perceptions. Intervoice connects voice-hearing networks internationally. Mind offers information and local services in England and Wales. Samaritans can be reached free, day or night, on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland.
References
Bergson, H. (1910). Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness (F. L. Pogson, Trans.). Swan Sonnenschein. (Original work published 1889)
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.
Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure. Duke University Press.
Clark, A., & Chalmers, D. (1998). The extended mind. Analysis, 58(1), 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/58.1.7
Clarke, I. (Ed.). (2010). Psychosis and spirituality: Consolidating the new paradigm (2nd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980)
Dychtwald, K. (1977). Bodymind. Pantheon Books.
Edgar, H. (2025a, June 12). Mingling with the universe: Autistic perception. More Realms. https://morerealms.com/mingling-with-the-universe-autistic-perception/
Edgar, H. (2025b, May 7). Monotropism, spiral time, and the rhizome of memories. More Realms. https://morerealms.com/monotropism-spiral-time-and-the-rhizome-of-memories/
Gray-Hammond, D. & Adkin, T. (2022, July 12). Autistic people and the burnout-psychosis cycle. NeuroHub Community. https://neurohubcommunity.org/2022/07/12/autistic-people-and-the-burnout-psychosis-cycle/
Gray-Hammond, D., & Edgar, H. (2026). The wider existence [Manuscript in preparation].
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Metzl, J. M. (2009). The protest psychosis: How schizophrenia became a Black disease. Beacon Press.
Mitchell, D. (2004). Cloud atlas. Sceptre.
Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism, 9(2), 139–156. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361305051398
NHS England Digital. (2025, September 18). Mental Health Act statistics, annual figures, 2024–25. https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-act-statistics-annual-figures/2024-25-annual-figures
Price, M. (2015). The bodymind problem and the possibilities of pain. Hypatia, 30(1), 268–284. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127
Thalbourne, M. A., & Maltby, J. (2008). Transliminality, thin boundaries, Unusual Experiences, and temporal lobe lability. Personality and Individual Differences, 44(7), 1617–1623. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2008.01.022
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, Autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
White, R. C., & Remington, A. (2019). Object personification in autism: This paper will be very sad if you don't read it. Autism, 23(4), 1042–1045. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318793408
Editor's notes (delete before publishing)
Add how readers can respond (form, email or community conversation date).
Ask Tanya Adkin how she would like to be credited for the monotropic spiral.
Confirm the workshop name and date, and whether to name Marta Rose and Meg Max.
Check both of you are happy with the positionality wording.
Check the anonymous reader is happy to be quoted.
Link "our last post" to the first symphrenia essay once it is live.