Songs of the Spadefoot Toad: Myth, Theory, and Biocognitive Perspectives in Mental Health
Matthew J. Sharps
Every generation has dealt with mental illness. Every generation has done so from an essentially local perspective, based in local concepts of the best way to understand the natural world from which mental illness has sprung.
Historically, every generation has been fairly certain that its perspective on mental illness was correct. The history of science demonstrates a certain hubris in every succeeding wave of scientific understanding- the fools of the past got everything wrong, but at least we know that we of the present, alone in all human history, have finally gotten everything right!
But then our generation’s kids arrive, to prove that Mom and Dad were idiots too. Our children prove that only their view is correct; then the generation that follows them turns up and doesn’t believe a word of it.
So it goes, the eternal academic struggle of time versus next time- but in the realm of mental health, there is a certain urgency in getting it right. I personally worked for about ten years, off and on, in various psychiatric and mental health facilities. I dealt with a variety of occasionally homicidal and frequently self-destructive inpatients, some of whom attempted or succeeded at suicide in particularly nasty ways; and based on all of that, I can attest from personal experience that it would be really nice if we could finally form an accurate model of mental illness.
But the modern world presents a problem in that respect. We now have immediate worldwide communication through the Internet. This means that local perspectives may become worldwide rather rapidly, if widely promoted by media- and the worldwide perspective on mental illness that seems most prevalent is the medical model, the idea that the best way to conceptualize mental illness is literally as illness, as a thing to be treated by physicians.
This model of mental illness originated at least as far back as two and a half thousand years, in the work of the Ionian medical philosopher Hippocrates (whose truly wonderful name can actually be taken to mean “Horsepower” in Greek). The medical model has been an extremely powerful force ever since.
The problem is that thousands of years after Hippocrates’ speculations on epilepsy, which were foundational for modern medicine but which proved eventually to be spectacularly wrong, scientists found out about microscopes and finally determined that most physical illnesses are caused by pathogenic microorganisms. These miniature creatures essentially try to live in, and simultaneously eat, our bodies. Viruses, bacteria, fungi- pathogens seem to see us as a cross between a Holiday Inn and a side of beef, and we’re exactly what they’re looking for. So, physicians poison the pathogens with drugs, or surgeons cut out the body bits that can’t be saved; it’s all covered by insurance and the problems are sometimes solved.
But in the mentalrealm, even today, there are no drugs that actually cure mental illness, in the same sense that an antibiotic can cure bronchitis, and surgery on the brain has an extremely poor track record, to say the least. There are lots of palliative medications, of course, drugs that make us feel better, even if they don’t really cure anything. Various stimulants may, for example, make those suffering from attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) feel better. The problem is that the same stimulants tend to make everybody feel better. So does Scotch, by the way- but not a lot of medical personnel prescribe it. Bartenders, yes; MDs, not so much.
Is it possible that even modern people- so wise that we use the Internet to spread important information about the Flat Earth Society- may have gotten some of our ideas about mental illness wrong?
Previous generations were just as certain as we are that they’d gotten everything right.
They hadn’t.
Mythos versus Logos and the Human Nervous System
Human beings have primate nervous systems. So did our distant ancestors, at least since they were being chased through the Mesozoic brush by the rather nasty intelligent dinosaur Troodon, who may have specialized in eating those very ancestors and who desperately wanted to know what they tasted like. And in all the millions of years since that time, with minor exceptions since the early days of ancient “theater” and the special exception of the last 60 years in which we’ve finally figured out how to make Batman look less purple on our color TV screens, everything that came into our brains from our eyeballs was real.
For many millions of years, anything which entered our ancestors’ eyes was real. It’s only been in the last sixty-odd years, the age of decent color TV, that anything believable, but unreal, was perceptually available to enter our heads.
Given this fact, it’s no wonder that our brains become confused between myths (mythos or muthos from the Greek) and logos. A logos (originally having to do with a concept of divine order) might best be defined today as an explanatory account which, as far as we know, is based in reality. A definition of mythos is more elusive, and delineating myth from logos can be even worse (see Hartog, 1988); but myths, at any rate, often incorporate traditional fictions into what are frequently intended to be explanations (Kirk, 1974). So, we might, at least for present purposes, define mythos as an attempt to explain things by making up all the good bits, and logos as an attempt to account for the world in terms of pure reality.
Now, for many millions of years, everything we actually saw was real, was logos. Now it isn’t. Our myths, in the modern world, are perceptually and perpetually available to us, on our cell phones and in glorious technicolor.
No wonder we get confused. The distinction between myth and logos, today, can be frustratingly elusive.
Myths justify our perceptions and interpretations of reality, and our place within that reality. So, they must seem to fit the facts as we understand those facts. Otherwise, myths just aren’t satisfying.
And some of the myths are real humdingers.
In a Greek myth mentioned by the comic poet Aristophanes (1962, Arrowsmith tr.), we find Zeus urinating through a sieve to make rain. If you don’t yet know about humidity, barometric pressure and isobars, as the ancient Athenians did not, this myth could make sense. Zeus lives high up above us, on the Olympian peak or in the sky. Rain comes from high up above us, and of course this urine/rain isn’t going to stink like human urine, since God-urine may be literally ambrosial, as well as having a bit of nectar thrown in. So, rain was nicely explained, mythically, without a shred of logos in the whole business.
Nobody’s sure if this was a real myth, of course- Aristophanes was something of a card- but many well-documented myths have the same this-makes-sense-and-it’s-also-a-lot-of-fun sort of feel. And almost all of them fit the local zeitgeist, the wonderful German word usually translated as “the spirit of the times.” Local zeitgeist can play holy hell with our local mythology, which typically seems to fit reality because it conforms to our ideas of what reality should be. Even when we’re incredibly wrong.
Poor Herodotus, the “father of history,” ran into this in his wonderful Histories (2006, tr. de Selincourt). Despite being occasionally and spitefully described as the “father of lies,” he’s usually very clear on telling us what he actually did or did not see or hear. He also tries very hard to separate mythos from logos. Yet even Herodotus slips up, both in telling us whether he’s talking about personal observation, mythos, or logos, and in fitting his preconceptions to aspects of reality.
For example, in his truly marvelous description of the hippopotamus (pp. 111), he at least suggests that hippos are quite big- but since the word hippopotamus means river horse, he apparently had horses on the brain and tells us that hippos sport manes and tails, and that they neigh like the real thing.
Herodotus obviously never saw a hippopotamus, but the mythos derived from linguistic similarity (horse and river horse) seems to have resulted in his confusion of mythos with logos– he appears to have believed that he was describing hippos as they actually are, manes and tails included, in logos, when he was actually creating a mythos, language-based and deeply inaccurate, but at least somewhat horsey.
At this point, it might be asked what fabulously inaccurate accounts of hippopotami have to do with ideas of mental illness.
Everything.
Language, Concepts, Myths and Mental Disorders
Based on nothing but a commonality of terms, Herodotus believed that the hippo, the river horse, must have elements in common with real horses. He therefore created what might best be described as a myth that he believed was a logos, an imaginary “river horse” that had imaginary traits in common with an actual horse. He did this because, linguistically, it seemed to fit, just as the concept of “illness” seems to fit nicely to concepts of mental disorders, as it does to physical maladies.
Like physical illnesses, mental disorders cause relative disability, and the afflicted need resolution of those disorders, or at least palliative care. We even use the illness-related term “hospital,” as in “psychiatric hospital,” for the facilities in which psychological problems may be addressed. “Illness,” at least linguistically, seems to fit the concept of mental disorder, just as horsiness seemed, for Herodotus, to fit the concept of a hippopotamus.
Do we create a medical mythos, based on language and on the shared characteristics of the mentally and physically ill, a mythos which we believe is in fact a logos? Or is the concept of mental illness as illness a true logos, as the medical model, as typically and inclusively employed, would suggest?
Obviously, complicating the issue still further, there are certainly major elements of logos in any conceptualization of the medical model. Some mental disorders are true illnesses in every sense of the word. Tertiary neurosyphilis is the textbook example; the patient may enter a psychotic state due to the action of a microorganism (Treponema pallidum), which attempts to live inside and essentially eat the patient. Other disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, present a clear neurological symptom picture, even if the etiology is uncertain. And something like a traumatic brain injury is clearly in need of a physician or surgeon’s attention. There is a set of disorders which absolutely fits the medical model, and which must be treated as such.
But what of PTSD, or ADHD, or even aspects of schizophrenia? How can we begin to explain the host of other disorders which are “functional” in nature, involving no presently-identified microorganisms or necessary physical trauma?
Enter the spadefoot toad.
Balanced Polymorphisms: Of Toads and the Human Race
Spadefoot toads, Scaphiopus bombifrons, inhabit the desert Southwest of the United States, which is a deeply insane place for a toad to live. There’s very little water there for these water-loving amphibians. Luckily, they have big hind feet (like spades, hence the name) and they are capable of generating astonishing quantities of toad mucus. So, after a rain which allows them to fill up with water, they dig themselves into the desert hardpan and plaster themselves, with their internal stores of water, in what might best be described as a large hollow mass of quick-drying frog snot. There they wait, sealed within their snotty, essentially watertight living quarters.
They wait for the next rainfall.
When it comes, they hear the patter of raindrops on the hardpan above, and they dig frantically out of their snotty abodes to reach the surface, croaking out urgent, passionate love songs, songs of froggish romance.
And loosely translated, the lyrics of these amphibian serenades are “Sex! We want Toad Sex! Right Now! Amazing Quantities of Toad Sex! Dammit!”
And in the rapidly forming desert pools, they get it. Writhing in slimy amphibian ecstasy, they create enormous glutinous lumps of eggs and toad sperm, the precursors of the next generation. Then, froggy libido spent, they hop away from the desert pools and dig their way back into the hardpan, to form more water-retentive mucus envelopes, and to await the next big rain.
And up on the surface, new things are happening.
Toad eggs, in the pools, are hatching at remarkable speeds. But despite deriving from the same Mommy Toads, two kinds of tadpoles emerge (e.g., Pfennig, Reeve, & Sherman, 1993).
One is a little slime-sucking omnivorous herbivore, slow-growing on its largely vegetarian diet.
The other type, assuming there are fairy shrimp or something similar in the given pool to stimulate its development, is a relatively gigantic carnivore with amazingly effective mouth parts and very large eyes, and it eats any living thing in the rain-pools that it can find. This high-protein diet accelerates its development further, and the big optical predator seeks out any meat available.
Including its diminutive and essentially Vegan brothers and sisters.
There aren’t nearly as many of the big carnivores as there are of the little herbivores, but their sibling cannibalism takes a toll, and we must ask the obvious question: What was Mommy Toad thinking?
Well, that would be nothing. She’s just a toad, for God’s sake.
But what was she doing?
Two things can happen to a desert pool. In one case, the seasonal rains have come, and the pool will remain to be trod in by cows and javelinas and so forth, with resulting muddy conditions very poor for optical predators like the bit carnivorous tadpoles. Under these conditions, lots of the little slime-suckers will survive.
But if the rains have not truly come, if the storm is a one-off, then the pool will evaporate quickly, too quickly for the little Vegans, with their poor diet, to develop into functioning toads. All will die.
Under those circumstances, however, the large carnivores will gobble up everything in the drying pool, including their siblings. This high-quality protein diet will allow many of them to develop so quickly that they can leave the pool nearly if prematurely grown, to complete their ontogenesis under the desert hardpan.
If the rains have truly come, Mommy Toad sacrifices some of her quasi-vegetarian offspring in the interest of the carnivores and of the other, untasted vegetarians.
If the rains haven’t arrived, all the vegetarians will die anyway, but at least some of the carnivores will survive on the high-protein, ontogenetically accelerative diet, and Spadefoot Life will go on.
It’s a balanced polymorphism.
Balanced polymorphisms occur when living creatures undergo something bad to get something good. Under drought conditions with a single hard rainfall, the spadefoot toads “accept” the violent death of the vegetarians so that at least a small portion of the population, in the shape of the carnivores, will continue.
Humans do the same sort of thing, in different ways and contexts. The terrible disease of sickle cell anemia protects some peoples of the tropical and subtropical world from the scourge of malaria in their original homelands. In the homozygous absence of the relevant alleles, malarial attacks may be catastrophic. In the homozygous presence of those alleles, terrible illness and death may occur as a result of the sickle cell disease itself. However, the heterozygous condition provides some protection from the horrifying symptoms of malaria, at least in malarial areas.
Unfortunately, when the same peoples leave those areas, the sickle cell condition becomes nothing but a nasty and sometimes deadly medical nuisance. Balanced polymorphisms can be terribly local in terms of space and times. In malaria-ridden parts of the world, aspects of the sickle cell condition reflect an advantage. In places with other types of mosquitos, the same condition can be a disaster.
Balance Polymorphisms in the Psychological Realm: PTSD and the Daytime Intrusion
In genetics, the term “balanced polymorphism” has a very specific meaning, which is co-opted in biology above the cellular level, and of course in biological psychology as we are using the concept here. The term, in the biopsychological sense, has broad utility.
Consider the phenomena of Encoding Specificity and State Dependency.
Encoding Specificity refers to the fact that if external conditions are similar when you study and are tested, your memory will tend to be better. So, as a student, if the classroom will be quiet when you take your exams, you don’t want to listen to music when you study; there won’t be any in your external environment when you take the exam.
State Dependency refers to the fact that if internal conditions are similar when you study and are tested, your memory will be better. So, as a student, you shouldn’t drink huge amounts of coffee when you take exams if you didn’t when you studied, and you shouldn’t exercise right before you study, since you won’t be in the high-arousal state of physical exercise when you take the exams.
If you know how to use them, these two phenomena, encoding specificity and state dependency, are your friends. If you know about them, you’ll study in an environment similar in important respects to the classroom in which you’ll be tested, and you’ll avoid heavy exercise, excess caffeine, alcohol or other drugs when you have to take the exam, as you presumably did when you were attending lectures and studying in the classroom.
But these two phenomena can also be your enemies; and here we see the lesson of the Spadefoot Toad, the concept of the balanced polymorphism, as we may apply it to a critical aspect of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): the daytime intrusion, a terrifying phenomenon in which the afflicted individual is transported, psychologically, back into the realm of his or her past traumas.
An infantry veteran, placed in an environment reminiscent of former battlefields, may fly on the wings of encoding specificity to a state in which he’s looking for enemy booby traps in his back yard (Sharps, 2022). If the features of the current environment are similar enough to those of the battlefield, these similarities may engender responses more appropriate to earlier combat than to current civilian life; and these combat responses, adaptively essential in combat, may prove tragically maladaptive in a modern city or suburb.
As the arousal consistent with a perceived combat environment takes over, the human “fight-or-flight” response will be engendered, and the veteran may enter the physiological and psychological state of prior combat. The state-dependent result can resemble hallucinatory behavior. The veteran responds to everyday stimuli as he would have responded to enemy action in his combat service (Sharps, 2022); and if those responses involve his former lethal combat skills, the end results can be tragic indeed.
The veteran is not psychotic. Neither is the Spadefoot Toad, and here is where the analogy becomes clear. The toad’s reproductive strategies are perfectly valid in one context, but catastrophic (for some offspring) in the other. The veteran’s combat skills were perfectly adaptive in war, but may prove catastrophic in peace.
Therefore, the ways in which these phenomena apply to humans cannot legitimately be construed as illness, in any normal medical sense; these phenomena are in fact behavioral adaptations, the efficacy of which varies widely and locally, depending on local conditions.
Many high-functioning people, including military veterans and many men and women in law enforcement, firefighting, and other emergency first-responder realms (e.g., Sharps, 2022) experience these phenomena, as older behavioral adaptations emerge in the present with reference to prior trauma. Encoding specificity and state dependency, for examplemay act in the complex dance of a balanced polymorphism. Under one set of circumstances, these phenomena help you do well on a college exam. Under another set of circumstances, they operate to produce a state of hypervigilance and overt aggression as you search for imaginary enemy troops in an imaginary combat zone; an illusory environment, generated in the mind, by the similarity of features of the current external and internal state to those of the combative past.
This is practically the quintessence of a balanced polymorphism in the production of maladaptive response; a result of the past meeting the present in a maladaptive perceptual, cognitive, and affective manner.
As mentioned above, it is clear that some types and aspects of mental disorders (e.g., neurosyphilis, Alzheimer’s disease, and TBI) are in fact “medical” in nature, in terms of any reasonable logos. But just as Herodotus extended horsey manes to his “river horses,” if we try to merge such phenomena as daytime intrusions with truly medical symptoms such as the consequences of tertiary neurosyphilis: are we promulgating logos or mythos?
ADHD- The Cro-Magnon Hunter in Elementary School?
I worked for a brief period with children with disabilities in the western United States. Many of these children were diagnosed with ADHD, attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
I would watch the most severe cases strip off their clothing and run round and round the pine trees shrieking “YAAAH!” at the top of their lungs, and I couldn’t help but wonder. In the modern world, such children, and the adults they will become, are typically treated as members of protected classes; but in the ancient world, when human beings were mammoth hunters with no concept of special education, how would their fellow mammoth hunters have responded to a person, with severe ADHD, when that person shouted at the wrong moment, scaring the mammoths into an abrupt and elephantine departure and depriving the entire tribe of the paleolithic barbecue to come?
It seems likely that such persons, tragically, would not have been tolerated. It seems probable that they would have been abandoned or perhaps actively killed; otherwise, the remaining hunters might very well have starved to death. Such persons, sadly, might have represented an unbearable burden in the unforgiving world of the distant past.
But if this is the case, then we are faced with a critical question: how can ADHD actually exist? If the syndrome were that maladaptive, any hunter-gatherer culture that tolerated it would probably have been wiped out; so how could ADHD have been preserved through evolutionary time, to manifest itself as it does today?
The following ideas are not original with the present writer (e.g., Hartman, 2019), but their importance will soon be clear.
First, is ADHD an illness, in the sense of a true medical logos?
Well, actual illnesses tend to present their symptoms in bimodal distributions. Most of us have a temperature of 98.6 F, but those of us with flu might average 102. Most of us are not vomiting, but those with the flu are bent over in the bathroom wishing they were dead. There’s pretty much no one in the middle on these dimensions; either you’re vomiting or you aren’t. We have a large distribution of the healthy, and a much smaller distribution of those afflicted by any given illness. This is the essence of bimodality.
Yet the symptoms of ADHD tend to distribute themselves relatively continuously, not bimodally, in population analyses (Buitelaar & van Engeland, 1996). There are lots of people in the middle on an ADHD distribution, with the symptoms of what might best be termed “subclinical” ADHD.
A continuous distribution. Does this look, statistically, like a bimodally-distributed medical condition, or more like a biological adaptation?
ADHD exists far more in males than in females, despite the lack of any genetic sexual factor. Individuals so afflicted may actually be “calmed down” by stimulants such as Ritalin, rather than by nervous system depressants. This is presumably because they may be biologically programmed in some way to seek high levels of stimulation. It is possible, though of course disputed, that this may be more characteristic of most males than of most females; and it is at least intriguing that for many centuries, most human societies have employed a division of labor in which males were typically the large-animal hunters, an activity requiring a lot of energy and the tolerance of very high levels of stimulation.
Persons with ADHD may hyperfocus, with intense and sustained concentration, on things in which they are interested. If they are not interested, they move on immediately. They often have greater energy than normal people, and they tend to be impulsive. Obviously, they are frequently nightmares as students in the classroom; even those with mild symptoms tend to experience difficulties with school environments, and the most afflicted, those I dealt with, are unlikely to be highly functional in any environment.
Yet the most afflicted, in a continuous distribution (Buitelaar & van Engeland, 1996), would be at the high, far end of the biological distribution; and they would, sadly, almost certainly be knocked on the head by their fellow hunters in the ancient world.
But what of those who only had some of these attributes, those whose ADHD was subclinical?
What of hunters who would focus intently on a valley which might provide game, but who would lose interest immediately if no game was found? What of hunters with extraordinary energy, who would attack a game animal impulsively? If you’re going up against a wooly rhinoceros when you’re only armed with a pointy rock, you’d better not think about it too long.
Impulsivity can be your friend, at least in a paleolithic hunt. Not so much in a classroom. Here, again, we might hear the polymorphic song of the Spadefoot Toad.
It has been suggested, for these and other reasons, that ADHD is not a medical condition at all, at least in its subclinical manifestations; rather, that it reflects a balanced polymorphism. There are many, many people who could not function as ancient hunters, either because they had too much of the condition (as did former patients with whom I dealt, children with disabilities) or because they had too little of it (the average modern person who can function reasonably well in a cubicle, but who may be useless in an outdoor emergency).
But those in between on an ADHD symptom continuum, between too much and too little, may have provided most of the meat in our paleolithic past.
ADHD is a condition in which, if this is true, logos mixes rather freely with mythos. Some individuals manifesting the condition simply must be medicated if they are to function at all in any society. Medical care here is palliative or essential for maintenance; logos. However, do we wish to extend this logos into the realm of mythos, as Herodotus did with the mane of the hippopotamus, or might it be better to recognize specific aspects of ADHD as adaptations which, like those of the Spadefoot Toad, have polymorphic characteristics in fine balance with the realms in which they operate? ADHD-related behavior, certainly at subclinical levels, may be the manifestation of an ancient biopsychologically adaptive set of evolved characteristics; it may be myth to extend the logos of the medical model to that subclinical realm.
If so, it might be better, psychologically, for the clinician to attempt to tailor the patient’s environment to his or her proclivities, at least to the degree possible and at least in less severe cases. Subjectively, I personally found there was little I could do for the most severely afflicted children with ADHD; their treatment had to be left to the medical logos. However, those somewhat less afflicted, when presented with play or skills-training situations that completely absorbed their attention, frequently exhibited no ADHD symptoms at all; at least, that is, until the activity in which they were absorbed was over. For those individuals, the medical model was far more mythos than logos; they needed an environment appropriate to their behavioral proclivities, rather than a radical biochemical alteration of those proclivities.
The medical model cannot be neglected here; those on the ADHD distribution who are most severely afflicted may not be able to function, in any conceivable environment, without medical intervention.
However, for those less severely afflicted, treatment might rely less on chemical alteration of the patient’s brain than on the realization that the patient might flourish better in an environment at least modestly tailored to that patient’s actual psychology. This opens new and important fields for applied research in psychology, and even in anthropology.
After all, it’s possible that our species owes such people all that mammoth meat.
Schizophrenia, Schizotypality, and Shamanism
I also worked for a number of years in the acute units of psychiatric hospitals, and in other facilities dealing with persons afflicted with schizophrenia. These people exhibited cognitive fragmentation, heightened emotional lability, loss of reality contact, and, frequently, hallucinations and delusions. They could not function well, or perhaps at all, in any conceivable human society. The medical model had to be applied as logos here; without medication, these patients were impossible to manage, even on an inpatient basis. Here we might enter a debate as to whether medication was needed for the patients, or for the society in which they lived; but on a practical basis, this debate is not particularly helpful. The political and philosophical aspects of this debate are of great interest (e.g., Szasz, 1961); but ultimately, people must survive, and the schizophrenic inpatients of my acquaintance were not likely to do so without medication.
And yet, with the example of ADHD to guide us, we might ask a critical question: even though medication was necessary for their management, were these patients ill in a classical medical sense, as they might be with influenza or bronchitis? Or were they, perhaps, the statistical “bad end” of a balanced polymorphism, as we might see with the most severe cases of ADHD? Is the Spadefoot Toad, so to speak, still with us and singing? Was the maladaptive behavior of these inpatients a statistical fluke, a biological proclivity which might render them useless or worse to their ancient clans or tribes, but which might be statistically essential to provide a less severe but related type of person within those clans or tribes?
The answer may be yes.
Between statistical normality and schizophrenia lies the realm of the schizotypal. These are people who may function well in the real world, but who may believe that their dreams have special significance. They may have a sense of personal, mystical powers. They may believe in personal, mystical connections to the natural world.
If schizophrenia is the low-functioning end of a distribution in which schizotypality lies between that extreme and statistical normality, we can see how schizophrenia might be the necessary consequence of the evolutionary existence of schizotypality; yet what would be the adaptive significance of schizotypal characteristics?
Robert Sapolsky (1997) may have the answer.
Sapolsky discussed the fact that, worldwide, shamans, local guardians of mystical beliefs, tend to exhibit schizotypal tendencies as defined. One cannot, of course, “diagnose” people across cultures. Yet those who bear the title “shaman” or its equivalent, tend toward these characteristics. Including beliefs in personal, supernatural powers.
How could this have helped the human species?
Consider two ancient villages, or clans or tribes, which must battle to the death over resources, or which simply want to battle to the death because they really hate each other.
One has no shaman, and therefore no hope of glory or of postmortem benefits. For them, death is a blank wall, devoid of any reward.
But the other group has a shaman, who not only assures them of the gods’ favor, but also of vast rewards in some form of paradise. The shaman possesses the supernatural faith and fervor characteristic of the schizotypal state.
Which gang of ancient warriors, stone hammers and pointy rocks deployed, will win the coming battle?
It would be a good idea to bet on the bunch equipped with the shaman, every time. Their fear of death will be muted by the promise of eternal reward; and they will continue to kill courageously and with confidence for as long as necessary.
It is interesting that, in the human species, there is not a single culture that does not believe in a supernatural realm. Belief in our tribal supernatural is our friend; it will help us to kill our enemies. And if for some reason we do not believe in such magical assistance, our warriors will be at a significant psychological disadvantage indeed.
In this adaptive, evolutionary sense, schizophrenia might best be viewed not as an illness, but as the maladaptive end of a distributed balanced polymorphism, in which most people need to be normal workers, a few need to be schizotypal shamans, and a small number (the true schizophrenics) bear the unlucky consequences of the nature of a statistical distribution. This is not, of course, naively to imply some form of biotic adaptation; but through normal evolutionary mechanisms, a group which possesses the requisite individuals who contribute to tribal success, including success in tribal warfare, is very likely to provide more descendants to the future. To have schizotypal shamans, we must have a few schizophrenics; and if this is true, they are not “ill” in a bimodally-distributed sense, but are statistically atypical.
True schizophrenics will certainly require medical attention, within a medical model; but to extend this fact to the schizotypal may to extend logos into mythos. Behavioral assistance to those less afflicted on this continuum might better be treated, if necessary, by means of empirically determined psychoeducational interventions, which may help the given individual to tailor his or her behaviors to the real demands of local environmental conditions.
The lesson of the Spadefoot Toad, the model of the balanced polymorphism, may truly extend to the realm of the schizotypal. If, for too many years, we have extended the medical model into a realm in which that model transforms logos to mythos, we may need to make major alterations in our treatment plans; and once again, psychology and anthropology may provide relevant answers.
Myth, Mental Illness, and Medicine
In view of all of these considerations, we can say that there are aspects of “mental illness” which must be treated medically, or at least with the collaboration of the medical realm. There is no intent here to recapitulate the “Myth of Mental Illness” concepts (Szasz, 1961) in which political or cultural motivations may render a purely scientific consideration largely impossible. Rather, the intent here is to frame a picture of mental disorder that productively distinguishes the human capacity for mythos from that of logos in application.
Some mental illnesses are purely and classically medical in origin (e.g., tertiary neurosyphilis). Others may require palliative medication, or medication simply from the viewpoint of patient management (e.g., schizophrenia as opposed to schizotypality, and severe ADHD as opposed to subclinical tendencies toward the disorder). In others, however, we may find the extension of mythos into logos. Just as Herodotus extended horsey characteristics to hippopotami based on the linguistic convention of “river horse,” just as he extended mythological considerations into what he believed to be a logos, we tend to extend the legitimate logos of the medical model into arenas in which it may function as a myth.
Herodotus allowed linguistically horsey aspects of hippopotami to lead him to treat the hippopotamus as a literal horse; mane and horsetail included, this was simply too much, an invasion of logos with unintended mythos. The same may be true for purely medical approaches to mental disorders- overextension of such approaches may create the equivalent of an attempt to place a saddle and bridle a hippopotamus, with perhaps even more catastrophic results. The medical model clearly has a place in the realm of mental disorders; but it is not the only place in that realm.
Psychological Possibilities
The work of Plato (1929, Bury tr.) suggests that a major cause of mental illness may lie in ignorance. This may well be true, although obviously not exclusively; learning the ecology of Treponema pallidum is not, for any given patient, going to cure neurosyphilis.
However, I have seen a veteran victim of PTSD “cured” of terrifying dreams of supernatural beings, whispering in an evil language, on his realization that the supernatural voices were his dreams of coded radio callsigns, originally heard through the interference of helicopter engines in Southeast Asia. I have also seen another veteran “cured” of crawling around his backyard looking for enemy booby traps when forcibly informed of the need to stop toasting his dead comrades with too much Scotch, and of the existence of the “triggers,” encoding-specific elements of his physical environment, that tended to lead him into the relevant state.
Awareness, as suggested by Plato, is your friend. It is the friend of the patient, and of the mental health professional dealing with that patient.
Frequently, mental health professionals are unaware of the power of cognition in the interdiction of mental health crises. Yet it is there; and one reason we don’t deal well with it is that the subfields of psychology tend to be very insularized. Cognitive scientists don’t generally mingle with clinicians at research conferences, and vice versa. Advances in cognitive science simply may not enter the clinical realm, which, by precedent, may continue to employ techniques from many decades past.
But what has modern cognitive science to offer the clinical realm?
Bransford and Johnson (1973) demonstrated clearly the power of prior frameworks for understanding, which here might include an understanding of the reasons and nature of a psychological crisis before patients enter it. People may well benefit from knowledge of their interior worlds, and what they might do to avoid the precipitation of psychological crises and counter the consequences when they occur. Prior frameworks for understanding, in the mental health realm, can be enormously important in countering the negative influence of the ignorance discussed by Plato.
Haviland and Clark (1974) showed that the best way to convey such information is explicitly, rather than in an implicit manner. Attempting to force people to discover “insights” within themselves may prove far less efficient than the explicit provision of the information they need to understand the connections between what they’re going to feel and how it is likely to influence their actions.
In the same vein, we should show any given patient, on a feature-intensive basis, the specific nature of the solutions he or she may find to interdict mental health crises. We should not rely on overarching gestalts, broad, nonspecific statements, to instruct people in specific goals. We should never shout at a patient the equivalent of, “You know how you are? STOP BEING LIKE THAT!” It won’t help. Therapists must take the time to spell behavioral solutions out, in a hierarchy of feature-intensive, explicit, stepwise refinement, for any given patient, point by point (Sharps, 2003, 2022).
There are many other cognitive considerations which should be taken into consideration, in any clinical intervention; but all might be condensed into a serious consideration of our Latin designation, Homo sapiens sapiens (literally meaning the wise, wise guy). We’re apparently so wise that we named ourselves twice; but even the ancients, those who gave us this name, perceived our cognitive powers as central to our natures.
And perhaps, our cognitive powers are central to our recovery from mental disorders. Some of these disorders have medical aspects, true; but other mental conditions may be more under our cognitive control, as suggested by Plato, than we may believe in our current cultural balance of logos and mythos.
In first responder psychology, for example, I have personally seen psychological interventions, based in prior, explicit, feature-intensive psychoeducational cognitive principles, operate to the great benefit of the recipients in realms ranging from training in counterterrorist bomb detection, (Sharps, 2022) to cognitive-behavioral interventions for first responders which have been massively efficacious in recovery and reduction of symptoms. We may anticipate similar success if modern cognitive principles are incorporated more into the treatment of mental disorders, changing the patient from the passive recipient of medicines to the active knower of prior, explicit, feature-intensive cognitive frameworks which may interdict the initiation of psychopathological behavior.
The incorporation of the principles of modern cognitive science into the clinical world, always with a prior, explicit, feature-intensive framework of the understanding of logos versus mythos in the medical, cognitive, and related realms,may finally result in an effective multidisciplinary approach to the astoundingly heterogenous etiology and pathology of the vast panoply of afflictions currently subsumed under the heading of mental illness.
References
Aristophanes (1962; tr. W. Arrowsmith). The Clouds. New York: Mentor.
Bransford, J.D., & Johnson, M.K. (1973). Considerations of some problems of comprehension. In W.G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Buitelaar, J.K., & van Engeland, H. (1996). Epidemiological approaches. In Sandberg, S. (Ed.), Hyperactivity Disorders of Childhood, pp. 26-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hartmann, T. (2019). ADHD: A Hunter in a Farmer’s World. New York: Healing Arts Press.
Hartog, F. (1988; tr. J. Lloyd). The Mirror of Herodotus. London: University of California Press.
Haviland, S.E., & Clark, H.H. (1974). What’s new? Acquiring new information as a process of comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 512‐521.
Herodotus (2006; tr. A. de Selincourt). The Histories. London: Folio.
Kirk, G.S. (1974). The Nature of Greek Myths. New York: Penguin.
Pfennig, D.W., Reeve, H.K., & Sherman, P.W. (1993). Kin recognition and cannibalism in spadefoot toad tadpoles. Animal Behavior, 46, 87-94.
Plato (1929; tr. R.G. Bury) Timaeus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sapolsky, R.M. (1997). The Trouble with Testosterone. New York: Scribner.
Sharps, M.J. (2003). Aging, Representation, and Thought: Gestalt and Feature-Intensive Processing. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
Sharps, M.J. (2022). Processing Under Pressure: Stress, Memory, and Decision-Making in Law Enforcement (3rd ed.). Flushing, NY: Looseleaf Law.
Szasz, T. (1961). The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper
This article is Copyright Dr. Matthew J. Sharps, all rights reserved. It was initially published in The Next Truth magazine Editor Maria Anna van Driel.
