Joshua Beil This is Me

Education

 Web References

1. 1. Case Example: Joshua Beil

   www.internetguides.com/blackbo - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/18/2001   Last Visited: 10/1/2002

   It was the summer of 1996, and Joshua Beil, diligent undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, traveled to Manhattan to do a summer internship at Citicorp. Up to then Josh had been a perfectly normal twenty year old. He'd grown up in Honolulu, bodyboarding, playing tennis, doing ceramics, getting solid grades in school.
   ...
   Josh attended the Iolani School, considered one of the most exclusive and rigorous prep schools in the nation. He was a member of UCSC's Division III national championship tennis team. He excelled academically.
   
   The banking internship was his father's idea. On arriving in New York, however, beach dude Josh came over all dazed and confused. He missed his girlfriend. He could give a fuck about banking. He goofed off on the job, was reprimanded and reassigned. He felt stressed, out of place, cut off from his world. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of the psychiatric profession, which defines billable ailments, notes that psychotic episodes are often ignited by an increase in stress, and that the typical age of onset is adolescence or early adulthood. When Josh quit his job two weeks before it was to end, leaving him with unstructured days in a landscape of dizzying freedom, he untied the last rope holding him to the ground. One push, and he would take to the air.
   
   He wandered alone in Manhattan for a few days, enjoying the lightheaded feeling. One night he found himself in a nightclub called Wetlands. There, in a subterranean room, he encountered a drumming circle: a couple dozen strangers banging on tribal-looking objects, being cool, reaching for something. Josh picked up a drum and joined in, and within a few minutes he shot past them all - he entered what he describes as a "mystical trance," a feeling that the rhythm being pounded out by all of these people was emanating from him, that he was its source.
   
   By the time he got back to his apartment he was convinced that he was undergoing a spiritual awakening. He sat down and tried to "make something happen." It proved easy to do. As he watched, the walls around him began to wave, picture frames shimmied. He believed he could see the individual molecules in objects. He extended his arms out to the sides and watched particles of light shoot through his body. A fruit had sprung into existence inside his being: rare, sweet, ripening fast.
   
   • • •
   
   Lunatic. Insane. Demented. What happened in the downtown club was simple: Josh Beil began losing his mind. Josh will grant you that - he'll insist on it. That's the easy part. But he'll also insist that while he was in that mad, mad world he was in another place as well: the place of the mystic, the zone of spiritual transcendence. He was where St. Paul was when he had his vision on the Road to Damascus, where the Buddha was when, sitting cross-legged under a tree, things clicked in the most profound way.
   
   There is nothing special about such a claim on its own: lots of madmen have believed themselves to be divine. But Josh himself isn't the entire point. What makes his situation remarkable is that more and more these days, psychiatry - the profession that used to marched in lock step under Freud's pro-science/anti-religion banner - is beginning to agree with Josh. Psychiatrists and psychologists around the country, at major universities and hospitals, are studying religious experience as a natural, complex human phenomenon, and many of these professionals, noting the seeming similarities between religious ecstasy and psychosis, have concluded that psychosis and mysticism are closely related conditions, maybe so close that the differences lie only in the way society judges them.
   
   ...
   By the time Josh got back to Santa Cruz from New York, ready to begin his junior year of college, his condition had advanced. Inside him, the fruit had ripened. For one thing, he could now see auras. Most people had thin haloes of light emanating from their head and shoulders. A few, however, such as a professor in an environmental studies class, exhibited blinding cascades, eruptions of color that blasted from the top of their head straight into the sky.
   
   The word angel, he says, is poor, trivialized, inadequate, but he uses it as a shorthand: at least people have an idea of what it means. He discovered that the universe was bifurcated into dark and light, good and evil; these people with the expansive auras were creatures of light. But with this realization came responsibility.
   ...
   Instead, Josh went on a fairly stereotypical trip through the psychiatric system. Naturally, his parents were devastated at the news that their son was in a mental hospital. "We were out having dinner, and we got this call," said his father, Drake Beil. "We were stunned, like we were kicked in the stomach." Josh's mother, Jude, immediately flew to Santa Cruz and found her son in a locked-down ward, looking and acting like a perfect madman. By this time Josh was convinced that he was being held prisoner so that researchers could isolate and extract the secret of his supernatural abilities. "It was absolutely frightening to think that we had sent off into the world a gifted kid and what came back was a vegetable," said Drake Beil. "We were overcome by guilt. Did we fail in preparing him to deal with the real world? And through it all was the thought that he might not come back, that this might last forever." That fear was eventually put to rest. A sequence of hardcore psychiatric drugs - Haldol, lithium, Risperdal - created various short-term difficulties - stiffening of the fingers, a general stupefaction, a near-constant need to sleep - but also ended the neurochemical hailstorm.
   ...
   Three months after Josh entered the mental health system he came out the other side: wobbly, weak, broken, but more or less recovered in his mental abilities. The breakthrough happened fairly suddenly. He was sitting with his father watching television; "Wheel of Fortune" came on. "All of a sudden Josh started guessing the puzzle and goofing on the contestants," Drake Beil said. "Then he turned to me and said, 'Josh has entered the building.'" Shortly after, he was sent home with his parents, and set about rediscovering basic skills - reading, writing, driving - that had been burned out of working memory by the flame of madness.
   
   What makes Josh remarkable, emblematic, is not his psychosis or his recovery - by one estimate, sixty percent of people who experience a schizophrenic breakdown recover from it. What distinguishes Josh is what he did next. In a sense, he went back to the madness. Most psychiatrists will tell such patients to put the experience behind them, bury it and move on, and perhaps most patients are more than happy to leave it behind like the charred remains of a wrecked auto they have miraculously crawled out of alive. But Josh couldn't forget: that joy, the way the air had tasted, the sense of the essential goodness and deep interconnectedness of things.
   
   Eventually, after the madness had left him but while he was still in recovery, he found a shrink who agreed with him. He had been searching through the literature on the topic of psychosis and mysticism when he came across the name of David Lukoff. He wrote to Lukoff, and received a reply. A relationship formed.
   ...
   Josh Beil is not alone. Mention to one or two such people that you are researching the subject and within a short time the word spreads - the calls and emails start coming. People want to tell their stories: screwy stories, stories that you suspect never got spilled to the little man with the pointy beard while lyingon a naugahide couch.
   
   Margaret lives outside Boston. She is 63, and worships Jesus Christ through mathematics. Her lifelong psychotic condition took a turn when a new antipsychotic drug suddenly worked where others had failed: the demon that controlled her mind vanished.
   ...
   There are surely legions of people out there who, like Josh, believe they are undergoing a spiritual awakening but who are in hiding from the medical establishment, who live on the margins, who shun all professionals with "psych" in their titles the way convicts on the lam shun badges. Some of them are dangerous. Most of these people, these new psychotics, however, are not so, shall we say, paranoid. They see a doc. They take some meds. They go along with the program - up to a point. "Traditional psychiatrists aren't evil or anything, just, maybe, blind in one eye," says Josh.
   
   Josh represents these people well. Unlike many, he has come through the other side. He remembers the acid-like washes of color and rushes of liquid joy, the instants of total lucidity, but he has passed out of the zone of terror and confusion, the not knowing if it would end. He can tell you - plainly, lucidly - about the landscape that the saints trod, the purple vision