Perceval broke into a spiritual promised land, the pinnacle of the psychotic achievement, for short periods when he would feel “transported to heavenly places.” In this realm of the Gods, he felt he experienced eternity and that he lived beyond birth and death. He sensed a separation between his consciousness and his physical being. Doubt was almost completely gone, but when it flashed he saw what he called the realm of pure imagi-nation, or the divine mind. It led to a kind of numbness in which he became absorbed, fascinated in spiritual pleasure. But at times it wavered like a mirage, and a fear was sown—that he might lose it.
Fear became a rush of energy. He looked back in envy at the height of his spiritual bliss and knew that it had gone. He became more aggressive in his attempt to win spiritual success from the powers. He overturned doubt easily, and any moment of it he saw as a demonic influence. The voices continually issued conflicting commands, but always they demanded further spiritual submission from him. He was in the realm of Paranoia, where he had to protect himself “against attacks from all directions.” He felt that only the exertion of greater energy, speed, and effi-ciency could save him from the nightmarish world that was coming.
On entering the realm of Hell he experienced the full fury of his own projections. He could not tell if he was committing acts of destruction or creation. His speed of mind was tremendous and in a constant momentum of change between giving birth and dying. He was given to feelings of hatred and of being hated, and, while fighting against the projections, he began to strike inward. Voices now ordered him to destroy himself. When the “crack” occurred he was at a peak point of being overwhelmed, alternately burning or being frozen in an environment of terror.
When Perceval first became ill he went through this cycle in about three months. After that, he recycled through it many times. In the last stages of his illness, he would recycle through the six intensified realms in a matter of minutes. It seems that, once done, it became progressively easier to do. He might have a moment or two of rest, or even clarity—particularly during his most despairing moments of the Hell realm—and then it would begin again. There appears to be a significant natural gap, or break, in the Hell realm, where one is open to learning things, to seeing things in a new light—and most importantly, where one is open to human intimacy and friendship. All those possibilities, of course, were absent in Perceval's dismal life at the madhouse.
In his loneliness he often thought of biblical Prophets and many other mystics and saints. They might understand his suffering, he believed, for they had lived through similar experiences; they also had been commanded about, and had been cast from the bliss of heaven into the abyss of the “dark night of the soul.” As do many people in psychosis, Perceval struggled with the ageless question of the subtle distinction between a tempestuous spiritual journey and true madness, and he was certain that he was being acted upon by the same power that had influenced the Prophets and the Apostles.
S TA G E S O F R E C O V E R Y
There is a silent despair in the modern world about the possibility of recovery from psychosis. Only occasionally is the despair publicly acknowledged, but privately, for the vast majority of psychiatrists and psychologists, recovery does not exist. They have become accustomed to seeing patients “relapse”—make a temporary adjustment to life and then fall apart under the pressures of life into the same psychotic world as before. They have seen this so often that they have come to believe that relapse is inherent in the illness, the expectable natural history of the disease. This professional belief system has been accepted and has passed into the general culture. Most people have become acclimatized to a belief that psychosis is a terminal illness, and have thus become unconscious and numb to their own despair. When Perceval declared himself recovered, he was met with tremendous scorn. He had been in the madhouse many months by then, and everyone around him believed he was still dangerous to himself and others. The miseries of his treatment persisted. In the course of proclaiming his recovery, he wrote over a hundred letters (some of which the hospital never sent), petitioning his mother, brothers, sisters, friends, lawyers, and the courts for his release from strict confinement and to be given a freedom commensurate with the abilities he had recovered. At first he addressed his mother; she, as his legal guardian, held the key to his confinement. He tried to explain his improvement and his wish for freedom: “After I began to recover from my frightful dream . . . I understood both things and persons to be really what they were—though not always, nor for sometime . . . though in a dream my behavior was still more moderate.” But all of his petitions were denied. He once tried to run away but was caught and restrained. Several famous psychiatrists of the time visited him and prescribed continued asylum treatment. One of them refused his petition, stating that because he wore his hair long and in ringlets (which Perceval called “natural and manly”) in knowing defiance of the hospital code of behavior, and because he refused to simply be a good patient and do what might be necessary for his quick release (like being kinder to his worthy family and less accusatory of his physicians), his judgment was obviously impaired and his mind required continued treatment.
How he longed to be away from the excitement and provocation of asylum life and to be in a more simplified environment where he might work at stabilizing his mind. Although he was held in confinement for another two years, he kept his longing for freedom alive.
Almost incredibly, during this time and while utterly alone Perceval was discovering a pathway to recovery from psychosis. It is difficult for us to know just how unique that discovery was or to appreciate how often and silently such an event may currently be happening in our hospitals and asylums. Clearly, Perceval had no scheme to do it, at least at first.
Recovery was an evolution in process: He had decisions to make at each step of the way, and there were many side roads and environmental obstructions. Although it is now popularly believed that recovery is improbable for people who are as ill as Perceval, not only did Perceval fully recover—and only the course of his life can demonstrate that—but he did so under the conditions of madhouse care!
The hectic course of his recovery reveals some basic principles, which apply to anyone during the cyclic journey of psychosis. When these insights made it clear to him just what he had to do to recover, he set an iron determination in that direction. It is through these principles that the story of Perceval's recovery can best be told.
The Wisdom of Recovery
There are experiences of sudden “shock” or “astonishment,” momentary “islands of clarity” and awakening. At such a moment Perceval said “scales fell from my eyes.” Often these moments are accompanied by horror at the self-deception in which one has been immersed.
There is also a more gradual awakening that occurs in the intervals between the sharp points of clarity. This happens bit by bit, sometimes agonizingly slowly, sometimes bitterly. But it also includes moments of delight and confidence. Although this sequence happens over and over again and its progression is cumulative, an active, continuous effort is required on the part of the one recovering from psychosis.
Each stage of recovery has its own particular danger. The danger of being drawn back into the whirlpool dream of psychosis is powerful, beckoning, and even irresistible. One can become enamored with the sudden awakenings and easily miss the point by turning them into self-aggrandizements or by attempting to create them at will. And during the periods of gradual awakening, one sometimes feels exquisitely precarious, combining what Perceval called a “child's sensitivity and an imbecile ability to control wild thoughts.'' There is a continual undertow of grief and nostalgia to relax back into the dream. Compared to the vivid display of losing one’s mind, recovery feels boring and hopeless. One’s intention and effort may give way. There is no other way to describe what is needed to accomplish the dangerous journey of recovery other than calling it courage.
Recovery is neither a distinct event nor a border to cross over. Moments of recovery are happening all the time, even in the midst of losing mind. Insanity and sanity are occurring together. Wildness of mind and clarity of intelligence are arising side by side. Spontaneous insights about how to recover actually present themselves as veiled messages within a delusion itself, and they are either recognized or lost.
If any stage of the natural unfolding of recovery is thwarted, frustrated, or actively opposed by the environment, the effort is either abandoned com-pletely or it becomes as it did with Perceval, a grim struggle for survival.
The implication of these principles is enormous, for it means that everyone has the capacity to recover from psychosis and that it might be done in similar stages: a virtual unwinding of psychosis. The following stages are described from the point of view of Perceval's experience. Each stage involved a recognition or insight into the nature of his own psychosis. Each stage is a quality of mind, not in the sense of an intensified realm but a particular moment of sanity within a realm, having its own emotions, logic, and serious dilemmas. Although they do not always follow in sequential order, they can be something of a guide through the predicaments inherent to the recovery process.
Detachment From Delusion
Within the first months in the madhouse, Perceval admitted to himself that nothing could deter him from attempting to comply with the commands of his delusion short of his own death. All his determined efforts at spiritual submission in the past had only led to this. He now openly acknowledged his total enslavement.
But then, as early as one month after the “crack,” he had startling glimpses of recovery:
A kind of confidence of mind came in me the evening after I had been threatened (by voices), and saw the thunderbolt fall harmlessly by my side . . . nothing ensuing, confidence again came in me, and this night a change took place in the tone of the voices.
Then, this kind of event happened several more times. That is what it took. He said that only “repeated experience of the falsehood of the promises made to me in delusion could succeed in making me relinquish altogether my attempts to comply.” Whatever this “confidence” was, it had the effect of also altering the delusion itself.
Doubt was returning. It spelled the beginning of the end of his bondage to delusion. But recovery beyond this point he said was “long in coming,” taking six months to complete, because soon after the episode of the failed thunderbolt Perceval was strapped to his bed and “became here again a sport of the wildest delusion.”
The shock of doubt allowed doubt to gain a foothold. Memories and reminders of that doubt lingered. But each moment of clarity was opposed by a recoil or aftershock, a rapid alternation between clarity and delusion. Gradually, the delusion itself was affected; with each moment of clarity there appeared a new edition of the delusion—a compromise delusion—which took into account his increased awareness and still exhorted him to maintain an allegiance to miraculous powers.
I have so long been deceived by my spirits that I now did not believe them when they told the truth. I discovered at last that I was on earth, in natural, although very painful circumstances, in a madhouse . . . and I knew I was looked upon as a child.
He slowly concluded, from the incessant contradictions within the commands of the voices, that the voices were as confused as he was. In this way, the voices were gradually weakened and eventually terminated— and Perceval makes a point of this—one at a time.
Discipline And Effort
Frustratingly, shortly after each successful “disobedience” to the spirits, he would again unconsciously relapse into reckless obedience. Only further discipline and effort could counteract that kind of deterioration of his willpower.
Voices sporadically occurred (at first making no sense) that urged him to “recollect” himself; that is, to become more aware of his situation and prevent “going into a wrong state of mind . . . by keeping my head to my heart and my heart to my head.” He repeated this slogan to himself over and over again throughout his recovery as a means of reminding himself to keep his body and mind together: “Without that, my head wandered from my heart and my heart turned from my head all through the day.” Voices told him he was “ruminating all day long,” and a “moving white light appeared as a guide” and would indicate to him when he was lost in thought.
A distinct kind of effort was required to recollect himself and bring himself back to the details of his physical world. When he could do that there came a synchronization of body and mind that strengthened his ability to resist the temptations of delusion. For example, on attempting to write letters, every syllable of these letters
I saw by illusion before I wrote them, but many other sentences also appeared besides which those I chose; and often these sentences made light of or contradicted what went before— turning me to ridicule and that ridicule goading me to anger and mad-ness, and I had great labor and difficulty to collect myself to seize those that were at all consecutive—or not too violent—or not too impassioned. This was extremely painful.22
Any sudden bursting of an illusion or of a glaring self-deception would “stupefy” him. At that moment his wild thoughts would cease and allow him to see things clearly. It took an effort to utilize that moment and not be distracted from it:
I caught the reflection of my countenance in the mirror. I was shocked and stood still; my countenance looked round and unmeaning. I cried to myself, ‘Ichabod! my glory has departed from me’; then I said to myself what a hypocrite I look like! So far, I was in a right state of mind; but the next thought was, 'How shall I set about to destroy my hypocrisy'; then I became again a lunatic.23
Puncturing a delusion, he realized, might come from simple sensations or even a scattered fact, and he began to seek them out. Once, he wrote to his brother to check out a memory as to the correct date of the death of his dog (which figured largely in one of his delusions), and its contradiction to the delusion once again “astonished” him. Another time, by requesting a copy of his baptismal certificate, he instantly dissolved his belief in the spirit voices who told him that he was not really his mother's son. “To confirm the suspicion I had of being deluded my mind needed these circumstantial evidences to be corrected entirely of its errors.” He noticed that there were perceptions whose sudden impact he had been avoiding, as if by a reflex. When he saw his face: “I observed on catching my face in the pane of glass that my head involuntarily turned away and I turned back to observe what had struck me.” It looked disfigured and moronic, and it “recollected” him. After this event, Perceval always carried a pocket mirror with him, so that he could quickly check and see if he looked like a madman or not. Finding “errors” everywhere within his delusions, a defiance against the voice of delusion rose up in him. He would hold himself back from action: “I began to hesitate before I acted and joked inwardly at the absurdities of my delusions.” Then, he habitually disobeyed the voices:
"It was usually a reason now for me to do anything, if I heard a spirit forbid it. I was sorry I had not done so before, being prevented by superstitious fear, for it seemed to bring me to my senses and make me calm and reasonable.” But even as his conviction in the delusions was eroding, “new delusions suc-ceeded those that were dissipated.” The effort had to begin again.
Discovery
His loneliness was profound. While living in a split world, where delu-sion existed side by side with reality, his sense of detachment from people was alarming: “They were dead to me, and I dead to them, and yet with that painful apprehension of a dream, I was cut off from them by a charm, by a riddle I was every moment on the point of guessing.”
His curiosity was engaged. The presence of other people called him out from self-absorption, even when this put him at the risk of being punished for it by the voices. “A beautiful servant girl whom I called Louisa” had such an effect:
The sight of a female at all beautiful was enchanting to me. I now began to recover my reflection rapidly and to make observations upon character and people around me.24
The spirit voices themselves “directed my attention with greater rapidity” to the “variety of situation and ornament.” Then he could make many distinctions and discriminations between reality and that which took place within the thick veil of illusion: “As I came gradually to my right mind I used to burst into fits of laughter at the discovery of the absurdity of my delusion.”
He “experimented” and played with his delusory perceptions. What he discovered intrigued him, and he began to further examine the nature of his strange perceptual processes. He discovered that he had an exaggerated tendency to “dream” even while awake; that is, to pull back from see-ing outward sensations and to see instead the images of memory.
These “investigations” were carried out during brief periods when he pushed himself to stand at the mental precipice between dream and reality, a precarious position. Such an episode might begin by accident: He would be struck by the sudden appearance of a voice or a vision, and then quickly decipher it down to its component parts, as one can sometimes do on awakening from a night dream. In doing this, Perceval first saw a simple “illusion,” like an afterimage, echo, or misperception. Built upon that, a hallucination rapidly took form by an elaboration on the ordinary illusion, which had only been a “trick” of the eye or ear: “I saw and discovered the slight that was played upon me. A trick, which until I became stronger in health, made me doubt that the objects around me were real.”
Immediately upon that, he noticed a second trick, which changed the meaning of the perception. This second overlay was caused by what Perceval called the “power of resemblance.” This function reshaped the illusion to the likeness of a memory. Then a third trick created a sense of conviction, by a power to personify the illusion or grant it the privilege of independent existence. When a newly created existence arose it would begin to act for, against, or indifferent to him. The delusion became solidified beyond doubt when he engaged it in dialogue.
As Perceval's discipline of self-observation became sharpened, he saw that all these steps occurred very quickly and outside his awareness. He was astonished by the speed at which a delusion could be put together and that he could even track that degree of speed. In short, he discovered that wildness of thought and disordered sensations together create hallucination, but only when one enters into dialogue with it does one become truly insane.
This self-observation and many of Perceval's further observations about the nature of psychotic perception are some of the most insightful ever made and are central to understanding the process of recovery. The examples that follow demonstrate an accumulation of insight about his own wildness of mind, all of which he needed in order to cut through his intoxication with delusion. They are presented in the same order as they occurred to him.
1. I discovered one day, when I thought I was attending to a voice that was speaking to me, that, my mind being suddenly directed to outward objects—the sound remained but the voice was gone; the sound proceeded from a neighboring room or from a draught of air through the window or doorway. I found, moreover, if I threw myself back into the same state of absence of mind, that the voice returned, and I subsequently observed that the style of address would appear to change according to the mood of mind I was in; still later, while I was continuing these observations, I found that although these voices usually come to me without thought on my part, I had sometimes a power, to a certain extent, to choose what I would hear.²⁵
2. The thunder, the bellowing of cattle, the sounds of a bell, and other noises, conveyed to me threats, or sentences of exhortation and the like; but I had till now looked at these things as marvelous and I was afraid to examine into them. Now I was more bold.²⁶
3. Prosecuting my examinations still further, I found that the breathing of my nostrils also, particularly when I was agitated, had been and was clothed with words and sentences. I then closed my ears with my fingers, and I found that if I did not hear words—at least I heard a disagreeable singing or humming in the ears—and that those sounds, which were often used to convey distinct words and sentences, and which at other times seemed to the fancy like the earnest cries, or confused debating, or expostulations of many spirits, still remained audible; from which I concluded that they were really produced in the head or brain, though they appeared high in the air, or perhaps in the cornice of the ceiling of the room; and I recognized that all the voices I had heard in me, had been produced by the power of the Deity to give speech to sounds of this nature produced by the action of the pulses, or muscles, or humours, &c. in the body—and that in like manner all the voices I had been made to fancy outside of me, were either formed from or upon different casual sounds around me; or from and upon these internal sounds.²⁷
4. Upon discovering the nature of an illusion caused by the projection of an afterimage; I drew from this the following inferences: that neither when I had seen persons or ghosts around me—neither when I saw visions of things—neither when I dreamt—were the objects really and truly outside of my body; but that the ghosts, visions, and dreams are formed by the power . . . in reproducing figures as they had before been seen on the retina of the eye—or otherwise to the mind—or by arranging minute particles in the visual organs, so as to form a resemblance or pic-ture of these figures—or by combining the arrangements of internal particles and shades with external lines and shades and etc. so as to produce such a resemblance and then making the soul to conceive, by practicing on the visual organs, that what it perceived really within the body exists outside, throwing it in a manner out as the specter is thrown out of a magic lantern.²⁸
5. Though I still occasionally heard these voices and saw visions, I did not heed them more then I would my own thoughts, or than I would dreams, or the ideas of others. Nay, more than that, I rather acted diametrically opposed to them.²⁹
The strength to face one's delusion comes from all such insights into the simple deceptions that go into creating a psychotic perception. Once, a magnificent vision of a naked woman, said to be his eldest sister, suddenly arose before him from the bushes in the garden and beckoned him. Just choose her, the voices told him. Recollecting how he had been so deceived by visions, he turned away, saying, “She might come up if she would, or go down if she would—that I would not meddle with the matter! At this rude reply the vision disappeared.
This response to a vision became Perceval's second most important slogan for recovery. It became his mental practice for recovery: a way of saying no to internal fascinations.
Anyone awakening from a night dream, a daydream, or even a moment of absentmindedness “comes to.” This is usually a moment of sudden expansion of awareness into one's environment. It is this kind of environmental awareness that Perceval tried to cultivate in himself. He studied the mechanism in himself: “Having to recollect myself, I became more aware of my real position, my thoughts being called out from myself to outward objects.” He pinpointed the sensation of being “called out” from delusion as being a kind of passionate energy toward the world—shot out like an arrow to sensory objects—and he tried to train himself to recognize it more quickly. But there was a major obstacle. He found that this sudden openness to his sensory environment was chronically being interrupted and covered over by a mechanism that felt like a “film,” or a fog, insidiously descending over his mind and clouding his awareness. Inevitably, he found himself projecting images onto this film, images that became animated, thus cutting him off from external sensory awareness. He finally solved this riddle by practicing at becoming quick enough to recognize the subtle sensation of the film as it first came to him, and then cutting through it. Thus, the sensation of the film itself became his moment of “recollection,” the reMinder To Wake Himself Up.
Courage
Each time Perceval woke up to the “barbarous circumstance” of asylum life, he became morbidly dejected with guilt, grief, and “a deep sense of self-disgust and degradation.” He noted that when this happened to himself or any of the other inmates, the response was to “become wild or apa-thetic.” He tells of “the gradual destruction of a fine old man who was placed in exactly similar situations as my own.” He watched how the old man's behavior became progressively more slovenly until he became unconcerned with even the slightest dignities of living. The elderly man had been stripped of humanity. Then, with amazement, Perceval saw all his own behavior in the same light. He, too, was deteriorating, was becoming animal! At this point he knew fully that he was as much a victim of his malignant environment as he was of his delusions. He called this shock of awareness “a mercy”; for the old man it was a tragedy, but for Perceval it was an insight that had been mercifully granted to him.
A dreadful sympathy awakened in him, for himself and for all the other patients around him. He was filled with an energy of compassionate outrage. For the first time, Perceval committed himself to follow a plan of action: He would direct himself toward “health” in every aspect of his life. He then devoted himself to becoming well, to being strong enough to speak for all the others who would never leave the asylum—to tell the truth about the horrors of their treatment. He took a vow:
I resolved—I was necessitated—to pit my strength and abilities against that system, to fail in no duty to myself and to my country; but at the risk of my life, or my health, and even my understanding, to become thoroughly acquainted with its windings, in order to expose and unravel the wickedness and the folly that maintained it, and to unmask the plausible villainy that carries it on.³⁰
This singular event of the awakening of compassion was a quantum leap in Perceval's course of recovery from psychosis. It is the case for many other people as well; a compassionate interest and even a dedication to be of service to other people is crucial to the later stages of recovery.
There was a shift of allegiance toward health in everything he did, and he resolved to “follow a plan calculated to compose and strengthen me, to arouse and cheer me—if I had not had resolution to adhere to such a plan, there might have been risk of return of illness, perhaps of insanity . . .. I braced up my mind also to courageous and virtuous efforts.”
He experimented with new efforts at bringing his body and mind into harmony to overcome the physical and mental torpor of asylum life:
“Whenever my thoughts and hands were most occupied I became, I suppose, nearest to sound state of mind, and consequently more aware of my situation,” and he also remarked “that all, or many of the faculties of mind and body should be called into play at one time, and above all things that the body should be occupied.” He also experimented with his breathing and discerned a peculiar interdependence of mind and breath, finding that his mind could be calmed and controlled by “regulated respirations.”
He tried to watch more closely how he ate his food, finding that the rate at which he ate and the qualities of food and their effect on him were all interrelated to his state of mind. He tested his ability to exercise by walking fast and was overcome with grief at the extent of his physical deterioration. He became concerned with his general health, and wrote to his mother to send him (which she did) the “dental materials” he needed to care for his teeth. He fought the hospital authorities to the end and finally was allowed to have some religious books sent to him.
Whenever he could be alone in his hospital room he stealthily wrote about these efforts and kept his journal hidden from the staff. He knew that they were especially interested in his notations about abusive treatment and his eventual plans for malpractice accusations. Because they would sometimes find his notes, he often wrote sensitive material in Portuguese.
Only after many letters, and what the legal establishment called his relentless badgering, did Perceval gain his release from Dr. Fox's asylum. His aged mother and his brothers gave in, and two of his elder brothers came for him. All the time while riding away in a coach from the asylum, he thought they were bringing him home. It was not until they got to the doors of Dr. C. Newington’s madhouse at Ticehurst, in Sussex, did Perceval realize what had happened. The new madhouse turned out to be more humane, and at least allowed him to take walks in the enclosed garden. His treatment here was not nearly as harsh, but he resisted it as best he could, and he continued his letter writing! Now, more often, he wrote to the Metropolitan Commission of Hospitals, to certain judges and members of Parliament, and in all the letters he demanded an immediate examination of his sanity.
He insisted to his family that they remove him from the madhouse and place him in a private home with a family or with attendants to care for him.
I needed quiet, I needed tranquility; I needed security, I needed even at times seclusion—I could not obtain them. At the same time I needed cheerful scenes and lively images, to be relieved from the sad sights and distressing associations of a madhouse; I required my mind and my body to be braced, the one by honest, virtuous, and correct conversation, the other by manly and free exercise; and above all, after the coarse and brutal fellowship I had been reduced to, I sighed for the delicacy and refinements of female society.³¹ At the same time that he was becoming more outwardly defiant of the hospital authorities, he was also mentally rejecting and just saying “No!” to visionary commands. The hallucinations became forgiving, softer, and at times encouraged him toward health. But he painfully discovered that he had to stand fast even against voices that called themselves friends. He had to forcibly take command of his own thought processes. This, he said, was the greatest effort of all. It meant assuming the power to direct his thinking—the very same power that, when he was losing his mind, he had attacked and abandoned. His previous practices of turning away doubt, spiritual submission, and nonhesitation had to be reversed. He did this by actively renouncing his emotional attachment to the the voices—neither fearing threatening voices nor taking pleasure in hopeful voices. Soon, his fascination with the presences, voices, and spirits ceased.
R E E N T R Y
Soon after Perceval was transferred to the second asylum he wrote to his mother and her attorney to inform them that he held them legally responsible for their having submitted him to
abusive treatment, and for holding him in the hospital against his will; he wished to be immediately released to a family lodging. He had heard that this method of treatment was being done by two doctors in London, and he requested that he be put under their supervision. Again, there was a round of visiting doctors and inane interviews. Once again, they urged him to remain at the Ticehurst madhouse and not to cause further grief to his family, who had suffered enough by his illness.
But something new was apparent in the behavior of the examining doctors and magistrates—they were fearful of his being released. He saw their professional greed at wanting to keep him as a patient. He saw their fear at his potentially exposing them to investigation. He suspected that they were also under the influence of his family, who wanted him to remain in the hospital. But he came to the conclusion that the greatest influence on their rejection of his appeal was that they were unworldly people, conventional and deeply prejudiced—merely “exceedingly simple” and fearful.
Finally, at the age of thirty-one, after three years in the madhouses, Perceval's intimidation of his family and the doctors forced his discharge. Physically ill, mentally exhausted, and vulnerable to becoming quickly overexcited, he moved to London and spent some time recuperating at a home-care lodging in Seven Oaks. He needed a great deal of rest!
In the following year, he married a woman named Anna Gardner, and two years later the first of their four daughters was born. They lived mostly in a home in the Kensington area of London, and it was there that Perceval made his fateful decision to write a book describing his experience. The book was to contain all the notes and letters that he wrote while in the asylums, including his accusations against his doctors and his own family. His friends argued against it; they said he would be bitterly attacked for such an expose, that it would only harm himself and his fam-ily and children, and that he should put those terrible years behind him.
He recalled the vow he had made to himself to speak in the name of the other inmates and how it had been the mainstay of his recovery: to use all his energy and his sanity to expose and break the system of madhouse care.
I reflected how many were in the same predicament as myself . . . and I said, who shall speak for them if I do not—who shall plead for them if I remain silent? How can I betray them and myself too by subscribing to the subtle villainy, cruelty, and tyranny of the doctors?³² He moved to Paris for the next year and during that time, largely from memory, wrote of his illness and his confinement. The writing itself frightened him. He feared that by vividly bringing back all his memories he might once again put himself on the verge of madness. He was also rightly apprehensive that he might overwhelm his readers in his flood of painful and accusatory words. While writing, he sometimes felt a return of insanity—an upsurge of a living memory, like the voracious eating of chained madmen—but then he would clear his mind “by pausing and drawing a deep breath, sobbing or sighing, as the cloud of former recollections has passed over me.” On the front page of the book he added a quote from the Aeneid. An aged warrior is requested to recount the siege and rape of Troy:
Oh Queen—too terrible for tongues, the pain you ask me to renew, the tale of how the Damaians could destroy the wealth of Troy, that kingdom of lament: for I myself saw these sad things, I took large part in them.
While still in Paris, he met at the Salpetriere Hospital with Dr. Jean-Etienne Esquirol, a giant of French psychiatry and soon to become a leading figure in the reform of asylum abuses. Esquirol helped Perceval and advised him as to the political actions he might take in England. But he was disturbed by the extremity of Perceval's conviction that all private madhouses should be abolished, feeling that the only innovations possible within psychiatry would come from the private sector.
Without realizing it, Perceval had stepped into the great debate then taking place in French psychiatry, one that repeats itself right down to our present time: Is psychosis a disorder of the intellect and will, as Esquirol argued, or is it a hereditary and degenerative brain disease, as championed at the Rouen asylum (which Perceval also visited) by Dr. Jacques Joseph Moreau?
Back in London, Perceval felt he also had something to say about this issue. He concluded that the study of a mystery like that of insanity—a study that to him was the “most grand and terrible”—was too important and instructive to be left in the hands of the physicians. He titled his book A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement: Designed to Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity (and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards Many Unfortunate Sufferers Under that Calamity). He published it anonymously in 1838, and it had immediate consequences on the course of his life.
Outrage
Living with barely controlled outrage is the experience of many people who return from the asylums. As for Perceval, he felt himself to be a lonely survivor and witness to an atrocity, one that was continuing without public awareness and that would continue far into the future. There were few, he believed, who could genuinely speak for the insane other than himself.
“And yet who is on my side? where shall I find the energy to reform these abuses?” His situation was not unlike those early escapees from the concentration camps who told of what was being done but were met with crit-icisms of “exaggeration” and hysteria.³³ Perceval always seemed to provoke the criticism of being too “excessive, intemperate, or over-indulgent” in describing his experiences. To this he answered:
I consider this one of the cruellest trials of the lunatic—that on their recovery, by the formality of society, they are not allowed to utter their sentiments in the tone and manner becoming their situation... in expect-ing from such as have been insane, and are sensible of their misfortune, the same tone, gesture, cadence, and placidity, that meets them in persons who have not been through any extraordinary vicissitudes.³⁴
When Perceval learned that one Richard Paternoster, a civil service clerk, was being unjustly confined at Dr. Finch's madhouse in Kensington, he helped to create the public pressure that led to Paternoster's discharge. When he was freed from confinement, Paternoster advertised in the Times of London “for fellow sufferers to join him in a campaign to redress abuses in the madhouse system.”³⁵ Perceval joined him immediately, and together they began to petition the city magistrates for an investigation into asylum treatment. They were soon joined by William Baily (an inventor and veteran of five years in a mad-house), Richard Saumarez (a surgeon who had two insane brothers), and Dr. John Parkin (another former patient).
In 1840 Perceval published a second, expanded volume of his Narrative, and this book was even more clearly dedicated to social action. One of the spearheads of action was to be his legal prosecution of his mother and Dr. Fox. No action of Perceval's met with so much suspicion of his judgment, doubt about his sanity, and accusations of his being a traitor to his class and country than his declaration to prosecute his own mother.
Could this be outrage running wild? Many people recovering from psychosis have been known to get stuck in a sense of justifiable outrage, feeling the energy of outrage to be an essential ingredient of their health.
Certainly, Perceval felt this way. He especially became impatient with people who could not see, or would not see, the abuse of power taking place in the asylum and the world around them.
The Assassination
He understood that it could happen again at any time. He might be labeled insane by his family or the lunatic doctors, and he might once again fall into the snare of the madhouse. He was already under suspicion by the Home Office for distributing literature that they said was calcu-lated to inflame the lower classes. Paternoster himself had been whisked away by the police in the middle of the night following a financial dispute with his father. Perceval and his group of former patients worked in an atmosphere of potential violence; the age of Victoria was also the age of wrongful confinement.
Perceval's immediate family, which included a number of prominent gentry in politics and the ministry, was appalled at the public exposure of his insanity, but much more so at the legal action he was directing against his mother. To them, it was surely an act of uncalled-for revenge. To him, it was the most precise and cutting action possible to present his case: His mother, just like the public, was being duped into believing the heartless advice of the lunatic doctors. Only later did Perceval find out that, from the beginning, one of his brothers had wanted to have him released from the asylum and brought to a private lodging next to his brother's home; but his mother (on the advice of the asylum) vetoed this plan. Before his discharge, he asked his mother to join with him in a suit against Dr. Fox; she refused.
Now, he felt he had no choice but to proceed alone. The malpractice prosecution might arouse public attention to asylum treatment, help provoke investigative hearings, and reduce the plight of those wrongfully confined. Also, he hoped this legal action would secure the rightful inheritance from his father, which his mother had withheld from him since his internment.
It is a strange irony that Perceval must have come to appear to his family as a haunting replica of the man who, many years before, had murdered his beloved father. The story is as follows: In 1812, when John was nine years old, his father was shot to death in the lobby of the House of Commons. The assassin, John Bellingham, was noted to be insane (as Bellingham's father had been) and was summarily hanged one week after the event. One report said: “It was one week from homicide to homicide.
This trial was called a case of judicial murder of an insane man and was explicitly rejected as having no legal precedential authority.”³⁶ Bellingham had lived a life of misfortune and bankruptcy and had been imprisoned for embezzlement. After that, he never ceased to petition and harass members of the government for compensation for what he felt was a wrongful imprisonment. He began to feel that he had to kill someone in order to bring his grievances to public attention, and Spencer Perceval—a man known for his generosity and aid to the poor—was the one*. When John Perceval, twenty-six years later, began his incessant letters and petitions for asylum reform, his family heard echoes and rumors of a dangerous person, a chronic complainer against the system, an avenger, possibly violent.
Throughout this his mother pleaded ignorance. She had no idea how badly he was being treated. In any case, she felt that the doctors knew what they were doing. They told her that John might become violent if he were removed from their treatment. That was enough for her, she had experienced enough violence in her family.
Soon after the publication of his second book, Perceval abandoned his threats of prosecution, possibly because his writings and activities were already achieving his goals.
Recovering Sanity
A Compassionate Approach to Understanding and Treating Psychosis
Edward M. Podvoll, M.D.
* The war against France lasted from 1792 until 1815. Among the principal objectives of this pointless bloodletting was to destroy Napoléon’s debt- and interest-free system of finance. (See Chapter III). During this period England also waged a war against the United States from 1812 until 1814. This war, as was the case with the war against France, was instigated by England at the behest of banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild (real name Bauer) after the United States Congress refused to renew the charter of the Rothschild-controlled[60] Bank of the United States, which had been the central bank of America from 1791 until 1811.[61] Mayer Amschel Rothschild is famously credited with having said: “Give me control of the economics of a country, and I care not who makes her laws. The few who understand the system, will either be so interested from its profits or so dependent on its favours, that there will be no opposition from that class.” British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval (1809-12) tried to stop this completely futile war, but was assassinated on 11 May 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons by John Bellingham, a political radical, who had been set up by Rothschild.[62]
[62] www.tomatobubble.com/fh1.html NWO Forbidden History (1765-1816). Concurrent with his appointment as prime minister on 4 October 1809, Perceval also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to which office he was appointed on 28 March 1807. He was thus fully acquainted with intricacies of high finance. During his chancellorship his Secretary to the Treasury was John Charles Herries, a personal friend and secret confidant of Nathan Rothschild. See N. Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, Money’s Prophets 1798-1848, Vol. 1, Penguin Books, London, 1999, 86. (Professor Ferguson is an insider, who attended the 2012 Bilderberg conference held in Chantilly, Virginia, USA). (...)
Concurrently Perceval was facing increased pressure from Nathan Rothschild to make a declaration of war on the United States. He refused. The British army was already bogged down in a stalemate situation in Spain and Portugal (The Peninsular War 1808-1814) with Napoléon’s forces, and he had no desire to commit more troops and treasure, financed by more interest- bearing bank loans, simply in order to save Rothschild’s sinking banking interests in America.
The assassin of Spencer Perceval, John Bellingham, was born about 1769 in St Neots, Huntingdonshire. From 1800-1802 he worked in Archangelsk as an agent for importers and exporters. He returned to Russia in 1804, and in November of that year he was falsely accused of having reneged on a debt of 4,890 roubles which subsequently led to his imprisonment for four years. On his release Bellingham took up residence in Duke Street, Liverpool. He unsuccessfully petitioned the government for compensation.
Bellingham, a bitter and aggrieved man, fell into company with two dissolute American merchants, Thomas Wilson and Elisha Peck, who were both keen to have Orders in Council, which forbade neutral nations from trading with France abrogated. These Orders in Council had been introduced by Perceval in response to Napoléon’s Continental Blockade which the latter had instituted in 1806 and prohibited trade with Britain and Ireland. Their continuation was due to be debated in parliament on that fateful evening. Thus we observe a confluence of interests, a disturbed and resentful man, two greedy merchants and the puppet master Rothschild pulling the strings in the background.
At 5.15 p.m. on 11 May 1812 as Perceval entered the lobby of the House of Commons, Bellingham stepped forward and shot him in the heart. Perceval collapsed uttering “Murder...... oh my God”[110] and within minutes was dead. Four days later Bellingham was put on trial at the Old Bailey. The trial lasted three days. A plea of insanity was rejected. The brevity of the trial was presumably related to the necessity of preventing any untoward disclosures. As is customary with this type of political assassination the “lone assassin” theory has to be preserved at all costs. On 18 May 1812 Bellingham was hanged. A few weeks later after Perceval’s murder the Orders in Council forbidding neutral nations trading with France were revoked.
A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind
Stephen Mitford Goodson
