A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health

https://www.thecompanion.app/philip-k-dick-psychosis/

by pmoriarty • 3 years ago

110 80 3 years ago

ftxbro• 3 years ago

if pkd were still alive he would think that gpt is communicating with him specifically

lordfrito• 3 years ago

You know I think you're 100% right on this... wonder what kind of crazy things PKD would come up with after talking to chat GPT.

Train up a GPT from his writing, and have a dialogue with himself?

ndsipa_pomu6• 3 years ago

If only there was some kind of android head we could use for that?

https://slate.com/culture/2012/06/philip-k-dick-robot-an-and...

throw458294738• 3 years ago

I have seen that LLMs (specifically character.ai) are not great for people in psychosis. I’m not sure that it’s actually worse than a psychosis without an LLM to talk to, but it has been painful to watch a loved one drawn in by it.

ttctciyf2• 3 years ago

The highly LLM-like artificial teachers in Martian Timeslip (see my other comment here) contribute to the protagonist's psychotic episode in that book, iirc.

ttctciyf2• 3 years ago

There's a passage in Martian Timeslip[1] where protagonist Jack Bohlen is brought in to repair an artificial teacher called "Kindly Dad":

"Hi, Kindly Dad," he said without enthusiasm. Setting down his tool case he began unscrewing the back plate of the Teacher.
Kindly Dad said in a warm, sympathetic voice, "What's your name, young fellow?"
"My name," Jack said, as he unfastened the plate and laid it down beside him, "is Jack Bohlen, and I'm a kindly dad, too, just like you, Kindly Dad. My boy is ten years old, Kindly Dad. So don't call me young fellow, O.K.?" Again he was trembling hard, and sweating.
"Ohh," Kindly Dad said. "I see!"
"What do you see?" Jack said, and discovered that he was almost shouting. "Look," he said. "Go through your goddamn cycle, O.K.? If it makes it easier for you, go ahead and pretend I'm a little boy." I just want to get this done and get out of here, he said to himself, with as little trouble as possible. He could feel the swelling, complicated emotions inside him. Three hours! he thought dismally.
Kindly Dad said, "Little Jackie, it seems to me you've got a mighty heavy weight on your chest today. Am I right?"
"Today and every day." Jack clicked on his trouble-light and shone it up into the works of the Teacher. The mechanism seemed to be moving along its cycle properly so far.

Conceiving this as an LLM with a "kindly dad" prompt doesn't seem too far a stretch. PKD nicely catches the interpersonal "uncanny valley" into which his protagonist has wandered.

1: https://the-eye.eu/public/Books/ManyThings/PDF/Martian%20Tim...

roody15• 3 years ago

Interesting read. Have always enjoyed Philip K Dicks novels… sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again. I cannot help but think he was writing from his own soul or at least his own experience. He was always the looker peering into the another world that he just didn’t quite fit into. It makes me feel sad like he was often likely very lonely despite his genius and fame :/.

ndsipa_pomu6• 3 years ago

His perspective is part of what makes his work so relevant to today with our manufactured realities that he predicted so well.

pizza2• 3 years ago

I agree and would like for you to expand on that observation

throwaway2902• 3 years ago

sadly not surprised he struggled with mental and substance abuse. His books read in a way that often feature a character somewhat removed from reality or in some form of psychosis. The idea of what is real or not real is explored over and over again

Don't take that is an indicator, Haruki Murakami often reads similarly and he seems to be a well adjusted person.

DiggyJohnson• 3 years ago

I think it’s can still be relevant analysis without you having to point out that it’s not a binary indicator.

ajkjk• 3 years ago

This comment is probably unnecessary but I've been reading tons of Murakami lately so here's a take:

Murakami's main schtick, I realized, is to write in the style of a hard-boiled detective novel, like Raymond Chandler (who he has often cited as an influence / obsession)... except that instead of the protagonist being a literal private investigator who wanders the city and meets people to solve the mystery of a murder, it's a disconnected man who wanders the city solving a mystery that's like, how to connect with people or how to get over a sense of loss or something. The world is mysterious, like how in a detective novel with corruption and intrigue and stuff, but it feels like it's that way because of how mysterious human connection is to his protagonists.

Philip K Dick, on the other hand, writes a mysterious world that makes some paranoid idea he had actually real. They're superficially similar but, I think, not really actually coming from the same place at all.

TeaBrain• 3 years ago

Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly contains an Author's Note at the end of the book on this topic. This is the note from the copy I have:

"AUTHOR'S NOTE:

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.

There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful.

If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

To Gaylene deceased

To Ray deceased

To Francy permanent psychosis

To Kathy permanent brain damage

To Jim deceased

To Val massive permanent brain damage

To Nancy permanent psychosis

To Joanne permanent brain damage

To Maren deceased

To Nick deceased

To Terry deceased

To Dennis deceased

To Phil permanent pancreatic damage

To Sue permanent vascular damage

To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage

. . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy."

blippage• 3 years ago

I was talking to a guy who was into drug counselling. He laid out some pretty shocking facts, like children as young as 12 take drugs. This made me absolutely convinced that we should not legalise drugs, except in the case where there legitimate medical uses.

He also said that he got annoyed when the police announced that there was a particularly potent batch of drugs on the streets at the time. His reasoning is that it only encourages drug users.

Also, experience of using drugs is no guarantee of safe drugs practise. If anything, it's the contrary. People become complacent in what they think they can handle, which spells trouble.

Also, drug purity can vary by region. You won't know about it in advance, but if you take drugs from a less tainted batch then you usually do, then you could well be taking a much higher dosage of the drug than your body is used to. Not good.

And finally, the most chilling part of all. He said that if you were to put some heroin on a table and say that this is the purest heroin on the market. You can take it, but knowing you will die. Many would still take it.

skhm• 3 years ago

I remember reading this many years ago. It didn't mean much to me at the time. It hits an awful lot harder a decade later.

armitron• 3 years ago

Superficial and entirely missing the mark. PKD spent years doing research trying to understand his most important mystical experience, and his extensive notes and documentation ended up in the book "exegesis" (also greatly influencing the philosophy underlying works such as Valis). None of that is of course mentioned in the article.

What we get is a random psychiatrist performing armchair psychoanalysis on someone he knows very little about.

dboon• 3 years ago

Yeah, reads more like a collection of fun apocrypha than a serious look at something that affected the great author so profoundly

ndsipa_pomu6• 3 years ago

Absolutely.

If you want to get a handle on PKD and his problems, it's so much better to read his work and get his own perspective. Radio Free Albemuth is interesting as a kind of precursor to Valis, but I must admit to not wanting to read Exegesis as it looks too in depth.

Trasmatta3• 3 years ago

I like just flipping through the Exegesis and reading random entries. It's always a fascinating trip. I would never be able to read it end to end (and it certainly was never intended to be).

It really is amazing to read after you've gone through VALIS.

Simplicitas• 3 years ago

Good point. On his passing away right before Blade Runner was release, not even a mention that reportedly Ridley Scott screened parts of the movie, and he evidently was lost for words, saying “I’m in awe that you were able to reproduce what was in my mind”.

8bitsrule• 3 years ago

Most people know nothing about what they have never experienced, naturally. Yet that doesn't stop them from taking any opportunity to share their cultured opinions on what others report.

There's a large literature 'out there' about extraordinary, inner, life-changing experiences that people have have reported and recorded throughout history. Plenty of their neglected works were re-printed in the middle of the last century - for a reason. They're easy to discover once you are motivated to look. Until then, it's easy to assume that it's they who are imbalanced.

Edit: Dick's 'Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura':

https://dickiangnosticism.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/tractates...

nologic01• 3 years ago

Some people live at the cusp of the abyss but they are kind enough to dispatch so that we the rest dont have to

mjklin• 3 years ago

“Rick James dwells in the abyss” https://youtu.be/2278XhCy4Bs

pizza2• 3 years ago

RIP Charlie Murphy. What a comedian. There have been many celebrity obituaries that have made me sad, but there are few that left me devastated.

placesalt• 3 years ago

It's bizarre that the article has a WARNING at the top which is a spoiler warning for a movie from the 1990s, but not a sensitive-content warning re: suicide.

aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA• 3 years ago

Off topic, but it bothers me when people decry spoilers for an older movie. As if everybody is supposed to have watched every major film in the history of Hollywood up to the last N years.

"Spoiler alert for anybody who hasn't seen this movie from 1980: the dog did it!"

Ugh.

schwartzworld• 3 years ago

We need to agree on a statute of limitations for these things.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

Spoilers are a myth and don't affect enjoyment.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/opinion/spoilers-successi...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.4070'

they were just as immersed even though they knew the outcome. In follow-up questionnaires, they also reported the same levels of engagement and enjoyment as those who didn’t know the ending.

ycombinete• 3 years ago

To be fair the spoilers for Total Recall are whoppers.

rustybolt• 3 years ago

"substance abuse" is such a weird term.

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

a euphemism for sure

ithkuil2• 3 years ago

Is it though?

The word "abuse" is pretty strong. If I'm abusing substances it's not like I'm just having a puff now and then do I?

The term "substance" is a bit generic, I grant you that. But does that make it an euphemism just because the exact substance is not specified?

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

Haha wow judging by the downvotes I guess people disagree! I meant that "substance" is a euphemism for psychoactive drugs. I guess the whole term is jargony as well. It's fine, shrug.

ycnhh• 3 years ago

maybe it should be 'abused by substances'

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

Interesting role reversal. The term is indeed ambiguous!

adrianmsmith2• 3 years ago

Why?

jtotheh• 3 years ago

Robert Crumb depicted PKD's religious experience in comic book form, here is a link: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/07/r-crumb-weirdo-phi...

chpatrick• 3 years ago

Well that was a blast, especially when calls the word of god in his head "artificial intelligence".

mock-possum2• 3 years ago

Wow. It’s terrifying how he says he wasn’t psychotic, while clearly describing psychosis. I didn’t realize how messed up he was.

2ICofafireteam• 3 years ago

When you're going through it, it can make perfect sense.

telesilla• 3 years ago

You'd think after reading so many of his books and stories you would know a person, this work from Crumb really shows how fiction writers often express themselves in unique ways that manage to keep themselves still private, somehow.

BSEdlMMldESB• 3 years ago

where does psychosis end and 'real' mystical experience begin?

here's a summary of Philip K. Dick's 'highest truths'

https://www.tekgnostics.com/PDK.HTM

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Probably hasn't ended with:

"18. Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. 'The Empire never ended,' but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the "

Trasmatta3• 3 years ago

If anyone would really like to delve into PKD's life, I'd recommend the biography Divine Invasions (not to be confused with PKD's books "The Divine Invasion"). He was such a deeply fascinating person, and I feel like most articles you read about him manage to only touch on the obvious or superficial.

sebisgosh• 3 years ago

Never heard of this one - thanks for the recommendation

duncancarroll2• 3 years ago

This is a decent article but the author unfortunately has no understanding of what is known as a "spiritual emergence", which PKD very clearly went through and is critical to understanding his life and legacy. One of the first phases of this process is "anamnesis", in which you recall information from what is thought to be past lives. Laugh all you want, until this has happened to you, you can't even imagine what it is like, but PKDs entire experience with the fish symbol was a clear example of this. There are many other signs, his precognition, the "AI voice", etc., all of which are common.

These events can mimic psychosis and other mental illnesses, but they are anything but. They signal the start of an inner metamorphosis, likely biochemically driven, though we don't yet know the biomarkers. It's like a second puberty, you have all these weird urges to meditate and whatnot, and if you do it right you grow and come out the other side a different person with a different experience of the world than the pre-pubescent .

Because of the general cultural lack of understanding and guidance, PKD, while brilliant, could only guess as to what was happening to him and had no idea what to do about it. In other times and other cultures, perhaps he could have been guided through the process, just as parents guide their children through puberty. It can take years to unfold and can easily go off the rails, see: Gopi Krishna, Living With Kundalini.

Unfortunately substances are one of the things that can make it go off the rails, and his propensity for them may have contributed to his untimely death instead of the preferred outcome of an "enlightened" individual. Again laugh all you want, until we figure out consciousness we have no basis to assume the non-existence of higher consciousness. But granted this whole space is polluted with new age crap, so unless you've had this happen to you it's understandable to paint it all with the same brush.

His Exegesis is a wonderful work, one of his best. Highly recommend reading.

duncancarroll2• 3 years ago

Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)

eternalban• 3 years ago

Thank you for comment. Knew little about the man himself.

"I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane."

This has to be experienced. (It's like Jimmy Hendrix says.) I'm not sure I would compare it to puberty, or an invasion. Definitely a visitation, however. It seems the historical successful travellers on the path were in the main fortunate to be born into families of adepts. In many cases it was the father who initiated the son. For others, the cultural milieu typically seeded the necessary symbolic guide posts.

Reality is that which, even when you downvote it, doesn't go away. ;)

You have perhaps forgotten your own initial encounters with such topics. It is a healthy response of the unprepared psyche to recoil from such content to protect itself; it can be dangerous, as you must know. The third rail is very much alive.

iloveCS2• 3 years ago

when I read "do androids dream of electric sheep" that was my first and last reading of PKD-- I instantly realized it was a mediocre work by a mentally ill person. Vitae brevis. And I went back to my Samuel Richardson's and the like.

iloveCS2• 3 years ago

which PKD-like moron downvoted my benign comment?

mock-possum2• 3 years ago

I feel like this could have dug much much deeper into paralleled through altered experiences on meth and the content of his stories.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

Philip K Dick is to amphetamine psychosis what Charles Bukowski is to alcoholism. Both are good writers, but living in their worlds would be something of a nightmare for the vast majority of people.

toomanyrichies• 3 years ago

Having never read any of PKD's works before, I'd be interested in starting with his short stories (especially those that haven't yet been made into a movie, since I'd likely have seen it).

Looks like PKD wrote (at least) 87 short stories [1]- any recommendations or under-appreciated favorites from HN folks?

EDIT:

A few that have been recommended on Reddit [2] that look interesting include "The Exit Door Leads In", "The Golden Man", and "Autofac".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Short_stories_by_Phil...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/a0blwl/rank_your_t...

A psychiatrist reflects on Philip K. Dick’s substance abuse and mental health

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