Food For Thought
I thought I'd start off this week's update by sharing an interesting nugget for you to chew on.
Did you know the experience of schizophrenia varies depending on your culture? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann studied schizophrenic individuals in India (Chennai), Africa (Accra, Ghana) and the US and found that the voices varied in the cultures.
Unsurprisingly, the voices in America experienced the voice-hearing as violent and hateful — a mental invasion bespeaking a broken mind. The voices are harsh and threatening. But while the voice-hearing was universal, this negative experience was not.
In India and Africa, the experience with the voices was predominantly positive. There was more of a personal relationship with the voices. In India the voice-hearing experience emphasised playfulness and sex whereas in Africa the voices more often involved the voice of God.
It seems that cultural understandings of the nature of the self and psyche and relationships with others play a role in determining how schizophrenia manifests. It makes you wonder whether the same could be true of other mental health conditions like depression and anxiety.
The whole article is well-worth a read (link here).
The weekly update
I spent this week working away at the series which the Constellations and Clusters article began. That's looking like it'll be one longer article and two Philosopher's Toolkit supplements.
There was some further dabbling with AI this week, including a little more vibe coding — this time writing a python script to fetch the top posts for the week from a few subreddits, running them through OpenAI's API to summarise any articles attached and then emailing it to my Readwise Reader feed on a Saturday morning. Part something I wanted, part experiment in what's possible.
Other than that, the inchoate massa confusa I've been working with over the past month has been alchemising into something solid. I feel I am emerging from a period of meditation into a more definitive direction, "to everything there is a season". I'll be writing about that in the coming week as well, I suspect.
PSA: lastly, I made a boo boo this week with post scheduling. I try to keep everything consistent between Substack and Patreon, but somehow I made two mistakes this week. I posted Poetry Club on Patreon on Tuesday as per usual, but neglected to post The Philosopher's Toolkit (written by fellow Irishman and Stoic Enda Harte); for Substack, it was vice versa. So this Tuesday, I'm going to be flipping the script and posting each on the platforms I missed. My apologies.