A POSITIVE SIDE TO PSYCHOSIS?
Most people experiencing a major mental disorder are distressed by it, and on recovery want to get back to normal and forget their odd and difficult experiences; but being psychotic is not always a negative experience. Peter Chadwick, a psychology lecturer with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, argues that psychosis brings forth talents in creativity, social sensitivity and awareness35. A service user workshop on ‘positive aspects of madness’6 found ‘spiritual understanding and joy, the ability to write fiction professionally, an enhanced sensitivity to others, increased empathy and improved skills as a mental health worker’ as some of the positive sides of psychosis.
-from “Stigma in psychiatry” by Alison J Gray, MRCPsych
wee ditty 
In other words, psychosis and the id reflect the normal human condition that existed prior to civilization. If one reads about the civilizations that existed just outside of the dark ages, they had plenty of habits that would horrify us today – such as eating maggot-filled raw meat – but these barbaric habits existed for countless millennia before the dawn of civilization. Perhaps the real fault lies in society’s insistence on denial of the fact we are only a few thousand years removed from being “uncivilized”, rather than in the acknowledgment that we can never fully tame the id that lies within.
LikeLike