Qi Gong Psychotic Reaction/Deviation DSM Culture Bound Syndrome
What is Qi Gong Psychosis?
It is a time limited psychotic mental break. The classic case often quoted from China involved a house painter, self-taught in Qi Gong, that began to believe he could speak to beings from another dimension. It is included in the DSM as a Culture Bound Syndrome.
Most sites agree that the event happens when too many Qi Gong sessions are performed in a compact time frame. But they believe the mental break is caused by miss-handling universal life energy, Chee. Some claim performing the Kata incorrectly is the cause. One site blames demons.
The actual cause is much simpler but it reveals how Qi Gong actually works and contradicts the beliefs of those who practice Qi Gong. (Sometimes there is a price for advancing knowledge.)
In the 1960’s designers building new close-spaced office workstations encountered a problem when knowledge workers using them began to have mental breaks. The problem was investigated and psychologists determined that Subliminal Sight and Peripheral Vision Reflexes had acted in the “special circumstances” those workstations created to cause the mental events. The Cubicle solved the problem by 1968.
It is difficult to see at first but performing Qi Gong in-groups also creates those “special circumstances.” Concentration in the form of eyes-open meditation substitutes for the mental investment to perform knowledge work. The movement of others close beside you provides detectable movement in peripheral vision to trigger repeating attempts to cause a peripheral vision reflex.
One way to look at the problem is that the constant subliminal appreciation of threat, movement in your Subliminal Peripheral Vision, eventually colors thought and reason creating paranoia, fear, and the psychiatric outcomes. (Google the "Awakening of Kundalini.")
Your brain does not identify the nature of the moving object it just reacts to the movement. It is a warn first identify second system. The reaction is a startle and sudden gut wrenching apprehension which forces you to look and identify the detected movement. You will learn to ignore safe movement but that does not turn the system off. That means you can also be exposed to visual Subliminal Distraction in many places. The additional exposure during Qi Gong performances would push you past the threshold of exposure and cause the mental break.
Low level long-term exposure for some users of Qi Gong and Kundalini Yoga creates fixed altered mental states in which the user begins to believe they have superhuman strength and supernatural powers. One such belief is that a Qi Gong master can cast Chee from his fingertips to strike an opponent. For Kundalini Yoga users these beliefs include the ability to levitate, walk unharmed through solid objects, dematerialize - become invisible, and read other’s minds and control their actions by mental telepathy. These beliefs are usually called “psychotic-like.”
This means that the actual reason you have health and mental state improvements by performing Qi Gong is operant conditioning.
VisionAndPsychosis.Net is a private psychology project, which includes Qi Gong deviation as evidence that visual Subliminal Distraction is an unknown and unevaluated cause of mental illness.
One of the first mistakes investigators make is to believe that the disorders of the DSM actually exist. They are observed then grouped and named behaviors. The names are given based on the length of the acute phase and the content of the behavior. Authors of the DSM openly admit they do not know what causes any of the disorders. Trauma is the latest theory. Most of the theories involve a belief in the fragility of the human psyche.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/QiGong..._Diversion.htm Start by performing the psychology demonstration and scanning the Everquest Connection page.
Illustrations will be added to facilitate communication later this summer.
One of the first symptoms is "hearing voices." This is shown through investigation of other Culture Bound Syndromes.
If you suspect you are beginning to have the epidode stop performing Qi Gong and search your daily activities for other places of exposure. It is not necessary to eliminate them all. We each have exposure daily. Most of it is harmless.
Psycotic like experiences due to Qigong?
Seriously, are any of the practitioners here free from experiencing phenomenon that might be hard to explain to a psychologist? If we start calling everyone who feels the chi spin, accumulate or flow, crazy, then silk winding is a dangerous tool to make people psychotic. Heaven forbid anyone start to actually see any of this energy flowing.
It is pretty easy to find people on youtube that are pretty far gone in their practice, but, in general, I believe that the perceptions that qigong tends to give are a more natural state of being. That said, I do think great care should be taken. Finding a constructive teacher with high ideals is a good idea.
.
Bob
Information contradicts worldwide research
The information you posted on mental illness in China is interesting. It contradicts information that has been replicated for about a hundred years around the world.
There is more mental illness in cities than in rural areas every where else.
Why is this reversed for China?
I doubt it has anything to do with Qi Gong or Kung Fu.
Low income rural areas in China may still use too-small single-room living arrangements. It would be interesting to investigate this.
That situation would allow Subliminal Distraction exposure.
Around the world where these living arrangements are used there are mental events called Culture Bound Syndromes. Qi Gong Psychotic Reaction is a CBS. Jumping Frenchmen of Maine was a CBS of the northern United States and Canada. I happened when groups of men lived in single room bunkhouses in lumber camps. It disappeared when modern logging equipment replaced those camps.
If you want to see an example of this go to YouTube and search George Dilman. He was featured in the National Geographic Channel program Is It Real? "Superhuman Powers."
Dilman believes he can throw Chee energy from his hands to strike opponents.
He has those beliefs from years of instructing one student while others move around him in his peripheral vision. That's Subliminal Distraction exposure.
I have a link to his YouTube video on my First Psychotic Episodes page but it is under a rewrite and I may move the link to another page.
This is not considered psychotic because he functions normally in his every day life. It is usually referred to as psychotic-like.
The danger is that if you have enough exposure to create one of these mental breaks you will have a fatal accident by acting out the delusions of the episode.
The Virginia Tech shooter created the circumstances for SD exposure, had the psychotic episode, and killed 32 people. Remember his paranoid psychotic rant? That was Subliminal Distraction exposure.
The symptoms of the episode can be shown to be fear, paranoia, panic attacks, depression, and thoughts of suicide.
visionandpsychosis.Net