1) INTRODUCTION
 
Back in the middle of the 1980s I listened to a lecture titled “Defence Mechanisms” by the Objectivist (she seemed to be one at the time) psychologist Dr. Edith Packer. In the lecture Dr. Packer discussed some of the major so-called “defence mechanisms” which had been identified by the science of psychology. I do not remember what Dr. Packer´s exact definition was of the concept “defence mechanism”. It was something along the lines of “a faking-of-reality which serves the purpose of making someone with a major psychological problem feel better, albeit without fixing up the actual problem”.
 
Dr. Packer gave concrete examples of defence mechanisms. One of her examples has stuck in my mind. Dr. Packer told us in the audience about a patient she once had encountered. This patient was a young woman who was overweight and not physically attractive. This young woman really longed for the state of being a beautiful, physically attractive female. She was pining for it desperately! But she had been unable to lose weight and fix up whatever other weak points she had as far as her physical beauty was concerned. So, she had become a neurotic - this as a consequence of desiring to be beautiful – but at the same time failing to actualize said desire in her own life.
 
This woman had developed a defence mechanism - a faking of reality - which made her feel better. But without really fixing up her problem. This woman had related to Dr. Packer that she had developed a habit which made her "feel good". She would stroll along the streets of the city she lived in. And she would stop in front of the windows of the stores. There she would just stand and stare at her own reflection in the windows for minutes on end and just imagine that she was a drop-dead gorgeous woman! She would simply think about how wonderfully happy she would feel - if only this fantasy was real! (But – the fantasy wasn´t real!)
 
Well – this was a sad story.
 
However – I suspect that most of us have had the experience of engaging in wishful thinking on some occasions when our own pursuit of values in life has been going badly. When we fail to achieve some difficult value which we are dying to achieve, but which seems beyond our reach – a satisfying romantic relationship, a meaningful job, a million-dollar fortune – we may very well fall prey to the temptation of imagining to ourselves that we have already achieved said value.
 
I do not remember which specific name the defence mechanism discussed above went by. However – the example of the unfortunate young woman certainly is relevant to the understanding of the development of my own psychosis! My alleged schizophrenia started out as an instance of wishful thinking. Which I initially chose to engage in.
 
In chapter one I related the events – involving that elite prep school, Milton Academy – which occurred at the prep school while my mental health gradually deteriorated more and more during my teen years. Leading up to my alleged schizophrenia. I related how the content of the “education” at Milton “worked” on my psychology in a way which encouraged me to hurt myself - without me being fully aware that was what was happening.
 
Most especially the vision of life contained in the “classics” of modern English literature - which were required reading in the “English” subject in the curriculum – hurt me. By means of persuading me that the world we live in is by its nature a sewer and that all of us human beings cannot help being mere pieces of disgusting filth.
 
I related in chapter one how I was convinced by the maleducation in the prep school that the life I had ahead of me “out there in reality” was going to be a doomed undertaking – just like the lives of the characters Josef K. in The Trial and Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Naturally I began to be filled with trembling and dread by the prospect of having to live and deal with such an awful reality.
 
So – as I indicated in section 6), i.e. “STAGNATION”, in chapter one – initially I was healthy. But the influence of the prep school´s maleducation began to render me depressed and neurotic. Milton Academy´s “education” motivated me to abandon reality “out there” - and to turn my mind inwards. I retreated from the desolate wasteland which the prep school convinced me was “reality out there”. And I began focusing my mind´s eye on the more “pleasant” and “cheerful” realities conjured up by the paperback sci-fi and fantasy pulp fiction books which I read. Which I much preferred to read, in place of those depressing “classics” of modern literature foisted to me by the prep school.
 
2) MY MENTAL ILLNESS SEEMED TO BE CAUSED BY HABITUATION
 
So – I was “set up” for mental illness by the nature of my education of all things!
 
The purpose of education is supposed to be to develop the student´s cognitive faculty in such a constructive way that it enables the student to deal with reality “out there” successfully in adulthood. But my so-called “education” at Milton Academy had the precise opposite effect on my cognitive faculty. Instead of building up my mind – so that I became a healthy, independent, self-sufficient adult – the maleducation perpetrated on me by my teachers at the prep school began by starting to break down my benevolent universe premise and my self-confidence - almost immediately when I arrived at the school at the age of thirteen. And then Milton “worked on me” non-stop for the next two years and three months – gradually and steadily deforming my consciousness so that I had become suicidally depressed at the age of fifteen and a half. The state of my consciousness continued to go from bad to worse even when I was no longer at the school - due to a sort of inertia, mental health-wise - up until the age of eighteen.
 
I cannot here explain how and why a highly respected elite prep school - in the allegedly rational, civilized, industrial, modern-day society which is the USA - could possibly turn out to be such a monstrosity as a school which mangled and destroyed the minds of its students. Instead of nurturing those minds and building them up. For - the purpose of this book of mine is to elucidate the role of philosophy in the causation of psychoses - and not to present the full story of modern education in America.
 
All I can do here is point the readers of this book to the places where the answers to such mysteries as the causation of the corruption of modern “education” in America can be found. Please check out Appendix 2 for a list of the best sources of information on the corruption of modern “education” and other subjects which this book of mine raises but does not suffice to explain.
 
My maleducation was not the sole cause of my descent into psychosis. There were several causal factors which together gave rise to my psychosis.
 
The maleducation perpetrated on me by the prep school was one of the two most important of those causal factors.
 
The other one of the two most important causes of my descent into mental illness was my own volition - i.e. my own choice to respond to the mental stress placed on me by the prep school´s maleducation by fleeing from “reality out there”. Since the content of the education at the prep school – most importantly the content of the “classics” of modern literature in the subject English. Since said content succeeded at convincing me that the life I had ahead of me would be a journey through a sewer and through a hell-on-earth - I chose to give up on trying to deal with reality. Milton Academy succeeded at convincing me that life was hopeless. (Let´s not fool ourselves. That was the very purpose of the “education” at the prep school. It could not have been unintentional – for, as Ayn Rand put it: “Errors of that magnitude are not made innocently.”)
 
Well, you could not reasonably blame me for giving up if you knew the kind of mind-mangling which the school perpetrated on me. I was just a kid – only thirteen years old when I began attending Milton. I did not possess the knowledge which I would have needed to protect myself against the brainwashing which the prep school subjected me to. Nevertheless – it was my choice to turn my mind´s eye inwards and to reorient my mind from pursuing values “out there in reality” - and to instead try desperately to alleviate my neurotic anguish. By means of focusing on imaginary fantasy worlds which I conjured up for myself as a form of solace.
 
I invested a major mental effort in the task of inventing “entertainment” for myself every single day starting from the early fall of 1967 up until the end of November, 1969 – when I finally bit the bullet and ran away from the prep school. This protracted and sustained effort aiming at introversion became automatised as time went by. Eventually, my introversion became so strongly automatised that introversion (i.e. “continuous daydreaming”) became second nature to me. I gradually habituated introversion more, and more as my seven teenage years went by.
 
And then – in the spring of 1972, around the time I turned eighteen – I lost my implicit confidence in the Axiom of Identity and crossed over the fine line between sanity and into psychosis! (See sections 13, 14 and 15 in chapter one for details.)
 
I conclude that the essence of my alleged schizophrenia may very well have been the development of a severely ingrained bad habit! This may seem an absurd idea to most professional psychologists and psychiatrists. For – schizophrenia is a form of psychosis. And, as I understand it, psychoses are not thought to be volitional. According to the science of psychology as it exists today, I believe - psychoses render volition inoperative. Psychoses are supposed to respond only to physical treatments – such as medications. And, therefore, psychiatrists and psychologists tend to take it for granted that psychoses must be caused by physical factors exclusively.
 
Well – I am open to the possibility that a psychosis necessarily involves physical damage to the functions of the brain. Maybe the hypothesis that schizophrenia is caused by imbalances in the relative quantities of neurotransmitters in the brain contains a grain of truth. Maybe schizophrenia and other psychoses involve some sort of physical damage to the brain which disturbs the fine balance of the neurotransmitters.
 
But – we cannot rule out the possibility that bad thinking habits – sustained over a sufficiently long period of time – can cause those harmful physical changes in the brain.
 
A psychosis might “start out” as merely a (free) choice to engage in bad types of thinking. But – if the bad thinking is repeated over and over again – it might eventually, due to the process of habituation identified more than 2.000 years ago by Aristotle - become second nature. Second nature in the sense that it becomes “hard-wired” - by dint of the circumstance that some physical attribute or other of the brain winds up being altered by the persistently repeated bad thinking.
 
3) “UPWARDS” AND “DOWNWARDS” CAUSATION
 
For – it stands to reason that there is a causal connection between the brain – which is the seat of (i.e. the cause or origin of) consciousness - and the conscious mind. And – it stands to reason that this causal connection goes in both “directions”. The physical organ – the brain – causes phenomena in the conscious mind. (For example, “the wiring” of the brain – i.e. the layout of the connections between the neurons in the brain may very well give rise to the memories in the conscious mind.) And – in the “other direction” – choices made in the conscious mind can cause effects in physical reality. (For example, if and when a man wills himself to get up out of bed in the morning – that event in his conscious mind results in his body hauling itself up out of his bed!)
 
So the brain - which is physical - interacts with the conscious mind - which is not physical. Physical activity in the brain (i.e. electrical and chemical signals in the neurons of the brain) can cause effects in the mind. And conscious activity in the mind (i.e. choices and willing) can cause effects in the physical body of the subject possessing said mind. There is both “upwards” (from the brain to the mind) and “downwards” (from willing in the mind down to the brain/body) causation in those living organisms which possess consciousness.
 
Consciousness exists. That is axiomatic. Whenever a materialist denies that consciousness exists – he presupposes it in the act of denying it – and so he contradicts himself. But consciousness is not physical. Then what is it? Consciousness is an emergent property of living organisms.
 
And – it is a sui generis. We do perceive consciousness – notwithstanding the fact that it is not physical. To be sure – we cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel anyone´s consciousness - not even our own.
 
But how did we get the concept consciousness? Where did it come from? Elementary – each, and every one of us has directly perceived one consciousness – namely, our own consciousness! By means of introspection. Introspection is one species of perception - the one that "looks" inwards. And once we have perceived our own consciousness, it is not at all difficult for any of us to infer that other living organisms possess consciousness also. After all – even children realise that their playmates, their parents, their teachers – and even their pet animals(!), possess the attribute of consciousness.
 
The contents of consciousness are not physical entities. But ideas (i.e. “concepts”) and emotions are analogous to the entities which exist “out there” in physical reality. We do things with ideas and emotions. We think about ideas. We combine ideas into theories, stories and entire books. We respond to emotions. We either express or suppress/repress emotions. As the philosopher Ayn Rand observed - consciousness is a process. The proverbial “stream of consciousness” is, but of course, a continuous process - a stream of awareness.
 
Since consciousness is a process, it is perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that there is some sort of “energy” involved in consciousness. For - we directly experience that serious thinking requires significant (non-physical) effort. (The ultimate source of this “energy” must be the metabolism carried out in the brains of living organisms. This metabolism involves large amounts of energy. According to my layman´s knowledge of biology the brain of a typical man consumes/metabolizes roughly 25% of the glucose consumed/metabolized by the man´s entire body in any given period of time!)
 
We already know full well that events in a man´s mind/consciousness cause events “out there in (physical) reality”. When a man wakes up in the morning – why does he get up out of bed? Or, alternatively, remain there in bed instead? Easy-peasy! The man wills himself to either get up – or, if he is feeling lazy, to just stay there in bed instead. It is the man´s thinking, choosing and willing (“I must get up now in order to get to work on time!”) which causes the muscles in said man´s body to stretch and contract in such a way that he winds up getting up and out of the bed.
 
The causal mechanism here is not rocket science. The events in a man´s mind/consciousness (i.e. the man´s thinking and consequent choosing) cause the neurons in said man´s brain to fire in certain patterns – and said firing of the neurons causes electric/chemical impulses to be sent out from the brain via the nervous system to certain muscles in the man´s body. With certain, specific physical movements of the body as a result. This is one species of “downward causation” (i.e. causation from the world of consciousness “down to” the world of the physical) in practice.
 
There is also “upwards causation” (from the world of the physical “up to” the world of consciousness). The most obvious example of this is the elementary fact that it is the electric and chemical activity of the neurons in the brain of a living organism which gives rise to (i.e. causes) the consciousness of said organism, generally speaking. Another obvious, and related, example which all of us are familiar with is the sensation of pain we experience when we place our hand on a hot stove, or when our bare foot happens to step on something hard and sharp - like a thumbtack.
 
4) MENTAL ILLNESS BY DINT OF HABITUATION
 
What follows will be preliminary speculations concerning the conceivable causal factors behind my alleged schizophrenia. I provided some, admittedly modest, empirical evidence for these possible causes of my alleged schizophrenia in chapter one of my book. The speculations of mine which follow will be based on said evidence.
 
What is the value in mere speculation concerning the causation of my alleged schizophrenia? I hope that these speculations will serve as food for thought for the professional psychiatrists and psychologists to whom will fall the responsibility for proving or disproving my scientific hypotheses concerning the causation of schizophrenia.
 
Or - whichever the species of mental illness it was that I suffered from during the eighteen months from the summer of 1972 through the end of 1973 – the period during which I was declared a certified psychotic. I insist on always stating that I allegedly suffered from schizophrenia during those eighteen months. For – I suspect that I was misdiagnosed by the psychiatrist(s) who was/were responsible for committing me to Ulleråkers Mental Hospital during the fifteen months that I was a committed (I was released from the hospital for a period of three months during the fall of 1972, notwithstanding the fact that I was still a certified psychotic during those three months. Then I was recomitted to the mental hospital in January of 1973.).
 
I suspect that I was misdiagnosed because I have, over the years, acquired a layman´s knowledge of the science of psychopathology. Said layman´s knowledge of mine includes a significant amount of knowledge concerning the symptoms which psychiatrists assert typify cases of schizophrenia. I know today, because I am me and I remember myself from the eighteen months during which I had a diagnosis of schizophrenia – I know from introspection and memory that I had none, absolutely nada, of such alleged symptoms of schizophrenia as hearing voices, experiencing hallucinations and imagining that my own consciousness somehow exercised direct control over the physical actions of entities in “reality out there”. [NOTE 1]
 
I am now (at time of writing) 71 years old. So - I have experienced many years gone by in which to live and learn. I have - throughout my entire adult life - been a voracious reader. Preferably of intellectually serious non-fiction. So – I have “picked up” bits and pieces of knowledge concerning the nature of human consciousness in general – and concerning its health, specifically. I am a layman and an amateur when speculating about the causation of my fellow men´s states of mental health.
 
So – everybody. Now I have warned you. I am merely going to provide you with “food for thought”. I will not attempt to prove any of my ideas. I hope that the world´s professional psychologists and psychiatrists will take these ideas into consideration – and wind up using their own observations of cases of psychosis to either confirm or falsify these speculative ideas of mine. Ideas about the possible causes of the grave mental health problems which in my case may - or may not - have been schizophrenia.
 
5) MENTAL HEALTH INVOLVES VOLITION
 
My idiosyncratic understanding of mental health issues is predicated on my conviction that all men have free will. Volition is real! And – the volition of the subject – i.e. the volition of whichever individual we are discussing - plays a major role in determining the state of his mental health.
 
How do I know this? The answer is simple - introspection combined with memory!
 
I still today have an excellent memory of the thoughts and emotions which passed through my stream-of-consciousness during the time in which I gradually descended into a suicidal depression at the age of 15, and subsequently into an alleged bout of schizophrenia at the ages of 18 and 19.
 
I remember the specific individual choice which, in conjunction with a certain traumatic experience, started off the gradual process by means of which my consciousness eventually degenerated into my psychosis. In section three of chapter one I related said traumatic experience. I also related the dire unfortunate choice I made. Unfortunately, I was weak – I chose not to stand my ground in response to my mother´s adamant insistence that “[I] could not know [anything]!”
 
My own mother (the b-tch!) held that I could not know anything – anything at all, if and when I tried to go by the judgment of my own mind. Went by the judgment of my own mind instead of taking some anonymous `authorities´ on faith. I never did stoop to the depravity of seriously believing my mother´s crazy idea. But – my self-confidence was undercut by my mother´s brazen denial of the validity of my mind.
 
I failed to innoculate myself against my mother´s insidious undermining of my self-confidence by dint of the fact that I failed to simply reject her idea indignantly and out of hand. I should have worked up the courage to tell my mother, in effect “Oh yeah! You say that I cannot know anything for sure with my own mind? And that I would be better off taking anonymous strangers on faith? That´s sheer nonsense, mom. Go to hell, mom!”
 
But I didn´t. So – by dint of my cognitive passivity and/or my cowardice - I let my mother get “under my skin”. My mother hurt me. And I let her hurt me!
 
So – said incident amounted to a traumatic experience. This experience constituted a “shock to my system”. I began to permit myself to be plagued by uncertainty. My mother´s initial “Comprachico-type” action had set me up for destruction by the "reinforcement" of a veritable barrage of repeated “Comprachico-type” actions which awaited me at the prep school, beginning a few months later.
 
The process of my descent into a psychosis took roughly five years – from its start in the spring of 1967 up until my diagnosis of schizophrenia in the early summer of 1972. The start of the deterioration of my mental health – the first cause, the trigger, of my descent into mental illness – was my mother´s gratuitous assault on my confidence in my own mind. But – subsequently it was a slow, gradual process. It was caused by a combination of my bad choices and by environmental factors. Said environmental factors consisted of the fallacious, irrational ideas contained in the instruction at the prep school, Milton Academy. My so-called “education” played a major role in driving me insane!
 
I know this for a fact – for, over the course of all those five years my mind was basically lucid. I was aware of what was going on – both “out there in reality” – and, also, “in here - in the world of my own consciousness”. I was in possession of both the ability to perceive external reality by means of extrospection - and to perceive the contents of my own consciousness by means of introspection. And – I remember very clearly, thank you, many of the events which I perceived out there in reality all around me – and, also, many of the thoughts and emotions which I perceived passing through my own mind during that same period of time.
 
6) MENTAL HEALTH AND “DEFORMATION” OF THE SUBJECT´S CONSCIOUSNESS
 
The development of my psychosis over five years can be conceptualized as a slowly progressing “deformation” of my mind. Like the slow movements, over extended periods of time, of the continent-rearranging forces of the at-glacial-speed moving tectonic plates.
 
When my mind was in good health, during my grade school years, it came naturally for me to focus my mind “outwards” – onto “the world out there”. All the time while in grade school I was on the right track. I was learning to understand the nature of reality. If my education had continued in the same vein - then I might have achieved some major existential success when I reached adulthood.
 
As I stated in section 1 in chapter one, I dreamed of one day becoming a scientist when I was a kid! I valued my mind - and I nursed the ambition of contributing to mankind´s store of useful knowledge. My role models were such intellectual giants as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein! They were my heroes and role models already when I was just a kid in grade school.
 
My mother´s Comprachico-type of action on me constituted a “sudden deformation” of my mind – like the violent impact of a large bolloid on the Earth´s surface. Said sudden deformation was the trigger which set the train in motion – the motion consisting of my mind´s slow decay into psychosis, that is.
 
The maleducation which began to be perpetrated on me after the summer vacation of 1967 – said maleducation very slowly and gradually completed the process. Chapter one relates in detail, in sections 4 through section 10, the specific means by which the maleducation at Milton Academy completed the task of deforming my mind all the way from mental health into insanity.
 
The essence of what happened was that the content of the humanities component of the instruction at Milton Academy brainwashed me with a nihilistic vision of the universe I lived in. I became convinced - by the implicit philosophical content (specifically, by the implied metaphysics) of the “classics” of modern literature which I was required to read (e.g. The Trial, The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, The Lord of the Flies etc.) - that life was utterly hopeless and that all of us human beings are doomed to lives filled with misery, depravity and failure.
 
I felt no relish for concerning myself with an outer world which I felt was hopeless and depressing. Due to the vision of life contained in the “classics” of modern literature, combined with the depressing contents of the news reports in the mass media of the 1960s.
 
So - I fled into fantasy worlds which I fabricated in my own consciousness. I perceived my own fictitious universes as being “brighter”, more colourful and more exciting places than the drab, boring, depressing and literally depraved universes of such intellectual slimeballs as Kafka and Salinger. The “classics” of modern literature motivated me to choose to render myself radically introverted.
 
By dint of the process of habituation first explicated by Aristotle more than 2.000 years ago, my radical introversion grew, and grew successively over roughly five years until it eventually became “second nature” to me. At first I needed to put forth effort in order to focus my mind inwards. But as time went by my daydreaming became more, and more the path of least resistance for my mind. So eventually daydreaming came to me naturally - without any conscious choice. Introversion became my mind´s default mode. My radical introversion was a compensatory mental habit which I chose to develop out of desperation. It was a desperate attempt by me to escape the unbearable inner state which was foisted on me by my maleducation at that awful “liberal” and “progressive” prep school.
 
7) PSYCHOSES MAY CONSIST OF BAD MENTAL HABITS
 
The mental health problems I had developed by the age of eighteen were – in essence – bad mental habits! In the language of the philosopher Ayn Rand, they were an expression of a truly bad, unhealthy kind of psycho-epistemology [NOTE 2] which I had been influenced/”nudged” into habituating. The prep school had foisted these bad habits on me. For those bad thinking habits were precisely what the prep school had been motivating me – urging me - to develop! Whether the teachers at Milton Academy were aware of it or not!
 
At the start of my sojourn at Milton Academy my mind had a healthy orientation “outwards”. I was hellbent on learning how to master reality and succeed in living my life “out there in reality”. The pursuit of happiness was my goal up until my unfortunate sojourn in the prep school. At the end of my sojourn at Milton Academy I had become a miserable neurotic – all wrapped up in my own private emotions of ennui and guilt. And instead of pursuing values I wasted my precious time while at the prep school on evasions of the need to act - for the sake of gaining an illusion that I was fixing up my senseless problems. Escape from misery had become my goal – instead of the pursuit of values and happiness!
 
So - my maleducation “pushed” me to reorient the focus of my mind from “reality out there” to “my consciousness in here”. My mind had been “trained” to adopt the radical subjectivism of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant! The essence of my mental health problems was that I was no longer concerned with the mastering of reality. My consciousness was in effect cut off from reality – as though I was trapped in Kant´s notorious version of the universe in which reality “as it is in itself” is utterly unknowable!
 
8) MY HYPOTHESIS
 
My hypothesis is that I focused my mind inwards so persistently – and over such a protracted stretch of time – that I reconfigured the connections between the neurons in my brain in such a way that I became permanently introverted. After a few years of choosing to constantly “look inwards” - introversion became second nature to me by dint of the physical make-up of my brain. So – I suspect that a psychosis can be the result of the habituation of bad modes of thinking. “Slow deformation” of a subject´s psyche might be simply the slow, gradual automatization of a bad mental habit by dint of the neurons of the subject´s brain re-configurating themselves as a response to their possessor´s persistent thinking habits! Psychoses may perhaps not be due to physical causes alone. Maybe “downward causation”, at least oftentimes, initiates the subjects´ descent into mental illnesses.
 
Also – the development of a “screwed-up metaphysics" might be the direct “trigger cause” of a psychosis. After all, I related in section 13 of chapter one, that weird conviction of mine which was that the entire house in which I lived might just, somehow, vanish into thin air when I was away at work! Evidently, my psychosis involved me losing my implicit confidence in the metaphysical principle called the Axiom of Identity.
 
The existential implications of my mind´s being “pushed into introversion” by the educational institution into whose hands I had been put were, but of course, that I became unfit for survival in reality by means of my own devices. For – an individual who is fixated on the contents of his own consciousness, to the exclusion of whatever exists in “reality out there” - is simply a psycho! A psycho who can only survive as a ward in an institution!
 
In chapters five, six and seven I will give detailed accounts of my inner mental life during and after my psychosis. I was so hellbent on escaping the depressing reality projected by my teachers at Milton, that I conjured up entire parallel universes and fictional societies for the sake of consoling and entertaining myself! Of course – I could not sustain my life “out there in reality” by means of fantasies “in here in my mind”. So - I became unfit to survive by my own devices once the prep school had finished “educating” me!
 
9) ONE MORE CRUCIAL CAUSAL FACTOR IN THE CAUSATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS: ALTRUISM
 
To be fair and objective I must add here that the traumatic experience perpetrated on me by my own mother combined with the maleducation perpetrated on me by the prep school were not the only two factors involved in my degeneration into an alleged psychosis. A third, and also crucial, factor was my own tragic choice to not only embrace the morality of altruism – but to, moreover, try pretty darn hard to practice it consistently in my own life. I relate what happened in this respect in section four of chapter one titled “MY ATTEMPT TO ACTUALLY PRACTICE THE MORALITY OF ALTRUISM” - and continue relating it in most of section five.
 
The morality of altruism is one of the most underappreciated factors in bringing about mental health problems around the world!
 
Why is altruism so harmful?
 
The short answer is: Altruism makes happiness impossible for anyone to achieve - without a concomitant heavy dose of debilitating guilt. A burden of guilt which poisons whatever semblance of happiness the subject nevertheless does manage to achieve. I illustrate how this works with my own case in sections four and five in chapter one. I complement said empiri with a theoretical treatment of the morality of altruism in chapters eight and nine of this book – “My Take on the Evil of Altruism” and "Ayn Rand´s Take on the Evil of Altruism".
 
NOTE 1: My knowledge concerning the symptoms which typify schizophrenia is summarized in an essay by the Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff – titled Madness and Modernism (published in The Intellectual Activist Volume 8, Number 6 -- November, 1994)
 
NOTE 2: The term "psycho-epistemology" was coined by Ayn Rand. It refers to the automatized interactions of the sub-conscious mind with the conscious mind. See the entry on psycho-epistemology in the Objectivist philosopher Dr. Harry Binswanger´s book The Ayn Rand Lexicon.