Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

> I didn’t want to stay medicated (my previous stint had lasted a decade), and I understood that the rules of the retreat meant that as I had left before the end, I could not go back. Vipassanā makes it clear in its literature regarding “serious mental disorders” that: “Our capacity as a non-professional volunteer organisation makes it impossible to properly care for people with these backgrounds.”

I don't really see what the author's personal troubles have to do with specifically Buddhism. If you stop taking powerful psychiatric medications and freak out in a greek monastery on the the Athos peninsula, you're also likely to get hauled away in handcuffs.

I'm no mental health expert but it seems risky to stop taking your meds, cold turkey, and likely against the advice of your mental health professional, proceed to immerse yourself 24x7 in any sort of religious retreat.

View on HN

Look at this paragraph a couple above the one you quoted:

> In the mid-Nineties, in my mid-twenties when I was working as a journalist in London, I took enough recreational drugs to keep me awake for nine days, at the end of which I was psychotic, sectioned, sedated and held in hospital for four months. That might sound dramatic, but I did it to myself and for all I know the treatment (including drugs since withdrawn from use) and the incarceration saved my life.

So, mid-90s, freaked out on recreational drugs, ended up in the hospital for four months.

Went on legal brain-altering drugs for a decade. Which would have him going off of them somewhere in the 00s.

...and then if you look at the paragraph right above the one you quoted...

> It seemed clear to me that if I could reach such an altered state through intoxication and insomnia once, and then do it again 20 years later through silence and concentration [...]

...we can pencil in about a decade of being off the legal brain-altering chemicals. Whatever triggered this, it wasn't the result of going cold turkey off of something he'd been taking up to the last day before starting the meditation course.

From the text it sounds like there was a large amount of time between the hospital/medication (that was in the mid-Nineties) and the meditation retreat, which I assume was relatively recent - I don't think he was on meds by then?

>I had been screened out at the initial application because of my history and then, after going into detail, accepted, as my prior issues were so long ago.

Does the article say the author quit their meds cold turkey before this retreat? I viewed the first sentence you quoted as meaning the author was stuck. They didn’t want to go back on meds (we aren’t told when or how the meds were stopped) and they couldn’t go back to the retreat. I thought it was a simple statement about having few options.

> freak out in a greek monastery on the the Athos peninsula, you're also likely to get hauled away in handcuffs

I'm not clear on why it should be obvious that someone freaking out during an intense meditation should be "likely" to get "hauled away in handcuffs". Could you explain?

Its hard to follow, but I don't think he was on medication going into the retreat, rather was given anti-psychotics in hospital after. (There was, apparently long ago, a history of mental health issues).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com