I saw things mocking me. I cannot say that I really saw images; they did not represent anything. Rather I felt them. It seems that my mouth was full of birds, which I crunched between my teeth, their feathers, their blood and broken bones were choking me.

(Sechehaye’s Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl)

I am left with the nagging irony in the beautiful prose of schizophrenic authors. I long to write with the poetic fluidity Sechehaye maintains as she symbolizes her anxieties, but then I must account for the lack of metaphor she speaks in. She does not intend to capture the reader in imagery like I wish I could. She was literally choking on raw bird parts when she wrote, in a wholly inescapable manner.

Potential thesis derived from this essay:

An empowered self – a definitive internal source of agency – is central to a functional lifestyle. The stratagem towards solidifying this self, implemented by Patricia Deegan for one, holds true as a self-determinacy enforcement approach Friedrich Nietzsche explores in his conceptualization of the will to power – for like happiness, Deegan felt in control of her schizophrenia as her “feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome” developed.*

Through mechanisms of reconceptulization that allow the reclamation of internal sensory delusions (i.e. hallucinations), schizophrenics may learn the reappropriation of authority (i.e. “voices” and their feeling of externally uncontrollable agency) to self (i.e. internal incorporation of self-derived feelings, in the standard conceptualization of the term). Moerman’s 2002 reconcepulization of the placebo effect as a “meaning response” (39) supports this analysis when one places “meaning” under scrutiny. Its implicit self-derived authority may imply that schizophrenic experiences such as Deegan’s provide evidence for Meorman’s non-pejorative placebo effect.