Pisces Moon's form of mental illness

[Jim Eshelman]

Every major astrological factor can potentially turn pathological, even though the vast majority of people nearly always express it in a non-pathological form. This may look like an extreme expression of the sign's typical characteristics or a reversal of them (I do think the opposite sign's polarity traits become involved as the mind or character breaks down); but a sign's abnormalities normally have something distinctive to the core symbols of the sign. A classic example is the way gentle Taurus, normally committed to harmlessness, might turn out to be a murderer but, if so, characteristically has strong passion and erotic themes involved.

For the most part, abnormal psychological states for a sign are extreme, out-of-bounds expression of ordinary traits that normally show in milder, unthreatening, and perhaps highly idiosyncratic ways in the psychologically healthy.

While working on Moon in Pisces today I remembered the example of genius mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. There is much to see in his chart - it is in no sense ordinary, with Pluto in the same degree as Ascendant. His Pisces Moon is afflicted by a near-partile conjunction with Mars (and that's before we get into even deeper complications by Moon-Mars conjunctions with Eris and Sedna). What follows below, therefore, shouldn't be taken as describing Pisces Moons in general except I suspect a few Pisces Moon folks will recognize more ordinary, healthy traits in themselves that correspond to the abnormality described.

Bottom line: I think Forbes' distinctive form of mental illness is typical of that which develops in extreme cases of mentally ill Piscians. The Wikipedia article is quite good this time, so I'll rely on quoting it at length. (I have several other Pisces Moons examples that show lesser, usually healthier forms of these traits.)

[Jim Eshelman]

From the "Mental Illness" section of Wikipedia's page on John Forbes Nash, Jr. I have added bold to one paragraph below that I think is most revelatory. (It's hard to distinguish some of these traits from the seemingly more normal states of, say, Joan of Arc or Jack Parsons, and many of the artists and great writers.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forb ... al_illness

Although Nash's mental illness first began to manifest in the form of paranoia, his wife later described his behavior as erratic. Nash thought that all men who wore red ties were part of a communist conspiracy against him. He mailed letters to embassies in Washington, DC, declaring that they were establishing a government. Nash's psychological issues crossed into his professional life when he gave an American Mathematical Society lecture at Columbia University in early 1959. Originally intended to present proof of the Riemann hypothesis, the lecture was incomprehensible. Colleagues in the audience immediately realized that something was wrong.

In April 1959, Nash was admitted to McLean Hospital for one month. Based on his paranoid, persecutory delusions, hallucinations, and increasing asociality, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1961, Nash was admitted to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton. Over the next nine years, he spent intervals of time in psychiatric hospitals, where he received both antipsychotic medications and insulin shock therapy.

Although he sometimes took prescribed medication, Nash later wrote that he did so only under pressure. According to Nash, the film A Beautiful Mind inaccurately implied he was taking atypical antipsychotics. He attributed the depiction to the screenwriter who was worried about the film encouraging people with mental illness to stop taking their medication.

Nash did not take any medication after 1970, nor was he committed to a hospital ever again. Nash recovered gradually. Encouraged by his then former wife, de Lardé, Nash lived at home and spent his time in the Princeton mathematics department where his eccentricities were accepted even when his mental condition was poor. De Lardé credits his recovery to maintaining "a quiet life" with social support.

Nash dated the start of what he termed "mental disturbances" to the early months of 1959, when his wife was pregnant. He described a process of change "from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' or 'paranoid schizophrenic'". For Nash, this included seeing himself as a messenger or having a special function of some kind, of having supporters and opponents and hidden schemers, along with a feeling of being persecuted and searching for signs representing divine revelation. Nash suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, his desire to be recognized, and his characteristic way of thinking, saying, "I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally." He also said, "If I felt completely pressureless I don't think I would have gone in this pattern'"

Nash reported that he started hearing voices in 1964, then later engaged in a process of consciously rejecting them. He only renounced his "dream-like delusional hypotheses" after a prolonged period of involuntary commitment in mental hospitals — "enforced rationality". Upon doing so, he was temporarily able to return to productive work as a mathematician. By the late 1960s, he relapsed. Eventually, he "intellectually rejected" his "delusionally influenced" and "politically oriented" thinking as a waste of effort. In 1995, he said that he didn't realize his full potential due to nearly 30 years of mental illness.

Nash wrote in 1994:

I spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release. And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized that I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research. Thus there came about the research for "Le problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d'un fluide général"; the idea that Prof. [Heisuke] Hironaka called "the Nash blowing-up transformation"; and those of "Arc Structure of Singularities" and "Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data".

But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60s I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.

Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists.