Interview with David Oaks
From Harvard to the Psychiatric Survivors’ Movement
David Oaks is the director of Mind Freedom International. As described in the story below,*18 Oaks had become involved with the mental patients’ liberation movement in the late 1970s. In 1985 Oaks began writing, editing, and publishing Dendron, a magazine for psychiatric survivors who were critical of the mental health system. In 1990 Oaks formed Support Coalition International (SCI) after meeting with representatives from thirteen other groups opposed to psychiatric oppression. In 2005, SCI changed its name to Mind Freedom International (MFI). (The website is www.mindfreedom.org.) MFI currently unites one hundred grassroots sponsors and affiliate groups to campaign for human rights in the mental health field.1
MFI is an accomplished organization and is the only group of its kind to have accreditation by the United Nations as a nongovernmental organization (NGO). Its status as an NGO enabled it to work with disability advocates from all over the world to produce the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) that was officially passed by the United Nations. As Oaks wrote me on October 13, 2011, “The CRPD is a stepping stone that is helping to change the paradigm in mental disability and liberty. Headed by our board president Celia Brown, our own team was able to mix in with these leaders, and build a lot of great relationships.”
An MFI human rights e-mail alert network reaches more than ten thousand people who take action and complain to governmental authorities about abuse. Several of these campaigns have resulted in liberating individuals from forced psychiatric treatment. MFI has numerous accomplishments: it negotiated an internationally binding treaty about disability and human rights; it conducted a number of successful campaigns, including the hunger strike described in the previous chapter (see chapter 2); and it coordinates Mad Pride cultural events and guerrilla theater in more than six countries, including Ghana (described in the interview below). MFI activism against forced electroshock treatments (ECT) persuaded the World Health Organization to endorse a ban of involuntary ECT. An MFI campaign on behalf of Haitian political activist and psychiatric survivor Paul Henri Thomas led to his release from a state mental hospital. Similar campaigns resulted in the release of others.2
I first met Oaks in 1990 in New York; we were both involved in protesting the annual meting of the American Psychiatric Association. I interviewed him at the time for the book I was writing—Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels. On the basis of my interview I reconstructed an account of his “psychotic episodes” in the late 1970s when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and included it as a chapter in the book; it is reprinted in the extract titled “David’s Story” in this chapter.
The psychiatrists had told Oaks that he was a chronic schizophrenic and that he would need to take “antipsychotic medication” for the rest of his life. By the time I first interviewed him, he had proved that they were wrong. As of this recent interview (2008) Oaks has been off psychiatric drugs for thirty years. Oaks is an example of a “creatively maladjusted” person. Clearly his organization, website, and numerous campaigns have helped inspire thousands of psychiatric survivors.
Farber: It’s been a long time since the first interview I did with you. In the meantime—despite the psychiatrists’ claim that you were schizophrenic or bipolar—you have not been locked up again or had any kind of breakdown.
David Oaks: No, I haven’t. I haven’t used the psych system for thirty years, since I got out of it my senior year of college. If I am upset about something I rely upon peer support. For example, I’m in a men’s group that started in the spring of 1989. We’ve been meeting for nineteen years now, and we’re good friends who support each other.
Farber: Is this a group of psychiatric survivors?
David Oaks: They don’t really identify as activists in the mental health consumer or psychiatric survivor movement. Most of my friends don’t identify as mental health consumer psychiatric survivors. I know a lot of my friends through the peace movement or the environmental movement. I know some people live, eat, breathe, and drink [the psychiatric survivors’ movement], and you know all their friends are consumer survivors. That is not the case for me.
Farber: We know broadly about some of the accomplishments of MFI. What does this mean for you day-to-day? What is a typical busy day for you?
David Oaks: I tend to work weekdays, nine to five. I come down here to the Mind Freedom office. We’re seeing people—there are three of us here—and I work answering clients and going to meetings, speaking out, speaking to media, and then going home. It’s kind of close to normal.
Farber: Does Mind Freedom offer any services to psychiatric survivors like peer support?
David Oaks: Mind Freedom itself does not offer direct services. Through human rights groups that we promote, we support and we encourage a whole variety of alternatives, but we ourselves are not providers. We feel that it might be a conflict of interest to be an activist group also promoting one particular approach over others.
Farber: Psychiatry claims that anyone who has a “breakdown” or “psychotic episode” is chronically mentally ill and/or biochemically imbalanced. They tend to discount people like you who don’t conform to their self-fulfilling prophecies; they claim in hindsight that you were not really schizophrenic, that you were misdiagnosed.
David Oaks: A lot of mental health professionals who label people and who deny recovery actually have severe mental problems themselves. One of these problems is hopelessness. What we’re finding is that mental health professionals who are very embedded in the mental health system will sometimes have an extreme problem of what might be called pessimism or hopelessness. They will say, “Oh no, you can never recover.” And what it is—that’s a sign of their own mental/emotional problems. Certainly people can and do recover all the time from extreme mental and emotional problems, and a lot of our members prove that.
Farber: When did you get involved with the Mad Pride idea? How has it developed?
David Oaks: That was started by some folks in England in 1999. Specifically, there are two people who are considered coconceivers of it. One of them was Pete Shaughnessy. He and someone else saw a Gay Pride event in London, and they said, “Hey what about Mad Pride? Why don’t we do some Mad Pride events?” So that’s how we heard about it. And as a community organizer you really want to encourage leadership by other people. When somebody has a great idea and is doing something really great like that, we love to encourage and help out, and that’s what we did. So Mind Freedom took that on as a way to support it. I helped link it up with Bastille Day. Mad Pride events can be held any time of the year, but they have tended to be in July, around Bastille Day, or May, or October, which is the Mental Health Month.*19, 3
So I would say that what I added to Mad Pride was some level of international organized support and encouragement. One of the founders, one of the earlier organizers of Mad Pride—when I told him about this he said, “Oh I’m not sure we should be organized.”
What we helped provide was recognizing that we can affirm Mad Pride but use rationality in planning and organization and leadership to promote it. So Mind Freedom combined the idea of Mad Pride with an organized approach. We have an international committee with leaders. We have teleconferences, planning, publicity, and a website. We encourage people to do Mad Pride, we help coordinate between them. So that’s what we brought to the mix. Even with that, it’s still very slow to take off in a huge way.
The main Mad Pride event, which we call an anchor event, tends to be about a dozen actual events: art galleries, theater events, campouts, and things like that, and fairs and festivals. So right now we’re trying to move it to the next level where lots and lots of people will be part of Mad Pride where lots of people can celebrate—even in their own homes, or with a few people, a small group, or individually—that it’s a human thing to celebrate our uniqueness, our difference. That’s why we connected up with the idea for International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment [IAACM]. Martin Luther King used that name more than ten times, including in front of the American Psychological Association on September 1, 1967. It was a laugh line in his speech—instead of the NAACP—but he was serious about the idea. So we incorporated the IAACM in Oregon. I think we’re the first ones to consciously and overtly create an IAACM. I’ve written to MLK’s son, who has a psych label, and said, “Hey, we’re forming this.” I didn’t hear back. So as far as I know, we’re the first. Patch Adams is our honorary chair.
The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment, it sounds funny, but it’s a serious thing to organize something intentionally. Like, many people still think Rosa Parks did what she did because her feet were tired, but she was an activist from the NAACP. That was a conscious act that she did; when she sat on that bus she was consciously advancing creative maladjustment. So Mad Pride is similar; for this thing to take off, we really need to consciously support it. It’s very challenging, and I’m proud that we’ve gotten as far as we’ve gotten—that Mind Freedom has boosted Mad Pride.
Farber: Are you saying that both Mad Pride activities and civil disobedience are forms of creative maladjustment?
David Oaks: Yes. Mad Pride is in the realm of art at the moment. It’s more like an idea, a concept. I would love to see Mad Pride develop art to such an extent that the general public does creative maladjustment activities. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks did what was called civil disobedience. So we had a mass civil disobedience movement during the civil rights movement and again during the war in Vietnam. Our Mind Freedom hunger strike was in that spirit.
I would add, also there is cultural disobedience, and that’s how I see Mad Pride. A group singing on a busy street corner and revealing their heart’s feelings—to such an extent that maybe some of them weep or open themselves up to say what they really think or feel—is utterly inappropriate in our society. There’s a frame of normality; you can’t do that. You can’t stand up in the theater before the movie starts, as a group, and say what you really think. Why not? We don’t realize how the norms we follow limit us—prevent the development of a sense of community. We need to depart from business as usual: in a crowded restaurant, tap on the glass—you’d be considered obnoxious and all these things, of course—or go to a mall and throw new dollar bills over the railing people tend not to do that. I would like to see more civil disobedience where we do go to jail. But I’d like to see all kinds of nonviolent, creative strangeness in the name of challenging, like the climate crisis. Let’s show people that there’s a crisis going on in the world. Let’s make it visible. Why don’t we see it?
Farber: You are advocating creative maladjustment. Would you say that normal society is itself insane?
David Oaks: No, I don’t use the word insane. I’d say normal society is certainly what any mental health professional would call insane—current society would fit that criterion—but I myself don’t like to use the word insane. What’s called normal is the worst mental and emotional distress in the history of the planet, and the climate scientists are showing that what’s been called normal is wrecking the planet. Our members, labeled schizophrenic, are not threatening to tear apart the ecological fabric of our planet. It’s the people labeled normal that are wrecking the basic infrastructure of our planet. So that is violence. You know, what we define as violence is very revealing.
Farber: What does Mad Pride mean to you then?
David Oaks: We are all mad, and I defy an individual to prove to me differently. Being mad is a part of ourselves we should all accept. It’s not like there is one perspective that is objectively true. Science now knows; no one has a grip on reality. It may be impossible to get a grip on reality. This is from complexity theory, quantum theory, particle physics, string theory, and all the cutting-edge sciences. Neurosciences are showing that we don’t have this grip on reality.
Farber: Does the word mad have any meaning for you?
David Oaks: It’s just culturally relative. The word deviant simply means “off of the path.” In our society, if you’re not—quote—normal then you’re considered mad and deviant. So like this guy was on a bus in Canada a few months ago, and he suddenly killed the guy next to him, began eating his ear, and cut off his head and held it up in the air. Obviously almost everybody in our society says, “Oh my God, that is clearly madness.” Okay? Well, what made it mad was it was utterly unexplainable and utterly unjustifiable, different. This is just so “out there” that it’s called psychotic.
But different does not have to be destructive. It could be creative. That’s why Martin Luther King Jr. advocated creative maladjustment. We don’t see what Rosa Parks did on that bus as psychotic, but she was breaking free of normality. She was doing something that was non-normal. So if we use the word madness to mean something utterly and totally different and non-normal, she was, by that definition, mad. Of course, we won’t call her that. But the word origin of madness simply means “changed.” So that is very revealing. So that’s why I say one can be proud to be mad. Our movement wants to explore this idea, crazy and proud, like Howie the Harp’s song “Crazy and Proud.”
Our society needs to break out of the mold of normality because what is called normal, let me repeat it, is like one of the best mental health movies out now: An Inconvenient Truth. Normality is a state of denying inconvenient truths.
Farber: Mad Pride means then an effort to wake people up by dramatically calling attention to the crisis of humanity?
David Oaks: Yes. Two things have always been a touchstone for me. One thing that psychiatric survivors can bring to the table is how we can use things like peer support and other alternatives to keep the human spirit alive, to keep it refreshed and renourished. We all suffer, all of us, but survivors have been through a lot of hell, a lot of them, so they have something to offer the planet. Survivors know to go through remarkable states, like suicide attempts, and come back and support each other and have something to offer society. So peer support, how to support one another, is one thing this movement has to offer.
The other thing is what Martin Luther King called creative maladjustment. He said the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. Definitely thinking outside of the box—like Rosa Parks, not like the guy in Canada who chopped off his neighbor’s head—but creative maladjustment. What the guy in Canada did was a negative maladjustment. We’re talking about the Rosa Parks–style creative maladjustment. So those are our two things, mutual support and thinking outside the box.
Farber: You said in the 1990 interview that when you had your breakdown you were experiencing “new aspects” of yourself, “spiritual, emotional, and mystical,” and that you wished there was someone “to help in the process of birth.” Do you still think looking back that your “psychotic” experiences in the 1970s were features of spiritual rebirth?
David Oaks: Yes, I do. I want to say first that I think that the word psychotic in mental health is like the “N” word in racism. It’s one of the worst things that people could be called. I’d say it depends on the individual, but for me, yes, there are spiritual aspects of everything. I think that when I went through my experience—when I was labeled psychotic—I got a taste of what saints, mystics, prophets, and shamans experience. Every cell in my body was certainly involved in the experience. It wasn’t just like a theoretical—you know—“Let us pray.” It was actually like, “I’m having a vision. I’m in an ecstatic state. I’m in an overwhelmed state.”
So I think that definitely it not only is a spiritual experience, but I got a taste of what those who came up with our various religions went through. I would not compare the quality of my experience to what Muhammad went through, but when Muhammad began to recite the Qur’an, I feel that I got a little tiny taste, a hint, a whiff, of what it was like to enter into that state. I really appreciate that. I would definitely consider that spiritual. There are other words for it . . .
Farber: You said in 1990 you had developed the ability to be centered and lucid and “still be in an altered state of consciousness.” You said, “Now I am capable of being in a so-called psychotic state without freaking out. I can go back and forth.” Is this still true?
David Oaks: I would say that I can experience what is called psychosis and be peaceful and functioning and return to do the work that needs to be done, so there you go. I can experience strong and overwhelming mental and emotional feelings—and unusual beliefs and states—without getting overwhelmed by what is called or what would be considered psychosis. I think that everybody’s in that state at times. In fact, we came up with a new acronym, pronounced “pumpkin”: People Mistakenly Considered Normal, PMCN. There are labeled people, and there are PMCNs. We’re all in the same mad boat, you know?
Farber: You were brought up Christian; you considered yourself an atheist at Harvard. Are you still an atheist now, Christian, or—?
David Oaks: I went to a Catholic church, but I became kind of an agnostic slash atheist. From early on, like in grade school, I would say I went through spiritual experiences. I don’t consider myself an atheist. I would consider myself, if you had to label me, an agnostic/pagan.
Farber: Do you think others who have been labeled quote unquote mentally ill—for all of them there’s a spiritual element? Are they potential mystics?
David Oaks: Well, I really take this whole pro-choice thing real strongly. So I wouldn’t at all take it upon myself to in any way describe other people’s experiences. Judi Chamberlin is an atheist.*20, 4 What she went through, she defines in her own way. Other members might define it in a spiritual way. Mind Freedom’s approach, and my approach for trying to get interfaced spiritually, is where we try to bring together the different perspectives, and that can include people that don’t believe at all. What I mean by interface is that you bring together a Jungian psychologist, an orthomolecular therapist, an acupuncturist, a peer support person, a housing expert, and each one of them may have a different perspective on what The Answer is—you know, capital T, capital A.
I think we need interfaces and many answers. We need to give people choices; are they being offered full information and support alternatives? That might include housing and vitamins, it might include peer support, it might include exercise and spirituality. The top few main alternatives to psychiatry are orthomolecular therapy, counseling, and spirituality, and each one of them has to be careful that it doesn’t become like the current system. With the current model, the medical model, the problem isn’t only the model, it’s the bullying behind it. I call it the bullying model.
Very easily a spiritual model could replace it and could become the same way; if somebody said, “Well, The Answer is this one form of prayer, this one kind of religion, this one type of exorcism,” that’s the problem as well as The Answer. If it became the dominant mode, we would question that Answer too. It wouldn’t mean that we’re anti-spirituality, but that we’re pro-choice. So I cannot say if madness is a spiritual experience for other people. It was for me.
Farber: You don’t think that people who get labeled, who have breakdowns, may be more spiritually inclined or more sensitive? Are they just the same as the average Joe or Jane?
David Oaks: Certainly a major issue is the trauma of being labeled. Being officially “othered” in our society is inherently a traumatizing act. Being labeled is just like being black in our society. If you quiz people about black and white, antiracist experts will point out several things. First of all, there’s no clear scientific differentiation between white and black. There is more variation within a race than there is between races. So there’s no easy scientific definition of who’s white or black.
But further than that, African-American activists tend not to be saying, “Oh, there’s no difference between people.” What they’re saying is, “There are lots of differences, based on all kinds of things. All kinds of mysterious things, all kinds of cultural things.” We ought to explore those differences, celebrate differences. So no, I’m not saying that there’s not any difference.
Here’s a quick insight into what I’m saying: it’s okay to have lines in our society between, let’s say, this group and that group. It’s okay to have distinctions, but they should be smart. The more you dive into that subject, you’re not going to find some absolutely clear dividing line. It comes down to the fact that we all are in the same boat. Nobody has a grip on reality. Therefore, we need everybody’s heart and mind onboard in making decisions together. Therefore, we need to be really careful and as nonviolent as possible.
Farber: So when you think of the people you’ve met who’ve been labeled mentally ill, do you think there might be similarities between these people—they might be more aware or sensitive than so-called normal people? Is there something distinctive that could be a source of Mad Pride?
David Oaks: I would say that, if you take a group of people that have been labeled mentally ill and you take another group that hasn’t been labeled, there may be—there certainly would be some differences but there’s no way to truly distinguish them. I would say that I am proud of what I call the mad movement. I’ve never organized strictly on labels. Everybody is welcome to join in and identify themselves as a psychiatric survivor.
I think everybody on the planet has experienced, has been harmed by the psychiatric system and its repression and so forth. So I think everybody can identify themselves as a psychiatric survivor. I think everybody can identify as someone who’s had severe mental and emotional problems. In fact, if you claim that you’ve never had severe mental and emotional problems, that is a good sign that you definitely have a severe mental and emotional problem. If you haven’t noticed that there’s a climate crisis or that we humans are all struggling on the planet or that you love people and then people you love die, if you haven’t come to grips with your mortality—I mean, if you haven’t experienced (or are unaware of any of that)—then you probably have some kind of cognitive problem, injury, or mental condition. I mean, it’s okay that you do, but you do. You’re in denial: we’re all in the same boat.
I think Psychiatry uses labels to divide us. In terms of the label consumer, why is it that the government has succeeded in defining a mental health consumer as somebody who uses official health system-licensed professionals? Those who see themselves as psychiatric consumers buy into it. The fact is that every entity, every living being, and every animal utilizes mental and emotional support constantly. If you take a monkey away from its mom and put it in a cage, it will wither. It might not die, but its brain will be smaller, it will be smaller, and nothing—no pill, no Jungian therapy, nothing—is going to make up for that. We are all interdependent, not just the people who get labeled mentally ill or consumer or survivor—everyone. The Psychiatry distinctions obscure our commonalities.
So in sum, I would definitely argue against making absolute, sweeping statements about anybody; that’s how bigotry and prejudice get started. That said, it’s okay to be proud of our community, and I’m proud to be a person who’s been labeled and who has made my career working in this field. I’m proud of being part of that community. There are amazing, vibrant, creative people I know who’ve been labeled and been through that.
I gave a speech in Vancouver recently. I concluded it by saying, “We’re the people who survived forced drugging and electroshock, labeling, and we persevered and we kept going, a lot of us, those that lived. A lot of us have kept on going, and there’s something very special about that; I like to describe it as ‘been on the front seat of watching the human spirit come back.’”
We’ve found in ancient archaeological digs evidence of human sacrifice. How can you explain that? There’s no rational explanation. And anybody who comes along and says they have a bumper sticker slogan as the answer or they have a magic pill—no. Don’t believe them. The answer is going to be everybody working all together, just like Martin Luther King talked about.
It’s about being human and remembering our humanity. It’s about that special, unique identity of the human. This is really about Human Pride. One of my so-called psychotic visions was about being a human being and having pride in being a human being and how we relate to the rest of the universe: we have a very unique planet and a very complex ecology. We human beings have something to bring to the table of the universe itself. So I think that has always been a touchstone for me, that so-called psychotic experience. Anyone could have that experience, and that, for me, is Mad Pride—Human Pride.
The following is reprinted from Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels. I interviewed Oaks for that book, on which I had just begun working. The year was 1990. I had just met Oaks for the first time. The narrative below, based on my interview, tells the story of Oaks’s breakdown. It had many strong spiritual elements. Together these pieces present a picture of Oaks’s life from youth to middle age. The reader can see for herself that Oaks was psychotic by the standards of Psychiatry.
One question is, how do people who know our society is insane tolerate it? Joseph Campbell—the famous mythologist and Jungian philosopher—had counseled “young people” to “follow your bliss,” to pursue what interests you passionately. It may well be that the only way Oaks could have stayed stable and happy was to find a niche in which he had an opportunity to contribute to the good of society, to its salvation, or in other words, not to adjust but to live in a state of tension with society, a state of creative maladjustment. Oaks had a degree with honors from Harvard, but he wasn’t the kind of person who could be content making lots of money working for a large corporation. And yet if he really had a defective brain he could not have been as successful as he was and he would have ended up on a psychiatric ward again over the years.
David’s Story*21
David Oaks is the editor of the magazine Dendron, a forum for individuals in the mental patients’ liberation movement. He has been active in that movement since his senior year at Harvard in 1977. He makes a living as a peace and environmental activist. Despite five incarcerations in mental hospitals due to emotional distress during the time when he attended Harvard, he graduated cum laude in the typical four-year period. He was given various diagnoses such as “schizophrenic” and “manic-depressive.” In other words David is supposed to be “chronically mentally ill” and able to function at a minimal level with the help of “medication.” He has taken no psychiatric drugs, nor been in a mental hospital, since 1977.
A Difficult Transition
Going to Harvard represented a major transition for David. “I came from a working-class background. I went to an all-male, Jesuit high school and then went with a union scholarship to Harvard.” Harvard represented making it, and his parents wanted to help him “mainstream.”
The summer before he started school he had two part-time jobs as an office worker. “When I got to Harvard that freshman year I was totally exhausted and out of it. And I didn’t have clothes that made me feel as if I fit in. I had these clothes that were really awkward.”
The culture was different from the one to which he was accustomed. His high school was competitive in an overt and obvious way. “People were very into competition and cutting each other down; the brutal insult kind of thing.” David’s father worked as a clerk for Penn Central Railroad; he had little formal education, but he spent much of his time reading. David’s mother was a housewife who also loved the written word. They lived in Chicago.
The Jesuit high school he went to was preparing students for college. It was oppressively all male. It was intellectually stimulating, highly structured, and competitive but in a way that was familiar to him. “Harvard is an elitist place. It is extremely competitive, and it puts you down emotionally.” The students there seemed very fraternal and “comfortable” with themselves. “But deep down there was a kind of elitist competitiveness.” Would he make it? Would he fit in? “I came from a working-class background, and I was going to Harvard, and people don’t understand how that kind of thing affects you to the very cells of your being.”
He had the opportunity to be socially confirmed and credentialed as being a member of “the best and brightest.” “Harvard mainly offers a mentality of elitism. Your ego gets pumped up. But in this society where we are beaten down so much that’s quite a commodity to get, isn’t it? They’re pumping air into people’s heads there.”
The opportunity to succeed was paired with the omnipresent threat of failure, a threat that transformed David’s sojourn at Harvard into a prolonged identity crisis, which explained in part the moments of acute distress that led to his incarcerations in mental hospitals.
Going to Harvard also represented to David the opportunity of transcending the limitations of the environment in which he grew up and that had influenced him to some extent. It was a first step to becoming a leader in the movement for social change in this country. The South Side neighborhood that David grew up in was ethnic blue-collar and racist. “The Nazi party had a headquarters only about ten blocks from my house.”
He felt that he had internalized some racial animosity. Away from his old community, he became aware of this and transcended it during his years at Harvard. “Martin Luther King came to my neighborhood, and he said he saw more hatred there than he did in any part of the country. I read later after I finished college that he felt almost hopeless. The only hope was if a few of the young people got out and went to college. And I thought, that’s a message for me.”
The threat of not making it haunted David throughout the four years he was at Harvard, and the memory of it still occasionally disturbs him now, thirteen years later. “I actually still have nightmares in which I’ll experience this enormous, almost cloud-like, megalithic feeling of being encompassed by this intellectual womb, which I take to be Harvard. I’m in a class, and I’m not prepared for an exam. I had never even gone to the classes for it. This is a common nightmare. But in mine, I am returning from a break. I can’t concentrate or remember.”
The pressure for David was intensified after his first hospitalization. The authorities attempted to confer on him the degraded social identity of a person who was “mentally ill.” In the process of climbing the mountain back to stability he slipped and risked being hurled into the abyss of nonpersonhood (“the chronically mentally ill”) from which many individuals never escape. “Always, in this nightmare, I had left Harvard, and I’ve flipped out, and I’m coming back to Harvard, and I’m looking at the exam, or trying to find my way around campus. I can’t read. Just like the first time after I was hospitalized and I couldn’t read. I can’t think. And I’m trying to piece together what’s happening. And it’s hard and I’m making mistakes.”
Religious Experiences
Harvard was an impersonal environment. “You don’t have that much personal attention from people. You rarely interact with the professor. You have huge classes with sections led by graduate students who are a few years older than you.” It was not until his sophomore year that he “flipped out.”
“It was strange because I began having a Christian religious-based experience and for years I had defined myself as an atheist. . . . The images and beliefs that I had learned in high school in terms of saints and the Holy Spirit came flooding back, and I experienced what I thought was the Holy Spirit; it led me into kind of a dangerous Boston neighborhood. . . . I had not slept in days and I was very tired, so I turned into a Jesuit school and I asked to speak with a priest. He was no help. He called my friends, who took me to the psychiatric unit at Stillman Infirmary, which is right in Harvard Square. . . . I saw a woman psychiatrist, and I had remembered seeing a poster around Cambridge criticizing psychiatric drugs and psychiatry so I was suspicious and told her what she wanted to hear.”
He was released. He went back to the dormitory, but he was still in a state of distress. David’s distress distressed his friends, which distressed David more. His friends took him back to Stillman. One girl said as she was about to leave him at Stillman, “Dave, you’re in a lot of trouble.” “Those were her last words before leaving, which scared the hell out of me. Not a smart thing to tell a person—and this was my friend.”
He was placed in a room. They came to administer drugs. He refused to take them. “I began panicking that because I had done this, gone to the priest and so forth, that Harvard was going to put me on trial, and I’d be thrown out.” The element of truth in his “delusion” was the realistic possibility of not “making it” at Harvard, the threat of failure that haunted this working-class boy throughout his four-year initiation at this elite institution.
There were positive aspects to his experience. “I felt I could see a pattern of an angel in a door, and I felt the Holy Spirit had guided me.” His friends had brought him the huge book, Lives of the Saints. “I began identifying with the saints.” He decided that he could lessen the threat of retribution by taking the drugs, so he reluctantly decided to do that. He was given a combination of Thorazine and Stelazine.
“The neuroleptics made me feel like a zombie. . . . I remember my parents had flown out to see me, and I tried to reassure them that I was physically okay. I started to do some push-ups. I did a few and then I began to bite my tongue. I tried to open my mouth and I couldn’t and my whole body was in paroxysms. My parents got a doctor and they’re watching me, this total writhing thing, and they put me onto the bed. Then a whole bunch of medical personnel showed up, and they administered an emergency dose of some kind of real tranquilizers that put me to sleep.”
He got out of Stillman about two weeks later and tried to go back to school, but he couldn’t concentrate. He went home to Chicago for a few weeks. He was in an altered state of consciousness, but he felt he was in a safe, supportive environment and was able to enjoy many of the unusual experiences he had. “I felt a third eye in the middle of my forehead.” At that time he had only in passing read the Indian literature that described the existence of a “third eye,” whose power could be developed, enabling one to attain clairvoyant vision. “It felt as if someone was trying to place a diamond in my third eye.”
David felt at times that the TV was personally communicating with him. He explains this experience now as partly a self-generated attempt to compensate for the spiritual vacuity of modern society. “In Native American cultures, in Earth-based religious cultures, people speak freely about relating directly to nature. And they believe that nature gives them messages. The belief that nature directly communicates to you is common in these Earth-based religions. We now live in an era where we are enclosed in a glass sphere, a bubble, of technology. So my way of restoring the sense of a dialogue with my environment was believing that the TV was personally sending messages to me.”
His family was supportive. His grandparents on both sides grew up in Lithuania. David felt that Lithuania had an “ancient” culture and belief system that validated the kinds of experiences that would be viewed as symptoms of mental illnesses in our culture.
His uncle was particularly helpful. David remembered one time he expressed to his uncle his fear that the wall in the house would fall. His uncle pressed up against the wall and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll just hold up the wall.” “My uncle was actually willing to give credence to my experience. He was very interested in ESP and parapsychology. . . . So when he was there I was able to calm down. Once, I stared at a TV antenna as a kind of meditation technique to help me to focus so that I could be centered and lucid and still be in an altered state of consciousness but not panicking.”
He described an experience with his brother that was both reassuring and inspiring. “I was waiting in the car. I saw my brother go into McDonald’s, and I saw this kind of macho guy walk in after him with what looked like a board in his hand. I felt the guy’s hostility. My brother walked back out, cheerful and tough at the same time. Something about his air of independence protected him. Seeing my brother come out safe in the most dangerous areas, I realized that I could also. I could walk through this wall of flame, and if I had support I could remain calm and lucid. It took me a while to develop that ability, but now I am capable of being in a so-called psychotic state without freaking out. I can go back and forth.”
After several weeks at home life returned to normal and David went back to school. He made up for lost time so that by the end of the summer he was caught up with his schoolwork.
In his junior year David started once again to have ecstatic mystical experiences. He cultivated these states because he felt that it was part of a process of becoming a more whole person. David gave a Jungian explanation for this: it was as if his unconscious mind was attempting to round out his psyche, to help him grow spiritually and to expand his potential as a person. Jung called this the individuation process. David had a tendency—he believed in hindsight—to be too analytical, controlling, hierarchical, distancing, overcompetitive, and linear. Now his psyche was pushing him away from a “left-brained” mode of experiencing the world because it limited his potential as a human being. He feels that Theodore Roszak’s book The Making of a Counter Culture explains his attitude then: creativity transcending the technocratic state.
At that time he was appointed publisher of a poetry magazine for Harvard students called padam aram, which means “stairway to heaven” or “Jacob’s ladder.” Serendipitously or synchronistically the building that Harvard gave the poets to use as an office had a ladder that went up to the roof.
David was a bit “flipped out” one day; he had not gotten much sleep and had smoked a little marijuana. At dawn, he walked up the ladder to the top and he looked at the gym and the ivy across the way and he noticed that there was a flock of birds in the ivy. “I believed they were sending me messages. They were passing messages on from other flocks of birds. I realized that they had a global communications network. I was ecstatic. . . . We’re talking pure ecstasy.”
I asked him what the message was.
“I don’t remember specifically. But it had something to do with telling me that what I was doing was okay, was meaningful, was part of a greater plan.”
This reminded him as we were talking of an experience he had ten years later as an environmental protection activist. “There was a train carrying hydrogen bombs. They call it the White Train. We blocked it in the northwest three times. I was in front of it all three times. I felt the same sense of purity as when I saw the birds. You know you’re in the right place, and you’re loving it, and you’re feeling connected.”
Incarceration and Chemical Torture
Pressures mounted and David continued to be plagued by a sense of insecurity. His behavior was sufficiently eccentric, although not in the least dangerous, that he was committed to McLean’s Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, against his will. “It’s Harvard’s teaching hospital. . . . It looks like a country club from the outside, but it’s all connected by tunnels inside, you seldom see the outside. . . . I was put into the hospital, put into my bedroom, and I sat down and they came in with the Thorazine. And they said, ‘Okay, take this,’ and I said, ‘No, thank you.’ I was in there singing to myself, and I had a top-of-the-world kind of feeling.”
“You really felt good?”
“I did. Yes. And they kept pushing the cup of Thorazine toward me, so I poured it on the ground. For that crime they immediately came in and brought me to solitary confinement and forcibly injected me. Then they made me go back after a day or two in there and mop up the Thorazine on the floor. You know, they took me to solitary, they held me down and pulled down my clothes and gave me the injection. I felt as if I had been raped. I wiped up the Thorazine with my hair to outrage them with my ‘submissiveness.’
“The drugs caused me all kinds of problems. I couldn’t see. I could not read my music or see across the room. I thought my eyes were going bad. The subjective feeling is actually one of disturbance. It’s important for people to know that it’s not a tranquilizing effect at all. What you feel is a sense of inner turmoil. Viewed from the outside you may look less agitated because you’re all mixed up and you’re not going to make much noise or show any spirit.
“I had difficulty thinking. I remember once trying to make a list of the books I needed from class and not being able to finish the list. I had difficulty moving my tongue, which I really resent because I still have residual effects today. I felt like the rats who were given Thorazine in 1950. Thorazine was first tried on rats in December 1950. The French researchers were looking at a range of chemicals, trying out different ones, looking to find one that would cause ‘maximal behavioral disruption.’ They had a rat trained to climb a rope for food. They finally tried Thorazine—they did not have a name for it yet—but they gave this chemical to the rat, and the rat would go to the rope and would not be able to decide whether to climb the rope for the food. It would panic. It was immobilized. Then they decided, ‘This is the one we will use.’ They were using it supposedly for other medical purposes . . . but within a year or two it was being given to mental patients. That’s one reason why so many people who continue to take these drugs when they get out of the hospital seem to lack the motivation to do things. They will not even climb the rope for the food, metaphorically speaking.
“A psychiatrist tried it on herself in the early 1950s, and she said she felt as though she was dying; she couldn’t get angry at anything. That’s how I felt. A few years ago two Israeli psychiatrists took Haldol [a similar neuroleptic drug], and they reported they were unable to work, to think, to even answer a telephone.”
David said that forcible druggings were routine and were not restricted to occasions when the “patient” was agitated or threatened violence. “You see a pattern in all three of my hospitalizations. Any display of spirit was considered to be the enemy, and they just looked for that.” For example, one time David was attending a “patient government” meeting. A patient complained that one of the staff members had promised to take him for an ice cream and then defaulted on the promise. David went to find the staff member. He said, “John, Joe would like you to come to the meeting to find out why you did not go for ice cream.” John ignored David, who then became angry and said, “Go to the meeting now.” John handed David a cookie. David crumbled it in his hand. “Immediately they started to get mental health workers all over the place. I said, ‘Wait a minute, just because I crumbled a cookie? I’ll put it in the garbage.’ Which I did. But it was too late. It turned into another forced drugging.”
David described another demeaning experience he had. “I needed a dime for the pay phone, and a nurse came by, and I asked her for a dime, which she gave me. And I was trying to be cheerful even though I was on drugs. A psychiatrist was walking by and said, ‘Excuse me, what are you going to be giving that nurse in return for the dime?’ And I said, ‘A smile!’ And he said, ‘That’s the sickest thing I ever heard.’ And that hurt me . . . and it helped me to realize their game: either through drugs or words they break you down.”
In his senior year David learned about the mental patients’ liberation movement that had formed in Cambridge. “I went to Phillips Brooks House, which is a social service agency for Harvard students. I said, ‘Look, you should have something about mental patients’ rights in here. It’s terrible in those places.’ One of the women said, ‘Let’s meet for lunch,’ which we did and she told me about the Mental Patients’ Liberation Front [MPLF] in Cambridge.” David joined the organization, went to meetings, gave legal advice to people who called the office, went to demonstrations, and helped to start a drop-in center for former mental patients.
Rebel with a Cause
The mental health experts told David that he was schizophrenic and needed to stay on medication for the rest of his life. Each time he was released from the hospital he stopped taking the drugs. Harvard required him to take psychiatric drugs to attend. He graduated from Harvard cum laude in 1977. He beat the system.
The possibility of making the kind of major life transition represented by Harvard activated David’s fears of failure. The working-class boy who made it big, made it to Harvard, and “flipped out” suddenly found himself facing the worst threat of all: the destruction of all his dreams and reduction to the status of nonperson by the mental health establishment.
David did not capitulate. He was too strong a spirit to be inducted into the role of chronic mental patient. He did exactly what therapists like Jay Haley recommend: as soon as he got out of the hospital he went back to “normal” life.
I asked David if at any point they had persuaded him he was mentally ill. “I never really, internally, bought the diagnosis. And I never have. My parents would say, ‘You know, you really just have to trust somebody.’ I was not being supported by the mental health system. I was experiencing new aspects of myself—spiritual, emotional, mystical—but this was happening in a rapid and unassisted way. The help I wanted did not mean someone to stuff it back in, but to help in the process of birth.”
David’s independence of spirit was a trait he possessed for a long time and helped him to lead others. “I was a rebel with a cause since I was a kid. I published a radical newspaper when I was nine years old, and again at twelve years old, that was censored by my local grade school.” In high school he was in the student-empowerment movement and in the anti-Vietnam war movement. In college he remained critical of the “power system,” including Harvard, corporate dominance of America, and authoritarian social relationships.
David’s sense of self is defined in broader terms than being a Harvard graduate. “I’m not going to totally reject the accomplishment of getting in there, but I recognized it now as a very narrow aspect of my being. Although of course it is a very unusual thing to graduate in four years with five so-called hospitalizations.”
When he finished college, MPLF supplied a great deal of his support. David continued to go to support group meetings and on MPLF wilderness hikes, and he became romantically involved with a woman activist in the movement who helped him improve his nutrition; he became a vegetarian. He has worked as a volunteer and as a worker for a variety of social causes since 1974. After several years in Boston, supporting himself through office work, David travelled for two years.
In 1982 he helped to organize the International Conference on Human Rights and against Psychiatric Oppression, which took place in Toronto. After the conference he was excited and had gone without sleep for several days. He began to feel distressed. He was staying in a friend’s loft. “I decided that I would take care of myself. I would lie in bed until I slept. I felt calmer after some sleep, but I was in an altered state. I’d go outside, and I’d see construction workers, and I’d think these are human beings dressed as construction workers, like actors playing out this experience. Despite this I realized I would be a calm person. I called myself ‘the Calm Lithuanian.’ I would experience these bizarre thoughts and not panic. And there’s a grain of truth here: just because someone is wearing a little plastic cap and has a little sign on their back does not mean that’s their identity. I was looking at the person as a whole person, and it struck me as funny that they’re also playing this little game by digging in the ground and wearing this hat. I have the skill now to experience these things without panicking or getting carried away.”
In 1983 David moved to Eugene, Oregon. He continues to edit Dendron and to make a salary as an organizer for the movement against nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. He has been active in the movement to protect the wilderness old-growth areas in Oregon: “These old-growth wilderness areas are being rampantly cut down. They are Douglas old-growth—Douglas fir—with incredible diversity of species, more living matter per square foot than anywhere on the Earth. The ancient forest evokes feelings very similar to the nonlinear states Psychiatry is attempting to destroy. Cutting all the old-growth down is a violation against nature. I am connected to nature. It’s a violation against me. People trying to preserve their natural areas is a very important struggle.”
David envisions a global nonviolent revolution. He sees people coming together.
As long as we’re alone we can be numbed by the destruction of the planet’s ecosystem, by poverty, racism, sexism. We’re like deer with the headlights in our eyes. We can’t run off the road. But if we organize and support each other our spirits will be lifted so we’ll have the strength to fight back. The mental liberation movement can assist overall societal transformation—a nonviolent revolution—in two ways. Two of these are by fighting the tyranny of normality and teaching the skills of empowering ourselves to lift our own emotions. With all due respect, I feel a vital part of the human spirit is the Fool. I love this part of ourselves. Our essence of foolishness is a key lesson of the environmental movement: that humans are interrelated with all of nature in such complexity, we should therefore walk as gently and humbly as possible. When a macho businessperson arrogantly tinkers with nature by, for instance, building a nuclear power plant and ignoring its waste, they deny the foolish essence of their humanity, ironically making themselves more foolish, but also more dangerous. They act as death clowns, if you will. How easily their self-interest bends their logic. Unfortunately, their so-called delusion is far more dangerous than those of us actually labeled “psychotic.”
Today, the unwritten rules that weave our social fabric catalyze a mass adaptation to this death clown behavior. The crime of our century has in fact been obedience, not deviance. Those who violate the very core of behavioral fascism, as many in our movement do, can contribute to overthrowing this tyranny of normality.
Our movement also shows people that even a survivor of terrible spirit-destroying economic, social, and psychiatric oppression can still overcome. One method we have explored is user-owned mutual support. The idea that individuals can get together as equals and consciously affect—uplift—each other’s emotions, lives, and even their biochemistry is heresy. In fact, that was one reason witches were burned: they formed groups of wise women, linked to the wildness of nature, who, through ritual, gained power over their own minds and feelings.
The hierarchical, technocratic state we live in has been useful at times. But now it is deadly to Earth itself. Our movement is part of the transformation by pointing out the unspoken, superpowerful, absurd dictatorship of an enforced sanity. And we can help nurture nonviolent revolution by showing that everyone has the power to transcend numbness and despair and keep creative, democratic spirits strong. Through humility and mutual support, humanity can gain the confidence to creatively overcome the dominant worldview, hopefully nonviolently if at all conceivably possible.
Commentary on David’s Story and Interview
David Oaks’s story as described in the above interview and in the account of his hospitalizations and rebellion provides confirmation for my own Mad Pride theory. I am arguing that mad people tend to have a distinctive mad temperament that puts them at odds with normal society and that makes them more prone to having visionary (“psychotic”) experiences. Once the mad are liberated from psychiatric serfdom (both from overt psychiatric control and from internalized images of themselves as mental defectives), once they begin to view their “psychotic” experiences as revelations or crises rather than symptoms, then they will be free to develop the capacity to act as catalysts of social transformation in our insane society; the mad will be free to join with other kindred spirits to constitute the vanguard of a new cultural/spiritual order.
Oaks has been very influenced by Martin Luther King Jr., who said many times, “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” King was not referring to mad people; at that time there was no resistance movement of former mental patients. However, it makes sense that those who have trouble adjusting and end up getting labeled “mentally ill” or “defective” by psychiatrists would include persons who have the greatest yearning for a different kind of society. The mad are often the most aware (often unconsciously) and most disturbed by the harm we are inflicting on each other and on the Earth. A “normal” person might be intellectually aware but not as inclined to feel the suffering of others. It makes sense that many of them would realize that our society is itself insane and that instead of endeavoring to be normal they would rebel and aspire toward creative maladjustment.
Oaks agrees with one of the major contentions of Mad Pride (see the section Insanity and Madness in the introduction), that adjustment to society does not constitute a legitimate criterion of “mental health” or spiritual well-being—or sanity—because our society is itself “biologically dysfunctional” or existentially off course, as Laing put it (see chapter 5).
Society is insane. Oaks was reluctant to phrase it that way—evidently for the same reason I felt it was necessary to invent and utilize a semantic distinction between “insanity” and “madness.” I suspect that a number of people, including many Mad Pride activists, believe as I do and Laing did, that the term insanity is indispensable; it is necessary in order to convey accurately the state of spiritual derangement and moral inversion of normal society. Consider: our (normal) society is insane. This premise changes our view of the “mental health system” since “mental health” by definition entails the adjustment to society!
Those who are in the Mad Pride movement have typically undergone madness. As did Oaks. (Some never were “psychotic”; they might have been labeled depressed or ADHD.) The mad experience is typically what John Weir Perry called a visionary experience; the “psychotic” is plunged into the myth world, the collective unconscious, into the deeper nonrational levels of the psyche. If the mad person is able to weather the crises of madness, he or she could become (as those in Mad Pride and in this book prove) a shaman, a mystic, a prophet—or an ordinary nonconformist. For what is the difference between “psychosis” and mysticism? Joseph Campbell (see chapter 5) had used a striking analogy; he stated that the mad person and the mystic are immersed in the same ocean of beatitude, but the mystic is swimming while the mad person is drowning.
When Oaks first had his mad experience he felt like he was drowning. The psychiatric system wanted to rescue Oaks, to pull him out of the ocean and transform him into a chronic mental patient. He resisted and broke away, and then he learned to swim in the ocean of the inner world. As he stated in 1990 and in his story and reiterated in our recent interview in this chapter, he now is able to have mad experiences—what the psychiatrists would consider psychotic episodes—and remain calm and lucid. Many authorities on various forms of mysticism would say that the ability to have altered states of consciousness and remain calm is the salient feature that distinguishes the mystic from the lunatic.
One of the Mad Pride movement’s important goals, as I see it, should be to help the mad to swim in this ocean. The first step is for the mad to become aware that it can be done—that madness represents not a meaningless biochemical aberration but a potential opportunity to discover new dimensions of existence.
But why, the reader may ask, do I refer to Oaks as “mad”? Is he not simply a mystic? Why seek to subsume potential mystics under the banner of Mad Pride? What does it mean to be mad? Of course the term mad is relative. For some persons the mystic herself at best is mad; her sanity is questionable by the standards of society. A prophet himself (e.g., Jesus) has typically been declared mad; he is a threat to the guardians of the status quo. The establishment (whether religious or scientific) has frequently attempted to disqualify the mystic, the prophet, or the non-conformist as a heretic, if not a mentally ill person.
In fact the use of term heresy is revealing. It was originally a stigma used by the religious establishment during the Inquisitions to denote those with “deviant” religious views who were thus deemed threats—and often demonic—to the religious establishment, the social order, and potentially to God. Today the term heretic typically connotes courageous nonconformity, that is, the word has been transformed and positively valued in the last century. It’s not considered an insult; holding nonconformist views is more highly valued today. Einstein for example was a scientific “heretic” when he proclaimed his theory of special relativity, thus refuting the “ether” theory. The term heretic was transformed.
Mad Pride could similarly transform the cultural meaning of the term madness and its cognates—madman, and mad woman. That is the main reason why I think it is valuable to use the word mad, and Mad Pride—to sanction those altered, often mystical states of consciousness that are invalidated in this society. It could be used to apply to all those who have had or have altered states of consciousness—whether these be deemed “psychosis” or “mysticism” by the establishment.
The Icarus Project transvalues the phenomenon of being mad when it states madness consists of “ dangerous gifts.” Mad people are today owning and valorizing the experience of madness, just as dissidents have owned the intellectual deviance of heresy instead of repudiating the word heretic and trying to redefine their heresy as nonthreatening to the establishment. Mad Pride activists want those who are labeled “psychotic” to realize that although they may be different from the norm, although their experiences may be frightening to them and threatening to the mental health professions that regard normality as normative, their brains are neither diseased nor defective; on the contrary madness is a gift. The mad person is a potential mystic, a potential prophet; she is at the nascent phase of her growth, and she will grow spiritually if her phase of madness is not aborted by psychiatric treatment and psychiatric drugs. As Oaks’s story illustrates, the “psychotic” or the mad person can learn to swim in the ocean; he can learn to have so-called psychotic experiences and remain calm. Such a person would then be a mystic, not “psychotic,” not mentally ill.
Once the person learns to “swim,” would she then cease to be mad? Would she be a pure mystic? Or would she be a mad mystic? From the Mad Pride perspective these questions are irrelevant. By affirming the value of madness—transvaluing the meaning of the term mad—Mad Pride makes it easier for the mad to accept and affirm the positive aspects of what society deems “psychosis”—madness—and to realize their kinship or identity with the mystic and the prophet. Then they can to learn how, as Oaks did, to have “psychotic” experiences and remain calm—instead of suppressing their unusual states or accepting the self-fulfilling psychiatric prophecy that they are chronically “mentally ill.”
Not only did Oaks become a mystic, he also developed or strengthened his prophetic sensibility; he became a full-time social activist and spokesperson for social change. Oaks did not resolve his psychosis by becoming well-adjusted to society; rather he resolved it by becoming creatively maladjusted, and his life is proof that others can become so as well. One cannot help but wonder, could Oaks have adjusted to normal society? It is very possible that had Oaks not created a niche that enabled him to financially support himself at the same time as acting as an agent of social change, he would not have been able to adjust to the world; he would have been depressed or unstable or profoundly discontented. Perhaps he is one of those persons who can only find his equilibrium by being creatively maladjusted. Perhaps there are many people like this, people for whom Mad Pride can offer an alternative.
Another way of saying Oaks is creatively maladjusted is to say that he is “adjusted” to the future, not to the present; in Laing’s terms he is “ontologically on course,” he is adjusted to the new world, the new order (“New Age,” as many would call it) that is he is helping to bring into existence.
Now the question of “madness” again arises: Is not adjustment to the new order the essence of true sanity? Yes, from the viewpoint I present here, accepted by all my interlocutors, it is. Is this new world also mad? These questions are unanswerable; the terms are relative. However, such an order is beyond sanity as we know it, as it is currently defined. The fundamental reality is not what we are living in now. St. Paul said we see “through a glass darkly.” The Hindu sage says we are living in a state of metaphysical “ignorance,” which distorts our experience itself. All mystics agree that it is difficult if not impossible to use words to describe the world or being when viewed from a “higher,” more “real” perspective. Therefore, we can infer that the new order is as different from ordinary perception as madness itself is different. The Zen master claims that the fundamental reality eludes thought. In a speech I gave to a conference of former “mental patients” I stated, “[T]he new order that is seeking to come into existence is mad when judged by the limited standards of the enfeebled imagination that reigns now in the name of reality.” Furthermore, “The new order we are creating will lie between the realm of dream and reality, of sanity and madness. . . . It will have the vibrancy and intensity of madness, the magical quality of a dream, but the fierceness of madness will be restrained by the firm but gentle power of love, which will ensure that the imagination is bound but not weakened by the task of maintaining our unity as a species.”5
It is my contention that the future—the new order—is breaking through the boundaries of the present social order under the guise of madness, of “psychosis.” It is breaking through in the psyche of the mad person. What we call madness is not a sickness; it is the future itself seeking to be born, to be incarnated in the “real world.”
Readers will notice that ironically Oaks’s theory of “mad pride” is not about madness but about catalyzing social change—using imaginative forms of street theater and art to stretch society’s acceptance of what is “deviant” and culturally expressive behavior and to push society to overcome their denial of inconvenient truths that threaten the survival of humanity.
Oaks skirts the issue of madness—“psychosis”—as a potentially regenerative experience, and while he certainly values social diversity and each individual’s contribution to diversity, he denies that there are any genuine differences between mad people as a group and normal people. To claim that there are differences, Oaks fears, would be to obscure our common humanity. As he put it, “. . . I think everybody can identify themselves as a psychiatric survivor. I think everybody can identify as someone who’s had severe mental and emotional problems. In fact, if you claim that you’ve never had severe mental and emotional problems, that is a good sign that you definitely have . . . . If you haven’t noticed that there’s a climate crisis or that we humans are all struggling on the planet or that you love people and then people you love die, if you haven’t come to grips with your mortality—I mean, if you haven’t experienced (or are unaware of any of that) . . . you’re in denial: we’re all in the same boat. . . . The answer is going to be, everybody working all together, just like Martin Luther King talked about.”
Certainly Oaks’s point is well taken, and his formulation is poignant. As human beings we are all existentially equal in worth. There is no escaping the human plight; if we are going to save the planet we will all have to work together. Oaks articulate this central insight repeatedly and eloquently. However, we are not all equal in abilities. Some people, for example, are smarter than others. Some are better engineers. Some are more spiritually aware. The ethical challenge every individual faces is to use her talents to help struggling humanity.
The temptation is to use one’s gifts to enhance one’s own power or financial wealth or that of one’s tribe or country or family, oblivious to the effect one is having on the human species, on the planet. The early Christians yielded to the temptation of power in the fourth century when they gave up their vows of poverty and nonviolence and accepted the offer of Emperor Constantine to be the priesthood of the new imperial Christianity, the religion of the Roman Empire. Throughout history idealists have repeatedly succumbed to the temptation of power. Evangelical Christianity in America has largely (tragically) been transformed into a cult of the American military war machine, if not into a completely un-Christian effort to foster wars in order to bring on the Armageddon. In the name of Jesus, it has abjured the nonviolence, humanitarianism, and love of the enemy that was the essence of the teachings of Jesus. All human beings, no matter how gifted—particularly those who are gifted—are faced with this temptation of succumbing to power.
But whatever the genuine dangers, I believe that there is a rationale for Mad Pride—for affirming that the mad are gifted, spiritually more aware than the “average” person. It is, after all arguably, true. As Laing wrote in 1967, “If the human race survives future men will look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness. . . . They will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break in the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.” Jesus himself said the “last” shall be the first—that social pariahs would be most ready to enter into the kingdom of God. After centuries of being told that they are mentally defective, what harm can result from asserting that mad people have certain assets, certain “dangerous gifts,” as Mad Pride activist Sascha DuBrul called them, which can and should be cultivated?
If I am correct, as I have argued in the introduction, the empowerment of the mad will lead to the emergence of prophetic voices and revitalize the dormant counterculture that arose in the 1960s. As society continues to persist in practices that are destroying the Earth (despite the warning signs, from global warming to nuclear proliferation)—as America continues to build bombs and start wars—it is imperative that we protect our visionaries from psychiatric destruction so they can help to save us. Among the mad are many who are mad enough to believe that there is an alternative, mad enough to believe (as did most American Christians—and Reform Jews, as well—in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before evangelicals reverted to reactionary Calvinistic fatalism and premillennialism) that the ancient messianic aspirations of humankind—the realization of the kingdom of heaven on Earth, the kingdom of God on Earth—can be realized. The alternative is the destruction of humanity—and of life on Earth.