Interview with Chaya Grossberg
Spiritually Informed Social Activism
Chaya Grossberg was a twenty-eight-year-old yoga teacher, poet, writer, and Mad Pride activist when I interviewed her in 2009. She had been one of the leading organizers of Freedom Center for six years, where she ran a yoga group and taught creative writing. In the summer of 2009 she moved to the Bay Area of California, where she got a job at the Alternatives to Med Center helping people withdraw from psychiatric drugs and opiates. After a year the center moved across the state. Grossberg did not want to move; she works now as an intuitive reader, or psychic, and a massage healer. In a letter to me in January 2011 she described her life: “I have been mostly living a simple life in a small studio in the woods and studying my environment and wild herbalism and foraging, as well as [performing in] theater and [doing] creative writing. I am healthy and happy. . . . I spend time every day meditating and writing and eat wild foods almost daily.” Her website is http://chayagrossberg.weebly.com.
In the course of our conversation she affirmed most of the contentions that I listed as explicit or tacit beliefs of Mad Pride movement activists. She seemed to agree with my theory—although she had not thought it out fully—that we are involved in a process of spiritual evolution and that we are currently in an acute evolutionary crisis where the role of the Mad Pride movement is to act as a catalyst for making the transition to a new stage of human development. Like all the activists in this book, Grossberg is one of the creatively maladjusted. Her process of spiritual development can serve as a model for other psychiatric survivors who have not broken out of the psychiatric net and not discovered their identities.
Excerpt from Chaya Grossberg’s Keynote Address to National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA), 2005.1
I recently went to a training for [patients’ rights advocates] that ended with a talent show. I realized that if everyone in the room took their talent and ran with it, we’d have a room full of artists, musicians, and craftspeople rather than people who identify as ADD, manic depressive, and “mentally ill.” We could have a roomful of people who know they have gifts and need to nurture their health through exercise, good nutrition, and less toxins. Instead we had a roomful of people on one two or three psych drugs each (with a few exceptions), who smoke a pack a day, and drink a few Cokes and a few coffees. I could see the unresolved hurt under the layers of psych drugs, nicotine, and caffeine. As people worked to speak through the layers, I could tell that their brains were not functioning optimally. When there are problems, do we want to see more or less clearly? This is a question that needs to be asked directly before getting hooked on psych drugs. I know because I have been on those drugs. I know that difficulty. In fact, being on neuroleptics was the only time I identified as having a mental illness. I was unable to think clearly.
To drug people into stability is to take away their essential humanity. Imagine if someone found chemicals that could keep the sky stable—free from too much rain, free from too much sun. Or if the Earth were stabilized so there were no mountains, no deserts, no valleys, no large bodies of water. Just as there is order in the natural world, there is an order in my life, and yours. There are natural forces that I see as spiritual forces, which keep me on track. They keep me in line with my destiny—they guide me to heal myself and others with love and brilliance. I make space for these possibilities. I treat my life as a garden. I must fertilize it, water it, I must take care of it. The bulbs I planted long ago will grow and I plant new ones all the time. Wildflowers grow too—ones I never expected. The whole thing looks messy sometimes.
You cannot afford to withhold your brilliance from the world, even if it is labeled madness. Whatever society calls it, and people will find all different names and explanations, it is your gift and the world needs it. This is what we can think of as passing the torch—taking the risks to show your brilliance and inspire others. For the future generation of activists, that’s us. We have a mental health system gone haywire that appears to be capturing people faster than they can be born. When you take the chance and offer your gifts, it is a huge leap of faith. I say this as someone who, like you, is able to take the leaps sometimes. I have much farther to go with sharing my own gifts. And so do you, that is why you are here. I must say “I love you” to myself and to G-d numerous times everyday, and take the leap. I have met many young activists, around the country, and I sense that faith is one of our strongest points.
Grossberg is also a gifted poet. Here is a poem she wrote when she was undergoing the crisis described in the interview. She believes it was a premonition.
Want
Now things are well.
They want to know about my journey.
“Were there rocks?
Were there diamonds?
How did you sleep on the slants of hills?”
All I have in my pockets is quiet, I say
and open my hand to their ear, to their footsteps.
They want to eat chocolate with me,
and dance.
They don’t know what these things
mean to me.
If you step on a rock, get a degree in diamonds,
You must hold their weight strong in your ear, in your foot steps.
The world is full of brown and retreat,
purple and history,
clear and mystery.
The world is full of Snickers bars and ballerinas,
hospital potatoes, wheelchairs,
writing and waiting
and watching people work
with the wonton of
Want.
It’s been called a wrestle
and wonderful.
I haven’t been waiting.
I haven’t been watching.
I wrinkle at the wonders,
which has been called a withdrawal.
I call it a wrap, a wash.
CHAYA GROSSBERG
Farber: When you were eight or nine years old, you went to therapy. Your parents—you said in the Madness Radio interview broadcast in 2007—were getting a divorce. That was the occasion that made you or your parents decide therapy would be a good idea, right?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. My mom’s a social worker; she believes in therapy; she’s very therapy oriented.
Farber: And you basically liked it at first, the therapist and the therapy?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah. I grew up in New York City and . . .
Farber: (Laughs.) So did I, and I know therapy is a religion here.
Chaya Grossberg: And it’s like there’s not that much community there. I mean, it’s not like growing up in the country or even in the suburbs where people have time. . . . And I think for me having therapy was just having somebody I could just talk to, and that was a really big deal, so it started out being something very positive for me.
Farber: Were you unhappy?
Chaya Grossberg: In some ways I was. My parent’s divorce was really hard. And I had a younger brother: it was really hard for him. And me being the older sister, it was also even doubly hard to see it being hard for my younger brother whom I felt really close to, and I felt very protective of him. For me, I wasn’t really struggling in terms of school. I always did really well in school.
Farber: It wasn’t a particularly acrimonious divorce, was it? They weren’t battling for custody over you?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, they weren’t battling for custody, because they both wanted joint custody. They both wanted to be part of our lives. Their divorce was not pretty. It took a long time. There was a lot of fighting. . . .
Farber: They both thought it was be best for the kids to have joint custody.
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, and they both wanted it for themselves, too. Neither of them wanted the kids all the time. They were both in the same neighborhood, and neither of them had any desire to leave that neighborhood, so my father just moved a few blocks away, and then we went back and forth.
Farber: So you got to high school, and then your therapist persuaded you to take an antidepressant. Was that Prozac, you said, at the beginning?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: And you didn’t mind taking it at first.
Chaya Grossberg: Actually I did. I really didn’t want to at first.
Farber: You said in your interview on Madness Radio that it enabled you to socialize more.
Chaya Grossberg: Well, that was after I was on it for a while. At first I didn’t even want to talk about it. When my therapist suggested it, I would get very upset . . . and my mother wasn’t into meds, either.
Farber: You said it was a stigma still at that time.
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, it wasn’t the way it is today where like all the kids are all on meds. The main thing was I just had an intrinsic sense that it just wasn’t the right thing for me. It just felt to me like it wasn’t addressing anything.
Farber: And the thing that you thought needed addressing was the relationship between your parents or between you and your parents?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, but I didn’t think that was the only thing.
Farber: And what did you think was the other part of the problem?
Chaya Grossberg: I was really good in school. So I got into a competitive high school in New York City.
Farber: Which one?
Chaya Grossberg: Stuyvesant. I did not like the competitiveness, and I was also very sensitive socially. I’ve always been like very sensitive in every way basically. So I guess there’s a lot of things that contributed to it.
Farber: You say that now you have a different view of what made you unhappy then than you had at the time?
Chaya Grossberg: I also have even more holistic awareness, so I could say my diet wasn’t really that great.
Farber: There were a number of things that were contributing to make you unhappy, so you went on Prozac. You were on it until senior year in high school, right? How would you overall . . .
Chaya Grossberg: Well, what I was saying is when I first took it, it made me kind of manic, like constantly socializing. And it also made me nicer on the surface and just more agreeable with everything. And it also made me less empathetic with other people and very impulsive.
Farber: You must have read Peter Breggin, right?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: I think you referred to him, didn’t you, somewhere? Peter Breggin said, about Prozac, it cuts you off from your feelings.
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, it did. I would just say things without thinking, insensitive things to other people, and it gave me more acne.
Farber: And there must have been some feeling of stigma as long as you’re on the drug.
Chaya Grossberg: At that time in my high school, there was this underlying sense that everyone had that if you were doing stuff like cutting a wrist—which I never did—you had to keep it a secret or the guidance counselors would find out and make you take meds. (Laughs.) So there was definitely that sense already of “madness” being something that people had to hide and there being a system that would force you into something that you didn’t want or hospitalize you.
Farber: That’s a little bit different from what I was thinking. . . . Was there any sense that it undermined your self-esteem just taking the drug? That it made you feel you were defective or mentally ill or anything like that?
Chaya Grossberg: I don’t think I really felt that way. Partly because it was already kind of “in fashion”; you know the way they advertise things, they make them somehow “in fashion.” So Prozac was already “cool” or something.
Farber: So the fact that you were on a psychiatric drug wasn’t something that made you feel bad about yourself per se?
Chaya Grossberg: Not really; I had a few moments and situations. I got off it in senior year in high school without any problem—on my own. I didn’t tell my father that I was on it for a while, a long while. I didn’t want my father to know that I was on it or that I had been on it. . . .
Chaya Grossberg: I don’t know. I just didn’t feel comfortable talking to him about any of my feelings.
Farber: So you were still having a strained relationship with one or both of your parents at this time?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. My relationships with my parents were strained. There were definitely good parts of them, but they were difficult for me and still can be sometimes.
Farber: Was this through the divorce period?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. Both my parents were then single parents, living in Park Slope, working full-time. They were very busy, very stressed out, not a lot of support living in a city. . . .
Farber: So then you went off to college. When I knew people going to Hampshire in the seventies, it was sort of a hippie college. Did it have that reputation when you went there?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: Similar to Evergreen?
Chaya Grossberg: Uh-hmm.
Farber: Your first year, you weren’t happy. . . .
Chaya Grossberg: Well, at first I wasn’t, but then I was. In the middle of my first year of college—this is also a spiritual turning point for me, a mystical awakening. I had already started to become very spiritual in high school. I was into yoga, meditation, and writing, and poetry. I was always very spiritually oriented.
Farber: When you say “yoga” you mean hatha yoga—body stretching. . . .
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah.
Farber: What kind of meditations and things were you reading?
Chaya Grossberg: In high school I was reading books on yoga and meditation, and I also had a class in school called metaphysics, which was an English elective at Stuyvesant. And we meditated every day and talked about all the different types of meditation.
Farber: Did it alter your perception of the world?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, when I did yoga, it did. I definitely entered into blissed-out states from yoga.
Farber: Euphoria?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, and also writing poetry. That was another really big thing for me, because I’ve always been a poet. So that also pushed me into mystical states, my poetry. And also I did a little bit of psychedelics. I smoked a little pot, and I did mushrooms.
Farber: Did the idea of God enter into this picture at all?
Chaya Grossberg: I think I prayed to God, mostly just when I was in a crisis or something. (Laughs.) At other times too—to give thanks. It was more in my own way; it wasn’t in a religious way.
Farber: So it wasn’t part of your whole mystical awakening, the idea of God or loving God or providential God or anything?
Chaya Grossberg: I think it was later—in college.
Farber: How did these mystical experiences make the world seem different to you than before—in high school?
Chaya Grossberg: Right. Well, I think it gave me this sense that, first of all that there was something I could do that would make my reality different. With yoga, it was like, “Wow, I can go to this yoga class and then afterward feel entirely different, feel totally blissed out.”
Farber: Did the universe seem more mysterious?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, I think the world always seemed kind of mysterious to me: the way that I’m rooted, the way that I’m wired. I think I’ve always had this kind of sense of faith. Even when things were really bad with my parents, something would happen, some kind of amazing coincidence like a sign from God. Or even, my relationship with my best friend in high school felt like this very spiritual thing, but me and my best friend were really in love with each other.
Farber: You don’t mean in a sexual way?
Chaya Grossberg: No. There was a little bit of that feeling. It was more like just friendship and loving each other as people. She had a very stable family—she lived right nearby—and whenever my mom would start flipping out at me or something, I would go over to her house, and we’d go for a walk, and I felt this sense of love with her, and we would talk about spiritual things. We’d even talk about psychiatry a lot and debate in our minds or discuss our feelings. We had the same kinds of feelings that I have now about psychiatry, this instinctive sense that it’s just not right. (Laughs.) And then the whole poetry thing was a really huge opening for me, because it also made me aware that I had this psychic ability, slightly. It just started to open up in high school, when I would write poetry and this stream of consciousness—images and words—would come into my head out of nowhere.
Farber: Like you were channeling or something?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, kind of like that, and even now when I read back on the poetry I wrote in high school, I think I was definitely already getting into these states, mystical states. (Laughs.) It was very real. Not real . . . it was mystical.
Farber: Okay, let’s skip ahead to the college thing. At first you were happy because you met new people, I suppose, and you were away from home.
Chaya Grossberg: I’ll tell you about my first year of Hampshire: I met a lot of people, and some of them I resonated with, although the crowd that I got involved with in the beginning of college was not really the right crowd for me. They were the partiers . . . people who are a lot less sensitive than me. They were more into drinking and hooking up with each other and having fun. Then in the middle of my first year of college, I got into a car accident. I wasn’t driving, and I wasn’t hurt seriously, but the other people in the car were. One or two of them were hurt somewhat seriously. That gave me for some reason this wake-up call: just the experience of being strapped to this stretcher and being lifted up through the sky and being really out of control of everything when that happens.
Farber: When you were on a stretcher, it must have gone through your head that you might die?
Chaya Grossberg: I knew that I was totally unhurt.
Farber: Even when the car was crashing, you didn’t have a fear that flashed through your head that something may happen, that you might not live?
Chaya Grossberg: I don’t think so. It felt more like a wake-up call. I thought about how one could die at any moment, anything could happen. I wasn’t in that situation that I really could have died. . . . I mean, I could have. But since I was wearing a seatbelt in the back seat, there was no fear that I was going to die in that situation. But for some reason it made me feel as if my life wasn’t really on the right track.
Farber: After this happened?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. I started to think twice about things. Okay, well, who are my real friends, who do I really want to be spending my time with, what do I really want to be doing? And why am I wasting my time with these people who aren’t my real friends, who are just having fun and being young and partying and having sex with each other. It felt like all of a sudden I lost interest. I lost interest in being popular and fitting in and being part of this group of people that I had been trying to be part of. Then I started to meditate every day and do yoga more.
Farber: What kind of meditation at that time?
Chaya Grossberg: Actually, there was a mantra. I took this class at my college . . . in meditation and yoga. Basically, I just sat. There’s a mantra, but I think what I started to do was just sit every day on my own in the morning, just sit in my room for twenty minutes or whatever, just sit and breathe and just focus on my breath. And sometimes I would do it even twice a day, for twenty or thirty minutes.
Farber: And this was before your Buddhist connection?
Chaya Grossberg: This was before I went to that Buddhist center. And just that simple act of meditating every day really transformed me. I became a lot happier and less concerned with . . .
Farber: Did you become detached from the negative thoughts and more able to feel some distance from the kind of thoughts that used to disturb you?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. Yes.
Farber: Did you know what you were going to do then, or things didn’t really gel until you discovered this Buddhist center the following year?
Chaya Grossberg: What do you mean, did I know what I was going to do?
Farber: Well, you said before that you realized you were hanging out with the wrong people and you were on the wrong path.
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, I started to seek out different types of people, different types of friends. I sought out more quiet people, people who seemed more spiritual to me, and also I sought out some people who were involved in activist stuff, because they seemed to care about something besides . . .
Farber: Political, antiwar activism? What year was this?
Chaya Grossberg: It was Hampshire, so all the activists were in the same clique.
Farber: What year was this? Obviously it was before Bush.
Chaya Grossberg: It was ’98. I wasn’t myself an activist at that time. Like I said, Hampshire’s a very small school, so there was probably just a small group of people who were really into activism, and they were all friends of each other. I became more interested in people who seemed to be doing something that had a broader purpose than just themselves.
Farber: Was there anything in particular that you were drawn to changing or bothered by about the world?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, there were. But my focus was more on changing things via spirituality as opposed to just via . . .
Farber: Changing things through changing people? Starting through changing the individual?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, exactly. There was a big Free Tibet group—there were some people who were into Buddhism—it was kind of a cross between being into activism and being into Buddhism, and they would get monks to come to the school and visit. I started to hang out with some of these people; I mostly developed individual friendships with some of these people.
Farber: So you felt better, more of a sense of belonging.
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, definitely. I became more able to focus on the people that I actually felt connections to and less on the people that I didn’t. And also I was still writing a lot, poetry and just writing for school. I always felt very comfortable writing; writing has always been something that has felt natural.
Farber: So the first year of college you had begun the process of finding yourself. What happened the second year? Then you went to the Buddhist center?
Chaya Grossberg: That summer I went to the center—before the second year.
Farber: So was that a major turning point, then?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: In the interview, you said it was amazing at first.
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, it was. We would meditate for so long each day.
Farber: What kind of meditation?
Chaya Grossberg: It was very simple, like following your breath.
Farber: I did that—Vipassana meditation—years ago, in the seventies. I found that incredibly boring. (Laughs.)
Chaya Grossberg: We would sit and meditate for hours, like three hours a day.
Farber: Was it connected to the Tibetan Buddhists, around Chogyam Trungpa?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, that’s what it was.
Farber: What was it called?
Chaya Grossberg: Karmê Chöling.
Farber: What year was this now?
Chaya Grossberg: Ninety-nine.
Farber: Yeah, I used to go to that group in New York in the midseventies for about a year. They would talk about how you had to get used to the boredom, sitting for hours watching your breath, but for you it wasn’t boring, even at first, right?
Chaya Grossberg: No, I really liked it. I would get into states that were meditative, very blissed-out states of mind, where I was in total peace.
Farber: So just by getting away from your own thoughts you were getting into transcendental states.
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah. Like sitting, just sitting and breathing and my energies would just open up, and I would feel very full and just very much at peace and able to concentrate on my breath really deeply.
Farber: So you were feeling peaceful and happy, and so-called reality seemed different.
Chaya Grossberg: And it was also that I was surrounded by a lot of other people who were doing this in the center, and it was a fascinating summer for me. Also, we were eating all locally grown organic food from the garden. It was just like a fantasy summer. I met this boy there and had this romance. It was also being in the country, being in the country versus the city. . . .
Farber: You felt that you were connected to nature.
Chaya Grossberg: Oh yes, especially because the center was in rural Vermont. There was nothing around us besides gardens and forests.
Farber: Was your conception of life changing as well?
Chaya Grossberg: Oh yes. You see I was brought up Jewish, but I wasn’t brought up religiously.
Farber: You said you were culturally Jewish.
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. My parents were very Jewish, but they weren’t very religious, and they weren’t pushy. They didn’t try to push any religion on me or anything. I had decided on my own to have a bas mitzvah. I think that was also part of my spiritual sense that this felt important. But with the Buddhism, my parents thought it was a cult that I was at that summer. (Laughs.) And it did have certain cultlike qualities, in terms of everybody trying to study the same thing and being “Buddhists.” (Laughs.) But not real Buddhists, you know, like Americanized Buddhists. It had a lot of positives, but it also led me away from my roots entirely. And another thing, in terms of Judaism: growing up in New York you don’t even really realize that you’re Jewish and that you’re in a minority.
Farber: Yes, I know.
Chaya Grossberg: And out here, there’s definitely a good amount of Jews where I am now in western Massachusetts, but you’ll definitely encounter people here who’ve never heard of Yom Kippur or who have never heard of Passover.
Farber: That’s amazing.
Chaya Grossberg: There are people who live here who grew up in places where they only knew one Jewish person.
Farber: Wow.
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, totally. So it’s definitely a culture difference, and I didn’t really realize that. Since I never had a Jewish identity to begin with, I didn’t even think it mattered. I never had a Jewish identity, but now I do. Here in Massachusetts I feel a sense of having to preserve my culture and my religion, and I definitely identify as Jewish.
Farber: In a spiritual way, as well as a cultural way?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, totally. And it feels important. And I notice that with some of the other Jews around here—Jews who are not very religious. But basically for me at that time I was totally disinterested in Judaism.
Farber: Well, Buddhists are atheists, right? God doesn’t figure in their religious metaphysics.
Chaya Grossberg: That’s a good point, because that was actually part of the thing that sort of drove me crazy.
Farber: Really?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, because everything was about your own responsibility over your mind. In Buddhism, everything is about how you have to take responsibility. . . . Actually, in real Buddhism that’s not true, but in Americanized Buddhism, in the Buddhism that people from America take and decide what they want to take and what they want to leave, it becomes that. I mean, it depends. Some American Buddhist might be worshipping different deities. . . .
Farber: Yes, sometimes Buddha sits in for God in some of the Buddhist groups.
Chaya Grossberg: Right, or there are different deities and different masters. . . .
Farber: Well, of course the major difference is between Mahayana and Theravada or what Mahayanas call Hinayana. Mahayana is more supernatural, and in some of the schools, Buddha is like God. That wasn’t something that you studied at the time?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, I did, but for me for some reason the way that I interpreted the religion—the parts that I took from it—were mostly that I had to take responsibility for my mind.
Farber: Right, and you think this is a Westernized version of Buddhism?
Chaya Grossberg: When you take a religion out of its culture, it’s dangerous because a lot of religion is culture and there’s tradition. For me it was dangerous, because I just took the parts that I took, and then there were other parts that weren’t as prevalent or whatever, or I just didn’t resonate with as much or something. Even though there were these deities that you could pray to, something about it, I can’t quite explain, but something about it—it wasn’t my religion. I think part of it was that it helped me to feel that I could escape from the difficulties of my life, that had been in my life before.
Farber: Well, I know often when you meditate, these things that seem so difficult become dwarfed, and they seem like trivial. You’re supposed to become more “detached” from it. Did you feel you were getting a sense of detachment then?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: That could be therapeutic. Was it then or later that you felt that God was missing from the whole Buddhist picture as you learned it?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, I think the following year, the following summer. So I actually did a one-month meditation retreat that winter. . . .
Farber: Oh, that was the one. You talked quite a lot about that in the interview on Madness Radio, about being frightened of doing it and there being the teachers—the monks—who were nervous about you doing it, but they finally allowed you to do it.
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah. So that was a really hard experience for me physically, because I was sick; I was physically sick at that time. I had lost some weight, and for me, thin as I am, losing weight is not an option. (Laughs.) I think partly it was that I was in Vermont, it was the winter, and it was freezing cold out; I spent the entire month just sitting doing nothing inside. (Laughs.) My appetite got lower from just not doing anything, and also the way I was thinking about things: at that time, I was really disconnected from people. I felt so detached, so different, and like I was in another world from other people. My parents had agreed to paid for the retreat for me, even though they didn’t really want to. It was another factor, I think, that my parents had a lot of money, and they always basically gave me money. They have always been very generous, and I suppose, like everything parents do, it has had mixed effects on me.
Farber: You talked about before, how the meditation gave you a feeling of happiness and ecstasy. Did you have that during the retreat?
Chaya Grossberg: I think I had moments of it, but for the most part I was struggling a lot. I was not healthy; I had the flu for the entire time. I was struggling just to even be there, just to even stay. Then I got back to college; this is actually when my interface began with the mental health system, when I got back. People could tell when I got back to college that I was really out of it, really not present and not healthy. I would lie on the floor of my dorm feeling I wasn’t in my body, so I went to the guidance counselor, finally, because I just felt so scared. I was having panic attacks, and I felt dissociated and terrified. Terrified. I didn’t trust anyone. Because in a way I had felt like I was on this path, but then all of a sudden it was like, I didn’t trust anyone, I didn’t trust any of the people . . .
Farber: The people on the Buddhist path, you mean?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, I had felt like I was on this path with Buddhism. I think I felt betrayed by it, because I realized even these Buddhists who are so-called spiritual don’t really have any rock-bottom sense of faith or they don’t know what to do when somebody is having a really hard time. So, I ended up at the University of Massachusetts psychiatric ward, where I was put on antidepressants. I was disillusioned when everybody at the Buddhist center got scared because I was having a hard time; they didn’t have a sense of faith in me, and they didn’t have any real wisdom to give me. They just got scared. (Laughs.)
Farber: You had expected them to have more of a sense of faith in you?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, I felt like the spirituality they were practicing didn’t have a rock-bottom quality about it. If it did they would have been able to handle my fear. And I started to see the flaws in the whole system that they were following. I don’t say that it’s wrong for everybody, but I realized it wasn’t for me. It wasn’t really my path ultimately.
Farber: What were the flaws?
Chaya Grossberg: I think what I had to realize, and actually kind of what you were asking before, was that I had to find God again. Because the Buddhists didn’t talk about God. . . . I mean, they did have their sense of protectors and stuff like that, but that stuff was not really resonating with me. It doesn’t have to be about anything in particular, in terms of meditating a certain way, for instance, or even thinking a certain way. It just has to be about having faith in my life overall, which for me is more like having faith in God and also not feeling like it was all my responsibility or all anybody’s responsibility. To me, having faith in God means that I don’t have to put all my faith in any other person or in myself or in a guru or in my friends. It’s more like an all-encompassing faith that’s in just life itself.
Farber: Is it kind of like a Providence that has some kind of role in designing your path or your destiny?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, totally. I definitely believe that I have a destiny, that my life has a path, that I can’t get off of it, and that I couldn’t get off of it even if I tried. (Laughs.) And that it’s not all my responsibility. . . . I feel like I’m interwoven into the world. . . .
Farber: Let me go back to another question. When you were on the Buddhist path, did you have an idea of where you thought it was going to lead or where you wanted it to lead?
Chaya Grossberg: I guess I just thought that I was going to become enlightened.
Farber: So you had the idea that you would reach the state of enlightenment and that was where you were hoping it would go?
Chaya Grossberg: I kind of felt like I already was enlightened, and I just needed to keep meditating to sustain it. (Laughs.)
Farber: And did it have to do with other people becoming enlightened, too? You know the boddhisattva ideal . . .
Chaya Grossberg: For me at that time it didn’t.
Farber: So God didn’t come in at that point—when you were taken to the University of Massachusetts and they gave you antidepressants? You weren’t thinking then, feeling then the absence of God? That’s something you thought about later?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about that then, but I was thinking then that these counselors were really insensitive and didn’t really know what was going on in terms of the whole Psychiatry thing.
Farber: Did you think maybe psychiatrists knew something that the Buddhists didn’t know?
Chaya Grossberg: I went to the counselor at my school because my friend suggested it, because I felt that my life was falling apart. I was having a really hard time, even just concentrating in school or just functioning on a basic level, because I was really dissociated at that time. I was kind of hoping for someone to talk to.
Farber: And how was that?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, the thing was, because I had lost some weight and I was really skinny, I was really skinny,—not that I was like anorexic or anything; I wasn’t trying to lose weight—they were really worried about me. The counselors and therapists just reacted with fear, and I guess I had wanted them to react with kindness and caring about me, but for them it was just fear: “You have to resolve this instantly.” I thought they were being impatient and kind of impulsive, which in a way could be understandable, since I was somewhat dangerous and unhealthy, but . . .
Farber: Dangerous to yourself?
Chaya Grossberg: Especially with my weight.
Farber: But you weren’t anorexic, you said?
Chaya Grossberg: No. I’ve never been anorexic in the sense of wanting to lose weight, but I have the type of constitution where if I get overwhelmed or if anything happens that causes me to not eat enough, I lose weight very quickly. And for me, losing five or ten pounds is dangerous!
Farber: You had some kind of an emotional/spiritual crisis that the authorities wanted to “diagnose” as a chronic mental illness.” Was that how it was?
Chaya Grossberg: I got different things from different people, different psychiatrists and stuff. But yeah, they basically told me that I was going to need to take drugs for the rest of my life.
Farber: That must have been upsetting?
Chaya Grossberg: No, because I didn’t take it seriously.
Farber: Oh, you didn’t. (Laughs.)
Chaya Grossberg: I knew at that point that they didn’t know what they were talking about. (Laughs.) But I didn’t believe in drugs; I never did.
Farber: You mean psychiatric drugs?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: Had you read anything critical of drugs before this happened to you?
Chaya Grossberg: Not that much, no. I was a very natural person. I never liked to take any kind of drug medicine. I’ve always found that natural things helped better for me. I had a very strong intuitive sense that the drugs would just do me harm.
Farber: You agree that you were having some kind of crisis at the time?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: What were some of the factors that you think were provoking it, besides your disappointment with Buddhism?
Chaya Grossberg: Family stuff and spirituality and more culture shock.
Farber: The culture shock from being at Hampshire?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, a little bit. I think that if I had grown up in the country, it might have been easier to me because I was opening up to a lot of things at once—things that I had never really been able to open up to before. Growing up in New York City I didn’t have that much connection to the natural world, so even that was kind of a big thing for me. I think mostly though, it was a big spiritual opening, and some of it had to do with a desire to reconnect with Judaism, but not really knowing how. I think as a woman it’s hard to understand how to reconnect since most organized religions are pretty much designed by and for men.
Farber: Well, that’s particularly true of Orthodox Judaism, right?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes, and I had one friend at Hampshire who had became Hasidic. He grew up Reform, but he . . . became a Lubavitcher. And I really liked him. He was smart and really sensitive and very spiritual. So I would talk to him a lot because he was the only person I knew who identified as being Jewish and was also very spiritual.
Farber: Even during your Buddhist phase you talked to him a lot?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, it was kind of at the turning point that I started talking to him a lot. He was going through a transformation too, because he was slowly but surely becoming really religious. I think he understood my confusion and the struggle I was going through, but not entirely. I knew that, at that time, that it didn’t feel like my path, becoming Hasidic. At the same time, I just felt so drawn in, like on the holidays sometimes I would feel this really strong presence of God with me, for so long. I would feel so peaceful and so connected to God that I was practically dysfunctional. I just couldn’t bring myself to go to my classes or do schoolwork stuff, because it suddenly seemed like it was kind of pointless. At Hampshire, it’s not that structured. Everybody I know that went there really has the sense of not like, “I’m going to conform to the world,” but, “I’m going to decide what to do in the world and it will conform to me,” kind of thing, you know?
Chaya Grossberg: It fosters a sense of self-direction and autonomy. Which is amazing, but it’s also, I think, really hard at that age.
Farber: So did you start praying to God at that point, or what?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, like I said, I always prayed. . . . Not probably at that point, but a little bit later; I had a prayer book, so I would read my prayer book pretty frequently at a certain time. I would just read the prayers as a way of connecting with God.
Farber: So you saw God as creator.
Chaya Grossberg: I think the way that I relate with God is kind of like a guide, a guiding force that’s in charge of my life—a guiding force that’s in charge of the whole universe, not just my life. Something that’s beyond my comprehension. In terms of the creator, there’s the phrase from the beginning of the Torah, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.” But in the real translation, if you look at the Hebrew, there’s no separation between God, the beginning, and heaven and Earth. God is both the creator and the creation and the act of creating. So there’s no dualism in terms of God creating. . . .
Farber: Oh! You find the same thing in the Hindu scriptures. In Christian mystical thought also, God creates the world out of himself. There’s not a dualism because there’s nothing existing apart from God.
Chaya Grossberg: Right.
Farber: Everything is God. That’s a more mystical conception.
Chaya Grossberg: I’ve always been a mystic. And I think that another thing about the Jewish tradition is this act of questioning and talking about things, as opposed to just taking things verbatim. A lot of the Jewish tradition is about debating different ways of looking at the text.
Farber: Like the Talmud.
Chaya Grossberg: What my friends and I do a lot, my Jewish friends and I, is that—not to say that all my friends are Jewish—we discuss things from our perspective, so I guess in that sense, it’s pretty Reform. In western Massachusetts I started to connect with other Jews from different places and developed a Jewish identity. We share a common heritage. For those Jews who were oppressed by the Holocaust, which some of my family was, there are certain common experiences, traumas that get passed down through the generations. Growing up in New York City I did not identify as coming from an oppressed minority group with a traumatic history. Part of it is that we celebrate holidays together, and since we are a minority, it is more “special,” we have to make more effort, and there is a need to speak up and preserve our traditions, or who will? But it’s mostly on the holidays that our group gets together.
Farber: When you pray do you refer to God as he or she? The Reform books have “he” and “she” now, don’t they? Reform siddur (prayer books).
Chaya Grossberg: I don’t think that God really has a gender at all.
Farber: How would you pray?
Chaya Grossberg: I would never say “he.”
Farber: You wouldn’t?
Chaya Grossberg: I might by accident. But if I was really thinking about it, I would never say “he.” I think if I was writing, I would probably write “HIR,” like to represent him/her, but to me God is like a spirit, and there’s no real place for gender in that. It’s just like God is everything. It’s not gender. It’s like asking what color God’s hair is or if God has a big nose or a small one. It just seems ridiculous. . .
Farber: Although, the Hindus worship God alternatively as father and Divine Mother—just as often as Mother. So this is a daily practice with you?
Chaya Grossberg: Now?
Farber: Yes.
Chaya Grossberg: Prayer, you mean?
Farber: Yes, and whatever other rituals you do.
Chaya Grossberg: I don’t do any daily practice right now that’s specifically Jewish. I would say I pray almost every day, but it’s in different ways, and I don’t think any of them are specifically Jewish. Most of them are just my own personal prayer, my own personal connection to God. At this point I don’t really bring that much Judaism into it.
Farber: You were taught Hebrew when you were growing up?
Chaya Grossberg: I was taught how to read it. I know what the prayers mean, but I couldn’t have a conversation.
Farber: How often do you celebrate the Sabbath?
Chaya Grossberg: There were times when I did celebrate it every week. I celebrate it in my own way every week. I have to work on Saturday mornings . . . but I usually take Saturday afternoons and just do nothing, rest, kind of like do nothing, and that’s part of my way of celebrating.
Farber: Do you think there’s anything distinctive about Judaism as a religion that differentiates it from Christianity or Buddhism—from Buddhism I think is pretty obvious, but other religions?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, I think there is, but I don’t think that’s really my expertise. I’ve studied some other religions. But I don’t know that much about Islam or Christianity.
Farber: And how did you come to be shaped? How many people do you meet with on the holidays?
Chaya Grossberg: It totally varies. It’s not like a set number or anything. Sometimes if there aren’t enough I’ll go to synagogue.
Farber: Where you live now, up in Massachusetts?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: Which synagogue? Reform or Orthodox?
Chaya Grossberg: There’s a Conservative one in Northampton that I go to sometimes. There’s a Reform one in Amherst and another Reform nearby that I go to sometimes. But the interesting thing is that here, since it’s not like New York—say, there’s one synagogue in each . . . there’s not even one synagogue in each town—so actually at the Conservative synagogue, there are Orthodox people and there are Reform people. So the Orthodox people have their own room. There’s not that much segregation here; all Jews feel that they have a common bond around here, even the Hasidic Jews feel connected to the other Jews.
Farber: Oh, that’s different!
Chaya Grossberg: So yeah, it’s not like New York, it’s very different, and that actually enabled me to learn a lot about Hasidism.
Farber: Did you learn about the Baal Shem Tov and Reb Nachman and Martin Buber?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes. I read some about those people.
Farber: Let’s go back to your other run-ins with the mental health system.
The summer before Grossberg’s third year in college she had another crisis. She did not want to go back home, but due to financial pressures she ended up back in Brooklyn with her parents. She said in the Madness Radio interview that she “had a crisis in the New York City subway station.” She ran into a friend who noticed Grossberg was acting strange and “out of it.” The friend called Grossberg’s family. When she got home, both her father and mother confronted her and told her she needed help.
Chaya Grossberg: I wanted everything to be between me and God. My mom asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital, and I said, “Tomorrow.”
The next day when Grossberg refused to go, her mother called the police. Since she was uncooperative, the police put her in handcuffs and escorted her by ambulance to a hospital two blocks away. She was not suicidal. In the hospital she was “shot up” with “major tranquilizers” (“antipsychotics”) that made her sleep continuously. After a few days her mother had her transferred to a hospital in upstate New York called Four Winds, which had a backyard and was much nicer.
Chaya Grossberg: In Brooklyn I was treated like a prisoner. At Four Winds it was looser.
Farber: By the way, what were the psychiatric “diagnoses” they gave you?
Chaya Grossberg: I was labeled with various other things from different psychiatrists. In college they said “chronic depressive disorder” or “dissociative identity disorder,” and at the hospital they said “schizophrenia” and “obsessive compulsive disorder.”
Farber: Yes, there is no reliability to their diagnoses. That is a basic requirement for any scientific validity—reliability, meaning agreement. Those are such demeaning epithets to use to describe a sensitive young woman going through a spiritual identity crisis. Of course, it seems each time they released you, though, they told you to stay on at least one “antipsychotic,” and they told you that you would have to be on “medication” for the rest of your life.
At Four Winds there were a lot of people like Grossberg who believed what they were going through was a spiritual experience.
Chaya Grossberg: At Four Winds, there was one guy about seventeen years old who said repeatedly, “It’s not a mental illness, it’s a spiritual thing,” and we talked about God and I forget what else, but lots of our spiritual experiences. He and I and another girl there would chat a lot about how we were not mentally ill but in spiritual transition. Another guy, I sensed he was psychic, and I asked him to write what he thought my job would be in society, and he wrote, “Transformation and healing, guidance and healing. You must walk the path in order to show the way.” This guy hardly knew me! I believe a lot of patients’ issues stem from problems and lack of communication in the family, and one person gets labeled as the “sick one,” and the psychiatrists continue this process of labeling.
At Four Winds they increased the “antipsychotic,” Risperdal, Grossberg was taking.
Chaya Grossberg: They always say, “Take your medication.” Always “your medication,” like it defines you.
She decided to stop taking the drugs, “her medications.” She said, “This was the beginning of an intense experience. . . . They decided that they wanted to keep me in the hospital and that they had to force me to take medication. So I was going to have a court hearing to battle for my right to refuse psychiatric drugs.”
Grossberg was challenging the basis of the system. A patient who refuses to take medication is considered to be “treatment resistant.” This makes it impossible for the patient to assert her rights, unless she agrees to do what the doctors command. The assertion of the legal right to refuse treatment is defined as a symptom of mental illness. A patient’s refusal to take “medication” could cause financial problems for the hospital: since “medication” is the primary “treatment,” hospitals have a difficult time getting reimbursement from the insurance companies if the patient is not undergoing treatment, which means taking “her medication.” Thus the psychiatrists have a vested interest in pushing the drugs. Grossberg had little chance of winning the hearing because the lower court judges typically defer to the hospital psychiatrists’ argument that the patient’s reluctance to take medication is a sign that she is too ill and incompetent to make her own medical decisions. This is the ludicrous catch-22. Psychiatrists are convinced that any patient who does not want to take her medication is ipso facto “treatment resistant” and thus incapable of making competent medical decisions about her body.
Chaya Grossberg: I did not want to live on medication. I wanted to show it’s important to fight for your rights.
Grossberg’s mother realized if her daughter lost the case she could spend a long time in a state mental hospital, so she went to the hospital, signed her out, and drove her back home. Most patients do not have parents who could or would rescue them. In spite of Grossberg’s discontent with her parents, they acted in this instance in an appropriately protective manner. On the other hand, it was Grossberg’s determination to fight for her rights that obviously prompted her mother to remove her from the hospital.
Grossberg went back to live at her father’s. She wanted to move into her own apartment, but her parents insisted she was not well enough. Thus they all decided that the following January Grossberg would go to Windhorse, an expensive alternative Buddhist treatment facility ($40,000 a year) where clients are placed with housemates and supervised by a team of therapists. I was not surprised by what she revealed (later this chapter) about the Buddhist “alternative” because I had read the book by its founder Ed Podvoll, The Seduction of Madness,2 and was disappointed to discover that he was as committed to the idea of mental illness (psychopathology) as Freudians were.
Podvoll’s approach was antithetical to that of Laing and Perry (see chapter 5), who believed “psychosis” was a natural healing process. He failed to appreciate the potential value of madness as a life crisis that fostered a process of spiritual growth; he saw it only in pejorative terms. Podvoll used Buddhist terminology but was convinced that madness was essentially a state of mental illness. (One often finds a prejudice in Buddhism against visionary states, which are seen as obstacles to enlightenment.) He did, however, believe it was possible to recover from “psychosis,” to get off medication, and thus his approach constituted an alternative to standard treatment.
At Windhorse, Grossberg was placed once again on three psychiatric drugs plus a sleeping pill, Ambien. She said that she felt the therapists there were always talking to her parents behind her back. She felt tired and fuzzy and had a fever for three months—due to the drugs, she realized later, but at the time she thought she had “chronic fatigue syndrome,” an autoimmune disease. At this point Grossberg had a dream that she believed was a message to her to get off the drugs, particularly Risperdal, an “antipsychotic”; she does not remember the specifics of the dream. She had a second dream that indicated she should get off the Risperdal gradually. (All of the critics of the use of “antipsychotics” believe withdrawal should always be gradual.)3
She started to reduce the Risperdal until she was off it and the fatigue symptoms had faded, but she still thought she needed the antidepressant and that she would have to be on it her entire life. “I was convinced at Windhorse that I was mentally ill.”
It was at this time that a critical event occurred in Grossberg’s life. She was walking in the street one afternoon in Northampton, and she happened to pass a Freedom Center “speakout” against psychiatric oppression. Grossberg stopped to listen, and she talked to a woman who told her that she had been on twelve psychiatric drugs and that now she was completely free of them. Grossberg knew if this woman could get off twelve drugs, she could get off a few. The dreams and the meeting with the people from Freedom Center marked a turning point in Grossberg’s life—the transition from “mental patient” to social activist and spiritual teacher.
Grossberg “knew” she had to go back to Hampshire the following fall. She knew she had to get off the drugs to do well in school. Grossberg finished at Hampshire in several months and received her degree, but it was a struggle to do well in school while she was still reducing the drugs and could not think clearly a lot of the time.
Chaya Grossberg: Over time I got off every single drug I had ever been on. It took about eight months to get off of everything and was very difficult. Risperdal, Xanax, and Effexor were the hardest. Prozac and Buspar were the easiest for me. Ambien was hard too; I went over a week without getting a full night’s sleep while I was reducing some of these. The Risperdal withdrawal made me feel more insane than anything else ever has. The Effexor withdrawal made me lose my appetite, feel nauseated, and basically be unable to get out of bed for days. But most of the withdrawal was acute and short-lived. I was surprised to feel fairly sane, energized, and “normal” once they got out of my system after a week or two. Freedom Center people helped a lot, especially in offering a sense of community after I had been isolated for so long.
By the following spring I was very involved with Freedom Center. Freedom Center was the bridge for me, and I knew my story could help other people, and that made me feel good. Also I was doing a lot of writing because I finally had my mind back. My parents became very supportive. My father is practically a Freedom Center activist. He reads their website almost every day.
Farber: You said in the Madness Radio interview there’s a danger in trying to deny the past. What do you mean? Well, you’re not trying to deny the past anymore, right?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, maybe I was trying to forget the past. Now I don’t really try to deny or forget the past. My brother and I sometimes talk about our past, our childhood.
Farber: Does he agree it was difficult?
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah, actually, he talks about it in a much more exaggerated way than I do.
Farber: Is it any more resolved today than in the past?
Chaya Grossberg: Sometimes I have conversations with my mom about the past. We had one this week that was pretty good, but it’s hard to tell. She can be really understanding and kind and compassionate one day, and then the next day it seems to upset and scare her so much, or she just isn’t open to it and perhaps I am not either. I don’t always feel I have the skills to talk with them about it in a way that doesn’t upset me. With my dad, I don’t think I’ve ever really been able to talk to him about the past; I guess I’ve always been too scared. Right now, I’m financially independent from my parents. My parents have a lot of money and—it has had its plusses and minuses. If I were to say I am not grateful for it, that would be a lie, but right now, I don’t accept any money from them, and that helps me to be freer.
Farber: Maybe he’s less controlling than he would have been when you were eighteen or nineteen or whatever? Neither of them remarried?
Chaya Grossberg: My mom’s about to get remarried. My dad—I would say, he’s probably with the person that he’ll be with.
Farber: So he has a girlfriend.
Chaya Grossberg: Yeah. They’ve been together for a while, I think they’ll probably . . .
Farber: But that hasn’t improved your relationship with them, them recoupling with other people? It sounds like it’s somewhat more resolved now, no?
Chaya Grossberg: It’s hard to say “resolved.” Yeah, I don’t think it will ever be 100 percent resolved. I don’t even know what that would be. But I feel like in terms of the mental health stuff, it’s resolved. They don’t think I’m mentally ill.
Farber: And they did for most of this period of time, right?
Chaya Grossberg: Yes.
Farber: That’s a big change. You spend a lot of your time now with Freedom Center, trying to save people from getting involved in psychiatric hospitals, getting involved in the mental—I call it the “mental death system.” Keeping people out of hospitals, getting them off of drugs, things like that?
Chaya Grossberg: Well, there are different things we do. A lot of the stuff that I do is educational. I speak at conferences, sharing my story and sharing my perspective.
Farber: Yes.
Chaya Grossberg: Everybody in the Freedom Center has their own little piece of it that they take on, and that’s the part that I like the most: speaking to large audiences of people about what it’s really like and what happened to me and what I’ve seen. I find that to be the best role for me. We also do organizing events with speakers and a lot of other things.
Farber: So then what do you think are the most destructive things that are done in hospitals; what should be done?
Chaya Grossberg: In my experience, hospitals have always forced or coerced me into taking many drugs that destroyed my health and made me tired and apathetic so I could be easily controlled. Also, the hospital environments were loud and stressful, populated with very highly drugged and traumatized people, and staff were disinterested in anything but control of the environment.
I would like to go to a hospital, if I were distressed perhaps and if it were a very different kind of hospital. I would go to one where there were many options for treatment, none forced, but all available—a hospital that offered lots of time in nature; fresh food of very high nutritional value; meditation groups; writing groups; art groups; one-on-one talks with kind, loving counselors who are spiritually oriented; massage, yoga, and exercise opportunities; acupuncture; nutritional counseling with supplements available; herbalist consultations with herbal preparations available; prayer groups; and quiet time to rest whenever needed. I would go to a hospital where others who have been through a breakdown/extreme states/trauma/spiritual transformation and are now living highly healthy lives made up much of the staff. I would go to a hospital that, of course, let me talk to friends and family on the phone and have visitors. I would go to a hospital that I could check out of when I felt ready to.
Farber: Do you believe in a messiah? Judaism was the first Western religion to envision the resolution of the suffering of humanity and the Earth in a messianic age of cosmic harmony. There has always been a prophetic tradition in Judaism that said the Jews could help—through righteous deeds, through tikkun—to create the conditions for the messianic age or the return of the Messiah. Is that part of being Jewish for you?
Chaya Grossberg: As for the messianic era, it reminds me of what other traditions call the Golden Age or even the end of the world, like the 2012 prophesies. In a way, total harmony would be heaven, and it is hard to imagine what one would do in a world without any problems. The words paradox and parabola come to mind. Paradox because everyone wants peace and to be free from strife and suffering, but when I think of life that way I wonder what my purpose would be, or anyone’s. And parabola: like we get closer and closer to perfect peace but never quite reach it? In a way that seems more heavenly since it does not equal the end of the world. But I am also open to the idea that eventually we will all be ready to let go of the world as it is and enter into a mystical, harmonious musical reality where everything flows in ease and beauty forevermore. In a world like this there is no duality whatsoever in anyone’s consciousness, so all is one and there can be no “righteous deeds” for everything is already right. In the world right now, I feel that spiritual people, and even less spiritually aware people, have a vision or guiding force in their lives toward this ideal.
Grossberg’s story is a powerful invalidation of the narratives scripted by the mental health establishment. Had Grossberg not had such strong inner convictions she would be a chronic mental patient today, hooked on psychiatric drugs and convinced that she had a “bipolar” or “schizoaffective disorder.” (Since she is educated she probably would not have been given the most stigmatizing of all diagnoses, “schizophrenic.”) Instead, she is a teacher and a striking example of a person who is creatively maladjusted.
From the beginning of her transition, Grossberg felt she was on a path and that she was “guided” by a higher power. If so, it seems to be that she was guided to a state of creative maladjustment. She is not one of those persons who can easily fit into society the way it is. When she first got to college, it did not take her long to sense she did not “belong” with those students who only wanted to party and have fun. She was drawn both to spirituality and to social activism.
This is a hallmark of many of the emerging leaders in the Mad Pride movement. They reject the idea of a dichotomy (or a conflict) between social activism and spiritual self-transformation. There are exceptions, of course. Caty Simon (see chapter 7) tended to see “spirituality” as a form of escapism. Most of the “leaders” of Mad Pride—Sascha DuBrul, David Oaks, Chaya Grossberg, Will Hall4—differ from those on the secular left who think spirituality is escapism, as well as from some associated with the “New Age” movement who think any form of protest, of contestation of the power structure, is an expression of “negative thinking.” Increasingly, Mad Pride leaders are fusing social activism and spirituality.
Grossberg underwent some kind of transition after she went off to college that led to multiple hospitalizations. Since I know her account only, the list of “symptoms” in the story above is short. (I do not know the psychiatrists’ version or her parents’ version.) However, it is clear from Grossberg’s account that she underwent acute anxiety that became panic at times and that many of the psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who saw her regarded her as “psychotic”—although she did not report any “hallucinations.” We know that at the time she was and still is intensely interested in spiritual issues. Psychiatrists usually consider a keen interest in spirituality in and of itself as a danger signal of psychosis.5 I would guess that Grossberg also exhibited some forms of bizarre and unusual behavior in addition to what she described. Why is she not a chronic mental patient today? Why is she not dependent on psychiatric drugs in order to function? Virtually every psychiatrist she saw, including the ones at Windhorse, told her she would need to be on medication for the rest of her life. This in itself is a damning indictment of the system.
What caused Grossberg’s problems? What caused her recovery? Clearly there were multiple factors. On the one hand Grossberg was going away to college, she was leaving home in an existential as well as literal sense; this is a critical and often difficult phase in the life cycle.6 During this phase if there are problems from the past they often resurface. This is a time when many young people have breakdowns, “psychotic episodes.” If they resolve their problems and successfully complete this phase of the life cycle—if they make a breakthrough—they will have established a basis for a robust sense of personal identity.7
Many young people do not complete the transition because at the time of the breakdown they are placed in the mental health system, where they are inducted into careers as chronic mental patients. Many young people are unconsciously scapegoated at this time by parents who fear their children’s independence. This scapegoating would usually not succeed without the help of the mental health system. In Grossberg’s case whatever tendency her parents felt to scapegoat her was resisted, due partially to Grossberg’s own persistence (despite her pitfalls) in persevering and establishing her own identity—despite the efforts of the mental health system to incorporate her into their own narrative of a chronically defective person.8 Despite Grossberg’s criticism of her parents and despite lingering conflicts, they ultimately supported her independence. They supported her in becoming her own person. This is rare among parents of young people who have been psychiatrically labeled; they usually follow the lead of the psychiatrists, who, as stated, are intent on transforming the person into a patient.
The process of becoming independent probably would have been smoother and easier for Grossberg had there been genuine family therapists to help her and her parents communicate to each other and negotiate their conflicts. I was trained as a family therapist by Salvador Minuchin and Jay Haley, and I know how family therapy can work to correct family “dysfunctions” while reversing the scapegoating of the most sensitive member as “mentally ill.”9 However, by the late 1990s when Grossberg was hospitalized, genuine family therapy had been replaced by the so-called psycho-educational model of family therapy that is based on teaching the entire family, including the patient, to accept and cope with the patient’s putative “mental illness.” This, of course, reinforces the scapegoating process by disguising it as a benevolent paternalism, and it inculcates the family with the sense of the importance of uniting to take care of the “sick” patient. Thus the family’s own “dysfunctionality”—its danger of splitting—is suppressed by the focus on the patient. This usually enables the family to survive while suppressing an awareness or resolution of its conflicts.10
In the lives of persons who escape from Psychiatry there is often a fortuitous or synchronistic encounter. David Oaks encountered the Mental Patients’ Liberation Front in Cambridge. Grossberg encountered Freedom House at an even more critical point in her life. It enabled her to complete her transition and find support in taking that last decisive step—of getting off psychiatric drugs and trading the identity of a mental patient for that of a social activist and spiritual teacher. As we will see in the next chapter, for Caty Simon the encounter with Freedom House was also serendipitous.
Grossberg’s resolution of her crisis also involved her redefinition of her spiritual identity. The “New Age” Judaism she embraced provided a culture, a community, and a spiritual practice that gave direction and stability to her life. It provided her life with a sense of spiritual gravity, of “bedrock faith” (to use Grossberg’s term from the interview above), and a relationship to the infinite, which is essential for those who are not philosophically satisfied with the glib materialism of modern society or with the various secular philosophies of those modernists or postmodernists who believe that the only authentic philosophical stance is based on a metaphysical defiance of all “external” authority, including “God”—on atheism.
However, atheism does not provide a strong foundation for faith in life because it—typically at least—answers the “fundamental question” of Einstein (“Is the universe friendly?”) with the assertion that the universe is a mere accident, an absurdity, and it thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Grossberg’s embrace of Judaism helped her to cultivate awareness of the “trans-sensible” (beyond the senses) reality of the Infinite, the reality of the Transcendent, of the holy and loving God of which the world of perception is a pale, albeit sacred, reflection.