The Spiritual Gift of Madness

Caty Simon is a twenty-eight-year-old activist in the Mad Pride movement. She has been affiliated with Freedom Center since 2003.

She wrote in 2005:

Freedom Center is the area’s only group run by and for people labeled with “severe mental illnesses.” We call for compassion, human rights, self-determination, and holistic alternatives. One can’t say enough about what a difference it makes to work through one’s problems among peers rather than trying to solve them within a hierarchical model.

None of these [therapists], even the best of them, helped me get better, ultimately, because not only did therapy undermine me in the myriad ways listed above, it was simply ineffective. What I needed was a community of concerned, socially active people to become engaged with and learn how to relate to, whereas therapy locked me in a room with one bourgeois professional with whom I had a totally artificial relationship who wanted me to become more socially adjusted. Members of the Freedom Center support group see each other every week. Every week, we listen to each other’s problems, and offer support, humor, and advice. We do each other little favors the way every interdependent community does. We celebrate each other’s successes and mourn each other’s losses.

In this way, people labeled with severe “mental illnesses” who are used to nothing but isolation, get to experience what being a part of a vibrant, living community is like, that is, what being truly cared about is like.1

Although Simon was diagnosed as “psychotic” she did not have any visionary or mystical experiences, unlike the other activists interviewed. She did not see angels or feel a sense of God. She stated, “I’m as close as an agnostic could be to being an atheist.” She was keenly aware that most people in the Mad Pride movement do have a spiritual worldview, but she said, paraphrasing Marx, “I don’t really seem to align with that. It quickly becomes an opiate of the people—any mystical tendencies.” (Of course, it is a thesis of this book that mystical experiences do not necessarily undermine social activism but, to the contrary, can predispose persons toward embracing a vision of radical social-spiritual transformation.) Unlike the other interviewees, Simon did not believe her emotional conflicts had initiatory significance.

Yet Simon is certainly not unrepresentative of Mad Pride activists, some of whom like her have no interest in spirituality and have had no mystical experiences. Based on my experience with Mad Pride activists as well ex-mental patients over the past twenty years, I believe that secular activists are a minority within the Mad Pride movement. Of the six mad persons I interviewed, one is secular and the others are intensely spiritual—two were not actively involved in the movement. This is probably typical of the composition of the population of former “mental patients.”

Because Simon is a rebel and was a victim of Psychiatry, she identifies with the mad and with outsiders in general. Despite her secularism there is a messianic strain in her thought: she consistently defines herself as an “anarcho-communist,” and she eloquently describes her vision of community in terms antithetical to a capitalist society based on the apotheosis of competition. The kind of competition prevalent in normal society is unrestrained by a sense of the unity of humanity and/or the interconnectedness of all life and is leading to the destruction of the fabric of social life and of the ecosystems of the Earth. When I asked Simon how she expected this ideal could be achieved, she acknowledged that she had no idea. (I did not include this exchange in the interview below.)

I think Simon’s story is exemplary because it illustrates very clearly two of the contentions of this book: first, the superiority of collective self-help to therapy, and second, that there is no “need” for any person to take the more powerful psychotropic “medications” (e.g., “antipsychotics”) on a regular basis; these drugs, particularly when taken over the long term, are harmful. Simon corroborates Dr. Stastny’s point: the drugs are part of a “package deal” (see chapter 1). Thus not only was Simon debilitated by the drugs, but she spent critical years of her youth convinced her problems were a result of mental illness. This severely undermined her self-esteem.

Psychiatric drugs are necessary for those who believe in them—as I try to show in my analysis of Sascha DuBrul (see chapter 9). This is because just as they function as a placebo, so does giving them up activate fears and expectations of going crazy. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, as Dr. Stastny points out, the longer one stays on these drugs the more difficult it is to give them up—the more debilitating are the withdrawal effects. On the other hand, my interviews show that even the most severely troubled patients were able to break the habit—if they stopped before they had been on the drugs for years. Those I interviewed who got off the drugs were those who were skeptical about them in the first place.

Like everyone I’ve met in the Mad Pride movement Simon believes that society is insane. She agreed that those who get labeled psychotic tend to be persons who find it more difficult than others to adjust to normal society. Like every activist in this book, Simon is one of the creatively maladjusted.

Caty Simon: I was diagnosed when I had a very typical situational breakdown caused by a lot of pressures of adolescence. I was a daughter of an immigrant family—a Russian Jewish family—who immigrated in 1981, the year I was born. Basically, like a lot of immigrant families, there was a lot of pressure to succeed in the new world.

Farber: Both your parents were Russian Jews?

Caty Simon: Both my parents were Russian Jews, and as with many Jewish families, of course there was a really huge focus on academia and academic success; also, my parents had belonged to the Russian intelligentsia, a class that very much emphasized academic success as one of the few markers of basic personhood—of success as a person.

Farber: When you say Russian intelligentsia, you mean your parents were artists and writers?

Caty Simon: My father was an engineer and my mother was a journalist, and they both had master’s degrees from very good schools. They would have gone to the best schools had anti-Semitism not blocked them from admission in Russia. My mother had become very interested in reconnecting with her religious history and origins, and she became an Orthodox Jew. So typically, she then sent my brother and I to a private Orthodox Jewish high school. It was a great school in many ways; it was from the Modern Orthodox Jewish sect, which meant that there was equal focus on learning Jewish texts and on secular curriculum. It was a ten-hour school day. It was also a school that was very much focused on academic excellence as well, and it sent a really high proportion of graduates to the Ivy Leagues. The problem was, here I was, this budding—I was a bisexual . . .

Farber: How old were you at the time you were identifying as bisexual?

Caty Simon: I was in that school from the time I was in fifth grade, but as I got into middle school, then I was a bisexual, human-rights-oriented feminist, in a misogynistic, homophobic environment.

Farber: How did you become a bisexual human-rights feminist?

Caty Simon: Well . . . I was a feminist basically from consciousness. I remember Russian culture, although it allows women more freedom in terms of their careers, it can also be very misogynistic, and I think I reacted badly to that very early on. So I had feminist leanings from the earliest that I can remember. It was the same thing in terms of the human rights movement.

Farber: When did you start thinking?

Caty Simon: I always kind of gravitated towards those things, and in terms of coming out to myself as bisexual that was around fourteen or fifteen, although I probably had stirrings about that earlier. But I remember even as early as thirteen—this was the kind of place it was—I was dragged into the principal’s office to talk about, and this was the word he used, my “heterodox” beliefs and how they were threatening to the school.

Farber: What in his opinion did heterodox beliefs consist of?

Caty Simon: Probably just questioning certain religious tenets. I don’t really remember everything, but it was also that they wouldn’t have treated me this way if I hadn’t been the relatively poor daughter of a Russian Jew.

Farber: There was prejudice among the American Jews?

Caty Simon: There was definitely prejudice toward people who had come later toward religion and definitely classism disguised as religious snobbishness.

Farber: So was this upsetting when you were taken before the principal?

Caty Simon: Yeah, it was pretty upsetting because in general I was kind of an outcast there.

Farber: How old were you when your mother put you in this school?

Caty Simon: I was in fifth grade.

Farber: So before that you more or less got along?

Caty Simon: Before that I was kind of a geekish, bookish nerd, but I never felt ostracized in particular. I just stayed to myself more often because I liked reading books at recess and picking my nose.

Farber: Were you reading adult books in fifth grade?

Caty Simon: I read all sorts of books from a very early age. I was a pretty precocious kid.

Farber: So it was traumatizing being placed in this new school.

Caty Simon: I don’t know if I would used as strong a word as traumatizing, but certainly ultra-shock and it was difficult. I’m just building up to the things that kind of came to a head when I was fifteen years old—the time that I got my psychiatric diagnosis. It was a ten-hour school day and one of the ways that I could redeem myself from being a Russian-Jewish scholarship kid was to get all A’s. My parents wanted me to achieve academically, but I found that my values were in harsh contrast to the school, so I had to get away a lot. I sought out these artistic, booky kids from the public school nearby, and I had this huge social life outside of school, and I also had these kind of Virginia Woolf-esque aspirations to be a writer and I forced myself to write a thousand words a day. . . .

Farber: Was Virginia Woolf a person you’d read or you were modeling yourself on?

Caty Simon: One of the people, certainly, and it was important in another context because I was reading a lot of modernist fiction and I was getting all these messages about how, in order to be a true artist and/or writer and/or genius, you had to have a touch of madness. If you weren’t like Virginia Woolf and didn’t hear the birds singing in Greek, you weren’t truly brilliant.

Farber: Where were you getting this, and from whom?

Caty Simon: Just from reading, from reading about Byron, Woolf, all writers that had gone mad; madness seemed to be an inextricable part of being this writer that I wanted to be. Also, I was in this slightly sexually abusive relationship with—starting from that time that I was twelve to the time that I was fifteen—a guy that was eighteen when I was twelve because I guess I was really lonely and he took me seriously intellectually. A lot of times that is what a precocious teenager will want more than anything else. I was putting my energy into so many different places—in order to get all A’s and to continue this relationship and to have a social life outside of school and to write a thousand words a day. I guess I made the immature teenage decision that in order to fit this all in, I had to dispense with sleep: to do this ten-hour school day and four hours of homework and then everything else. Of course we’ve seen in studies that sleep deprivation causes all the symptoms that the DSM labels mania—especially in a conflicted, young, developing teenager.

Farber: Were you also conflicted about sexuality or not?

Caty Simon: Well, I was conflicted about my sexuality’s place in my religion, and even though I was really in violent kind of disagreement with a lot of the tenets of the religion I was in, it was the only community that I really knew. So owning up totally to my queerness and to my feminism was then to force myself outside of the only belonging that I had. So all of those things kind of came to a head, and I made a number of flimsy, very by-the-book suicidal ideation cries for help kinds of things—though I never actually made a serious suicide attempt. I would swallow a few pills of aspirin and drink a few sips of vodka and then say I had ingested much more than that. I didn’t actually think that they would send me to the hospital; if I had known a way to talk to authority figures or just someone who could guide me about what was really bothering me, then maybe I wouldn’t have done any of those things, but what happened was then I got sent to these juvenile wards.

Farber: Juvenile psychiatric wards?

Caty Simon: Yes, because they thought I was suicidal and because the doctors didn’t particularly like arguing with a pedantic, precocious, argumentative teenager.

Farber: Were these doctors in the hospital, or did they take you somewhere?

Caty Simon: Yeah. It was in-patient first of all, after these suicidal calls for help.

Farber: Just the pills?

Caty Simon: I took pills, but like I told you I would take a few pills and drink a few sips of vodka and pretend that I’d taken the entire bottle. I didn’t realize I’d be put into this brutal, oppressive . . .

Farber: Were you able to articulate to the psychiatrist, like you’re articulating now?

Caty Simon: Well, I didn’t totally realize—a lot of those things were subconscious—the conflicts that I was having. What I was able to articulate was this strong defiance—that I wasn’t crazy—which obviously irritated them to no end, and obviously I could cogitate fairly quickly, and with the manic symptoms that were provoked by extreme sleep deprivation my thoughts pretty much raced too, and because I argued with them, they immediately said something like, “Well she’s either paranoid schizophrenic or has bipolar disorder, but it’s too soon to tell.” I stayed in three different juvenile wards for a period of a week each.

Farber: In which hospitals?

Caty Simon: Once in Charles River Hospital that no longer exists, and the second two times I went to Westwood Lodge in Westwood, Massachusetts. Charles River I think was in one of the suburbs of Boston. In Charles River I was immediately put on Zyprexa, and I noticed that every single kid there regardless of their diagnosis was put on Zyprexa. Zyprexa dulled my thinking and deadened my intellect, and that was what I’d been taught to see as the core part of myself.

Farber: Did they put you on Haldol or . . . ?

Caty Simon: No, but an atypical antipsychotic was enough, and I think they did shoot me up with Thorazine one time as a disciplinary measure; that was always in the background as a threat. In Charles River Hospital I think it was the first time that I realized that in certain situations people could have absolute power over you and could hurt you and there was nothing you could do about it; as a minor I had no rights.

Farber: Did they think you were really suicidal?

Caty Simon: Sure they did, but the worst thing was I saw a twelve-year-old girl get raped by another inmate, a seventeen-year-old boy. Witnessing that rape wasn’t the worst thing; it was the staff’s response to it. They took us into a room and started lecturing us about personal contact and about not letting our desires get a hold of us, and they didn’t seem to acknowledge that it was rape. The twelve-year-old girl was sitting in the corner crying, and finally a staff member said, “If you can’t stop acting out and behaving inappropriately, then you’re going to have to be limited to your room.” It seemed like their huge concern was of her being pregnant; they immediately sent her for a pregnancy test. They had absolutely no concern about the trauma she might have suffered, at all. Everything we did was because we were just misbehaving, horrible children or our diseases were controlling us like demonic possession. Everything that happened was both our fault and everything was a symptom of our illness . . . so even if we were victims, we were to blame.

Farber: Yes, I see, you were both sick and bad, both mad and bad.

Caty Simon: Yeah, exactly. It’s not like our sickness removed us from responsibility or from blame. So the twelve-year-old girl was being blamed for not being able to control herself, for not being able to stop a perfectly reasonable reaction to having been violated.

Farber: And this was what year, in the ’90s?

Caty Simon: It was 1996.

Farber: Supposedly a more liberal and enlightened time.

Caty Simon: Yeah, and this was not a state hospital, it was a private hospital; my parents’ insurance paid for it.

Farber: Did you tell your parents about this incident?

Caty Simon: No, I didn’t. At the time I just felt betrayed by them, and I didn’t feel that I could reach out to them.

Farber: But you’re saying that had you told them, they would have at least been shocked by what you said and angered at the hospital?

Caty Simon: I honestly don’t know. I don’t know how the hospital would have spun it, and they had the weight of authority and I didn’t. I was just one teenage girl who was diagnosed as defective, and they were a system that had all sorts of PR-spun reasons for what they did.

Farber: This was one of the most traumatizing features of being in the hospital, the rape?

Caty Simon: Yeah, that and just the general sense of being totally discredited, having no rights, and being chemically imprisoned.

Farber: It sounded like you didn’t believe . . . the diagnosis?

Caty Simon: I fought the diagnosis at first, but again, I was just one teenage girl against this whole system. . . .

Farber: First you were afraid that you were mentally ill in a serious way?

Caty Simon: No, no. At first I fought the diagnosis, but then I changed. I succumbed to this idea that there was something inherently wrong with me.

Farber: At first you fought it.

Caty Simon: Right, at first I fought it, and that’s what gave me an even worse diagnosis, because they saw my fighting as denial. . . .

Farber: Yes, they call that noncompliance with treatment, which they see as part of the illness. . . .

Caty Simon: But then, like I said, I was just one teenage girl against not only a system that bought into this biomedical model, but an entire culture. Around that time, Prozac was seen as the nectar of the gods.

Farber: Yes, exactly. That was around the time the book Listening to Prozac by the psychiatrist Peter Kramer was published, and he gushed over Prozac like it was going to usher in the millennium.

Caty Simon: Yeah, that’s around when it came out, and it was just scary; everybody saw mental illness this way, and nobody would have listened to me, even outside of the psychiatric system.

Farber: You mean, you couldn’t have gone to anyone you knew and said this is too much pressure for me at this school?

Caty Simon: I couldn’t have said that because I didn’t know that I wanted to leave the school; it was the only community I knew. Like I said, a lot of these things are subconscious. Otherwise I think I could have just articulated what my problems were without staging these fake suicide attempts.

Farber: And you might have been successful and found a counselor who understood without being put on psychiatric drugs?

Caty Simon: Right. It could have happened, certainly.

Farber: Did you believe in God at that time also?

Caty Simon: I tried to make myself believe in God, so I could fit in, so I could stay in this place. On the one hand it was really intoxicating for an intellectual teenager: you got a chance to study the Torah, which was much more sophisticated than any secular stuff that was offered to teenagers, and it was the only community I knew. I thought that it was me, that something was wrong with me and that I needed to force-fit into the school, and I wish I could learn how to do that. I didn’t know that I needed to leave the school, until of course I got expelled—for not doing my schoolwork.

Farber: What was the timing of this?

Caty Simon: I was locked up for a week each time: three times between the ages of fifteen-and-a-half and sixteen. Then I was expelled the last year of school.

Farber: And at the end of it you believed you were manic-depressive?

Caty Simon: Yes, I believed that I was “bipolar,” the label that they finally decided to stick on me.

Farber: Did that upset you?

Caty Simon: Sure. Now I thought that there was something that was going to be wrong with me for the rest of my life, that I couldn’t achieve everything that I wanted to achieve, and worst of all was being chemically incarcerated. A lot of people at Freedom Center say that they’d rather—having experienced both—be in prison than in the mental hospital, because at least in prison you get control of your own mind. I didn’t even have control of my own mind anymore. . . .

Farber: You were taking Zyprexa?

Caty Simon: Zyprexa, then they gave me Depakote, and most of the medication acted as a depressant for me and made me feel even worse, and I felt like they halved my IQ, and I couldn’t do what I used to be able to do because I didn’t have the same agility of mind, and that was what I valued most in myself. So I was just being snowed by all this propaganda and being told over and over again by these powerful authority figures that there was something wrong with me.

Farber: They told you it was a disease like diabetes?

Caty Simon: Exactly. Then I had these antidepressant medications take hold of me so I couldn’t do my work, so that, for example, senior year of high school I could hardly get out of bed; I was so depressed because of the medications.

Farber: And they told you that if you went off your medication, you would crack up and . . .

Caty Simon: And then it seemed that it was self-fulfilling, that now I had gone through my manic cycle and now I was going through my depressive cycle, depressive phase rather. It was horrible: I felt paralyzed emotionally, and just in terms of my productivity, I started my first two years of high school with all A’s and I ended hardly being able to attend school.

Farber: Do you attribute this to drugs or to the psychological impact of being labeled?

Caty Simon: Mostly to the drugs, but the psychological impact certainly didn’t help. Being told that you couldn’t do things and that your depression was crippling and chronic—it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Farber: Were there conversations that they had about you, or with you, where it was impressed upon you that you were mentally ill?

Caty Simon: Not to me. About me—in front of me—more like. I’d go to the psychiatrist with my parents, and they would decide together what to put in my body. I had no say.

Farber: So as you said you ended up thinking that you had a chronic disease like diabetes?

Caty Simon: In the same model as diabetes, but worse because I ended up believing that this bipolar illness ate up the most basic things that I valued most about myself.

Farber: Such as?

Caty Simon: Such as my intellect, my ability to achieve, my ability to articulate, for instance.

Farber: But in reality it was the psychiatric drugs you took that were doing this to you?

Caty Simon: Yes, I believe that now, but I didn’t know it then. I thought I was going through my depressive phase of my bipolar illness. That’s what they kept telling me. . . .

Farber: What did they tell you would happen if you didn’t take your meds? They must have given you their typical warning?

Caty Simon: Yeah, sure they gave me that one, that I would have a relapse, that my current depression would get worse and/or I would be manic or out of control, that I’d be rehospitalized. My mania had never really been out of control—my sleep-deprived mania.

Farber: Was any of the mania euphoric?

Caty Simon: Euphoric, maybe. I would do amazing work under its influence. It wasn’t just through the filter of grandiosity that I saw this. It was well-done work: both fiction and papers that I would send in to my professors. One of my religious studies papers got published in an adult journal.

Farber: What was it about?

Caty Simon: It was about the book of Exodus, sort of hermeneutics in the book of Exodus, it was really interesting. I knew Hebrew and Aramaic and could write in those languages as well, so . . .

Farber: At some point after this you were seeing a therapist? A Freudian?

Caty Simon: She was kind of cognitive-behavioral.

Farber: Because you wrote that you were supposed to talk about your mother and your father and early childhood and all that stuff.

Caty Simon: They’re still very into developmental stuff. Talk therapists are still very much into that. That’s still a holdover from those days. It was difficult because it was such a narrow-minded view of . . .

Farber: I think they must have been somewhat psychoanalytic if they thought everything was your mother and your father and the early years.

Caty Simon: Not everything. Obviously there’s still influence by psychoanalysis, but she was also into something that I think was somewhat positive, which was changing one’s mental tapes.

Farber: Was this the same woman?

Caty Simon: I did go to several different psychologists at first, but the woman I was with most of the time, she did kind of emphasize changing your self-talk.

Farber: Well, yeah, that’s cognitive. And this was the one that told you that the borderline personality disorder diagnosis was bullshit?

Caty Simon: Yes. Have you read Making Us Crazy? It shows how psychologists and psychiatrists will often diagnose a patient with borderline personality disorder when she is not meeting their expectations of what a patient should do. It’s like their bruised ego compels them to label them that way. There’s even a joke: “How do you treat someone with BPD?*27 You refer them.”

Farber: Right. The term really expresses contempt. I witnessed that in the 1980s when I worked in a clinic with psychoanalysts. It was the patient they did not like—for whatever reason—who got labeled BPD.

Caty Simon: Basically I think that I got that diagnosis in the beginning because the doctor just didn’t like a powerful woman’s voice, and he didn’t like the fact that I was unashamed about my sexuality. One of the first doctors that I had who gave me that diagnosis basically called me a slut. I think that my sexuality combined with my assertiveness was threatening to him, coming from a young teenage girl.

Farber: You said you first got the label “bipolar” when you were in the hospital, right? And you were also labeled “borderline.”

Caty Simon: Right. There’s always another axis that they can add onto, right?

Farber: So they said you were bipolar with a borderline personality disorder.

Caty Simon: Yes, double-damned, basically.

Farber: After going through this hospital experience there was this sense of malaise that was lingering from everything that had happened to you.

Caty Simon: I’d call it iatrogenic depression, basically. I was taking Zyprexa, Prozac, and Depakote, and then just Depakote and Prozac, and the Depakote just knocked me out. It took all the energy out of me and just made me incredibly depressed, so I went from being a straight-A student to basically failing. Let me explain the dynamics. There was this period where I was supposedly being “manic”—but my mania was caused by sleep deprivation and the situation that led me to deprive myself of sleep was that I was not getting enough work done because I was depressed by the so-called medications. The mania was followed by me being depressed when I came down, and I would say that that further convinced me that something was inherently wrong with me, which completely undermined my self-esteem and gave me this feeling that I was doomed for life.

There is considerable evidence that the drugs Simon was taking do in fact often produce a state of profound apathy and depression.2 Psychiatrist Peter Breggin has argued, based on extensive documentation, that antipsychotics—including newer “atypicals” like Zyprexa—blunt the emotions, producing a “chemical lobotomy and a chemical straitjacket.”3

Simon was prescribed multiple psychiatric drugs. The interaction of multiple drugs has a negative synergistic stress reaction, which may result in maladaptive body changes that psychiatrist Grace Jackson has termed an “allostatic load.”4 Since (as Dr. Stastny noted in chapter 1) the prescription and ingestion of multiple drugs became the norm in the 1990s (for financial reasons), patients are now suffering from an increased allostatic load, which accounts for the kind of feelings Simon described. Furthermore, the psychological effect of being labeled mentally ill usually produces a state of lowered self-esteem and depression.

The theory that Simon suffered from a biochemical imbalance is completely unnecessary to account for her depression. Furthermore, this theory is particularly unpersuasive due to the fact that contrary to the propaganda of psychiatrists and drug companies, no evidence has ever been presented that those labeled mentally ill have brain abnormalities (see chapter 2). Those who know the psychiatric literature realize the claim that biochemical imbalances account for “pathological” behavior is an unproven theory and an article of faith among psychiatrists. Most psychiatric patients believe this claim for the very reasons Simon had explained: it is repeatedly impressed on them by experts with the full weight of the highest authority.

A third source of Simon’s unhappiness could be postulated: she never resolved the conflict that led to her “cry for help”—the conflict between her desire to succeed and excel and the resentment at the toll this constant pressure was exerting on her ability to relax and enjoy life. Fueling this conflict was the idea instilled in Simon that in order be a person of worth one must continually compete to maintain and aggrandize one’s social status in the academic marketplace. It is easy to see how one could become lured by the rewards of success, and even more potent is the fear of failure. As Jules Henry wrote, “To be successful in our culture one must learn to dream of failure.”5 In school, failure often becomes the occasion for public humiliation, and thus “the . . . nightmare is internalized for life.” This is how we are socialized to become part of the “rat race” of “normal” society in which every other human being is viewed as a competitor; although, as Simon noted, there is a sense of self-esteem that one gains from belonging to the academic elite. This was the ethos that Simon had internalized, which as Jules Henry documented, is taught in the family and in the schools.6

It was the internal conflict generated by this ideology, this ethos, that had led to what Simon called her cries for help, but this conflict was never addressed by any of the experts she saw. How could they have addressed it? They too had internalized this paradigm, they were part of the rat-race society, and they saw it as natural. Instead of addressing it they loaded her body with psychiatric drugs and told her she was mentally defective. Assuming—reluctantly—the role of chronic patient relieved Simon of the pressure to compete, but at the cost of her sense of self-worth and of her capacity for autonomous creativity. She needed guidance, someone to help her attain balance. The mental health system has only two products to offer—psychiatric diagnoses and psychiatric drugs.

Years later Simon found a “cure” for her “illness” when she discovered a community based on mutual aid—Freedom House—a community that encouraged individual initiative in the service of the community, not individual self-aggrandizement. Simon’s “cure” included repudiating the ideology of competitive capitalism and affirming the vision of a society based on cooperation. This vision was not based on the idea of the subordination of the individual to the collective, as in the theory of Soviet-style communism, nor was it based on the exaltation of individual freedom regardless of its effects on others, as in American capitalism. It was based on an awareness of the unity of all—and thus the reconciliation of the happiness of the individual with the good of society. It was the ideal not of traditional communism but of anarcho-communism.

Farber: So by the time you get to Labor Day of 2003 and you go to the Freedom Center, how much later is that?

Caty Simon: I spent the years that I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen just depressed and barely functional. I did get into Bryn Mawr, but based on my prior grades and on a lot of teachers writing great recommendations for me. I went to Bryn Mawr, and the whole time, even though I had come to believe that I was mentally ill, I instinctually despised the drugs. I knew that they were doing something bad to me, and I think that there was still some kind of base of integrity about my sense of identity deep down, this kind of core part, and I knew that there was something wrong with the drugs. As soon as I got to Bryn Mawr at eighteen and nineteen and was on my own, I stopped taking the drugs cold turkey. But I had no information about how to withdraw from drugs, and I wasn’t in therapy anymore.

Farber: How was that experience?

Caty Simon: Horrible. It confirmed this idea that I was mentally ill.

Farber: Yeah, you thought it was your illness coming back. You obviously hadn’t read the psychiatrist Peter Breggin at that point, right? Of course Breggin shows that psychiatric drugs are highly addictive and produce powerful states of withdrawal, which are typically seen as the illness returning. The withdrawal effects according to Breggin can include hallucinations and panic.

As Grace Jackson writes, “Far from reflecting the faulty genes of the patient, or the return of the underlying illness, [as patients are constantly told] withdrawal symptoms have been repeatedly investigated and explained by predictable drug induced transformations in the body—many of which persist for weeks or months.”7

Caty Simon: It wasn’t totally a breakdown; I just went from being mostly depressed most of the time to a minute-by-minute kind of physical agony where I couldn’t stand to be in my own skin. Akathisia, it’s called.

Farber: Were you pacing a lot then?

Caty Simon: Yeah, but I couldn’t really tell what my natural state was, because as soon as I started feeling these things, I started smoking weed every day; I didn’t really like weed particularly, but I thought that it was the only drug available to me. I’d never really taken illicit drugs before.

Farber: You could have taken alcohol.

Caty Simon: I really hate alcohol. It makes me stupid, and it makes me feel bad. I started smoking weed just because I felt I needed to have my state of mind altered to anything else.

Farber: This was when you were completely off the psychiatric drugs. Did it work at all?

Caty Simon: It put me into another state, but—I had been encouraged as a career mental patient to constantly monitor my own moods for so long, and that creates its own problems—it hurts to be totally self-centered.

Farber: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think a lot people decide they’re bipolar on the basis of that continuous self-monitoring of their moods. One no longer has spontaneous moods when one is worriedly self-examining oneself.

Caty Simon: Right. And I just didn’t know any real coping skills, so even though the weed provided a kind of respite—you know how potheads have kind of tangential thinking . . .

Farber: You mean they go off on digressions?

Caty Simon: Right. So these kinds of thoughts would constantly lead back to self-hatred or self-loathing because I’m so used to focusing totally on myself, but the weed dampened the feeling I had of severe withdrawal from those medications, which I had no idea was occurring.

Farber: No one who gave you the drugs ever warned you of that?

Caty Simon: No. Firstly because nobody ever expected me to go off of them, right? Nobody would ever have encouraged me to do so . . .

Farber: They all told you that you needed them.

Caty Simon: . . . and secondly, because in the ’90s when I was first prescribed them they were still trying to hide the fact that coming off of psychiatric drugs would lead to withdrawal. They would try to refer to it by other euphemistic names in certain literature, something like “discontinuation syndrome” or anything other than the actual word withdrawal. But I wasn’t even exposed to that particular literature that explained there were withdrawal effects. So anyway, I just thought that it was my old illness coming back in some way, and although part of me kept on doggedly denying that I was mentally ill, the only other alternative way that I could explain the past few years to myself was that I had some sort of horrible defect of character—that I was lazy and wrong and bad.

Farber: But you were off the drugs, and you were passing classes at Bryn Mawr?

Caty Simon: No, I wasn’t. That’s the thing. I was deeply involved in my classes, but since I was smoking weed all the time I couldn’t really pay attention or complete tasks, or I would get so caught up in the literature we were reading that I would just read it further instead of writing the paper or . . .

Farber: Yeah, that would happen to anyone on marijuana.

Caty Simon: Right. I remember this particularly ludicrous period where I was smoking so much weed and reading Das Kapital, and instead of reading that one little section that they assigned me, I was reading as much of it as I could through the blur and not writing the paper about it at all, or reading Hegel to get some background on it and just being totally captivated by that work. I was exercising myself intellectually, but not in the way that would help me pass classes. Then of course when I didn’t pass classes I would continue to be self-recriminating, and it would just make the whole thing worse.

Farber: How long did that go on for?

Caty Simon: A while, and not just because the withdrawal continued for so long but because after the withdrawal I got into doing drugs of different kinds and that certainly didn’t help my productivity. Nobody in therapy or nobody in the hospital or nobody anywhere had really taught me how to achieve and produce without being on drugs.

Farber: What year did you start Bryn Mawr?

Caty Simon: I don’t really remember, 2001? I took a year between because I didn’t finish high school my senior year, and so I had to take some classes at the state college to finish up. Also I was volunteering at a rape crisis shelter, but I was still really disturbed.

Farber: But at the end of the year you had flunked your classes?

Caty Simon: Yes.

Farber: So what happened the next year?

Caty Simon: I also just hated the place. I was kind of this naive little girl who thought that going to a Seven Sisters school meant that I would enter this anarcho-feminist utopia, but instead, Bryn Mawr was just basically a made-over debutante school.

Farber: So you considered yourself a leftist by this time, an anarcho-syndicalist, did you say?

Caty Simon: I’m an anarcho-communist . . . in the Emma Goldman style. I wouldn’t really consider myself an anarcho-syndicalist. I think my school of thought is sometimes referred to as social libertarian as in, I have a lot of socialist beliefs but I also don’t believe in the state. Although nowadays, most leftists in my circle seem to be more anarchist than socialist.

Farber: Nowadays, though, when I run into someone who calls himself an anarchist I get the feeling they just mean run in the street and engage in direct action or throw rocks in windows or something. I didn’t have any feeling that it necessarily meant that they were theoretical anarchists; I think the term is used pretty loosely, isn’t it?

Caty Simon: It’s used more loosely, but you’re talking about Black Block kind of thinking. I mean it in the sense that my utopia consists, like I said, of a stateless world in which a community makes decisions but doesn’t impose them through violence and things are structured on a small community-based level rather than on a large, centralized scale, using self-determination. I think a lot of people see it that way. Direct action is part of the tradition. The Icarus Project itself is kind of anarchistic, it’s self-management. . . . Anyway, I did consider myself a leftist and to see women whose horses cost as much as my father’s salary in a year was kind of disgusting, and to see women who thought that feminism meant that women could be CEOs too. This place was so monoculture—as Sascha would put it—that I used to joke that even the lesbians were straight and even the Asian girls were WASPs. It was a pretty awful place for me to be in, especially when even the supposed liberal democrats in the Democratic Party were moving more toward the right.

Farber: Including the ones on your campus?

Caty Simon: Yeah. They were all about entering the corporate system and doing well for number one. They weren’t even really intellectually interested in what they were studying, only its utility to them and their careers.

Farber: So by the end of the first year you were disgusted with it.

Caty Simon: I was disgusted with it, and even if I hadn’t been disgusted with it, I wouldn’t have been in a frame of mind where I could really achieve there anyway.

Farber: But you did remain off the psychiatric drugs without having to be rehospitalized?

Caty Simon: Yes, and I wasn’t rehospitalized because my weeks at the hospital were some of the most traumatizing times of my life, maybe the most traumatizing times of my life because I’d never had authority so brutally imposed on me so indifferently. They would threaten, “If you don’t take your meds then we’re going to shoot it up your ass.” Although I’d been in paternalistic places like the Orthodox Jewish school, I’d never been in a place where the exercise of power was so naked and brutal. So I did everything I could to appear right on the outside and to never get into a situation where I could get hospitalized.

Farber: So you’ve already proved them wrong, you’d already been a year off the drugs that they said that you needed to keep from going insane.

Caty Simon: Yeah, but I didn’t really quite come to that conclusion because I was still doing so horribly according to my own ideals of what I should be able to accomplish.

Farber: So what happened with the second year?

Caty Simon: I left Bryn Mawr, and I followed a rich boyfriend to upstate New York.

Farber: Was he a leftist?

Caty Simon: He was malleable. He was mostly apolitical, but I kind of pushed him to the left a lot. And then I left him when I was twenty and moved to Northampton and started becoming economically self-sufficient and became more involved in the human rights movement.

Farber: Was this what you were referring to when you said you had these new left-wing friends and they agreed with you about everything except the psychiatric issue?

Caty Simon: Right. I was doing low-income rights work, I was doing sex worker rights work; I was doing all sorts of things. I was finally doing the kind of work I advocated, instead of just theorizing about it. I was finally putting my money where my mouth was and doing the kind of activism that I never could elsewhere, and that really started my recovery. I think just doing the things that I believed in took me outside of the endless ruminations about the self and this endless self-monitoring and put me in a place where I was just focused on doing what I needed to do for the organizations I was in. So suddenly, without my even noticing it, I started becoming more “functional.” A lot of it also was I just started to relearn these habits that I had allowed to sink in when I was told that I was just a walking array of symptoms. I really focused on trying to be responsible in my relationships with other people, because before I would be really needy and dramatic and manipulative—I thought there wasn’t anything I could do about it because I was just BPD—but I began to counter that actively with, “Yes, there is something I can do about it,” and that I owe something to my friends and I owe something to my community to behave in a responsible and caring manner toward others and toward the work that I was doing. That was part of my recovery. I think that when you talk about a spiritual recovery, mine was an existential-spiritual recovery in the sense that I was accountable for my own voice, rather than being these effects of my supposedly defective chemical makeup, just a pawn of my broken brain. So I think that was the major step for me, saying that I’m an actor, a moral agent, not an object.

Farber: That is something Laing emphasized, you know. He got it from Sartre—the idea that our actions are praxis, not a process. They are intentional, goal-directed, not mere effects of biology or psychology. So your transformation had to do with a number of things but not therapy. And getting off psychiatric drugs was critical.

Caty Simon: Well, for me, even talk therapy was out. The psychotherapy I encountered always labeled me the sick person in the room in need of guidance. Therapy didn’t work for me because it immediately put me in this submissive state.

Farber: Yeah, that was one of family therapy’s critiques of traditional psychoanalytic therapy, that it did that—it put the so-called patient in a one-down position. There is this idea of the identified patient—because if anyone is acting crazy it means the entire family is dysfunctional—but only one person becomes the family scapegoat.8

Caty Simon: Right, exactly. I was constantly the identified patient. But even if you pathologize an entire family, you still have the psychologist, the therapist who is the supposed source of sanity and salvation, and I really didn’t appreciate that. My therapist was always asking me why or what I felt, but we never did anything about what I did, which was most important, as it turned out.

What I really needed was peer support where people all put themselves on an equal level saying that, “No, we’re not all crazy, but some people who are struggling may be unhappy to some greater degree than others.” Nobody can place themselves as being the center of sanity while other people are identified as somehow defective in the way that they behave or are. Placed in that environment I think really finally sealed my recovery.

Farber: So you were pretty much out of the sick role and empowered before you even got to Freedom Center.

Caty Simon: I was pretty much empowered, but I think Freedom Center really sealed the deal by allowing me to get into peer support.

Farber: To help other people?

Caty Simon: I did a lot of facilitating certainly, but still even the facilitators spoke about their troubles. Nobody ever held themselves above or was this visibly impersonal figure in this emotionally volatile group. We all put ourselves into it, we all put what was actually going on in all our lives into it. The facilitators shared about their lives as well.

Farber: That would have helped you even if you’d never been labeled a mental patient. . . .

Caty Simon: I’m sure it would have.

Farber: It’s a community that helps people deal with what Szasz calls the problems of life?

Caty Simon: Right. So half of my recovery was an individual thing on my part. I took responsibility for my individual actions. The other half was a community aspect of realizing that my problems weren’t so unique or extreme and that other people were experiencing similar things or had experienced similar things but were now happier because they were doing the kinds of things they wanted in their lives.

Farber: So today you’ve been off these drugs for years, and you never went back on the drugs they told you needed for your bipolar illness?

Caty Simon: No. I think I still swing back and forth, and I still lead a very unstructured life. I do all this work for these organizations on a volunteer basis, and I support myself through black market means, and I do structure a lot of my time myself, so it isn’t the traditional life. I still don’t have a nine-to-five existence, so there are still times where I fuck up or I’m not as “functional” as I want to be, and there are still times when I kind of retreat into this maybe depressive space, but I know how to cope with it. I know not to hate myself for falling short of the perfectionism of my youth, and I know that because a project of mine failed it doesn’t mean that I am a failure. It doesn’t all fall back on labeling my entire identity or entire being as somehow lacking, which is what a diagnosis did.

Farber: Did you read Kate Millett’s book The Loony-Bin Trip?9 She talks about the self-loathing induced in her by being labeled manic-depressive.

Caty Simon: Right, I love that book, and then I loved the way that it portrayed how the people that we love the most can buy into this dogma and think that they’re doing the best they can for us when they deliver us into the hands of the mental health system.

Farber: Exactly. So one of the ways you deal with your depression, you go to a group at Freedom Center?

Caty Simon: Sometimes. I think that the support group’s utility in my life, the phase for that ended. Eventually I became kind of emotionally overwhelmed by the work of being a facilitator. I don’t attend a support group much anymore, but I appreciate how it helped me—and how it can help others—to realize that they are not alone in the human experience and that what we call mental illness is simply part of the continuum of the human experience.

Farber: You referred to being so-called manic at certain points. You agreed that there were some positive aspects of it. Do you think that there are some ways in which your temperament is not defective, but distinctive?

Caty Simon: I don’t think it’s inherently distinctive. I think I was brought up in such a way, I had a ten-hour school day, I had so many conflicting interests, and I just learned to push myself really hard into this state of continuous productivity, which led to what they call the manic state. I don’t really believe in the whole Icarus Project ideology of mad people having dangerous gifts—at least not in my case. Nobody’s born with a specifically differing temperament; I think we all get that way through developmental, cultural influences.

Farber: So there’s no biological component.

Caty Simon: I don’t believe so, and I don’t think that we’re especially sensitive or talented, although maybe talented people are prone to be misunderstood and labeled. What I’ve seen the psychiatric industry do is label marginalized people of whatever kind or people who just act in ways that are more extreme than the implicit social covenant that we have to behave ourselves in a certain way. So you get queer teenagers who are labeled, you get people of color who are labeled; you know that there is a study done with psychiatrists, and the only thing that they change is the fact that the person is a person of color, and a white middle-class person gets a diagnosis of major depression, while the person of color who’s poor gets a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Farber: Let’s control then for class factors. Don’t you think among middle-class people that people who tend to get labeled schizophrenic and bipolar seem to be more creative and more sensitive than people who don’t get labeled?

Caty Simon: I know plenty of people who are creative and sensitive who never get labeled. It’s partly that maybe there’s not enough room for the different ways that people behave when they’re creative and talented.

Farber: So you agree that people who are creative and talented might in fact be more likely to be labeled in the first place?

Caty Simon: Sure. I think anyone who challenges the status quo is likely to get labeled. Anyone whose expression of emotion is too intense for our society to bear.

Farber: So you do agree that people who get labeled tend to be distinctive in a number of different ways, but you don’t think there is any biology involved?

Caty Simon: Right.