The Roots of The Icarus Project
There Arjuna could see, within the midst of the armies of both parties, his fathers, grandfathers, teachers, maternal uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, friends, and also his fathers-in-law and well-wishers. . . . Arjuna, . . . cast aside his bow and arrows and sat down on the chariot, his mind overwhelmed with grief.
THE BHAGAVAD GITA1
The object of the Gita is to show “the most excellent way to attain self realization” and “this can be achieved by desireless action; by renouncing fruits of action; by dedicating all activities to God, i.e., by surrendering oneself to Him body and soul.”
MAHATMA GANDHI ON THE BHAGAVAD GITA2
True sanity entails the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self completely adjusted to our alienated social reality . . . and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.
R. D. LAING3
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. . . .
ALLEN GINSBERG, HOWL4
In September of 2002 Sascha DuBrul wrote an article that was published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian under the title of “The Bipolar World.”5 Ashley McNamara read the article, contacted DuBrul, and together they formed a website called The Icarus Project. In 2004 they published a booklet titled Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness: it consisted of insightful social criticism; stories of love and loss, anguish and madness; trenchant critiques of society; explorations of the link between madness and mysticism; and gifted creative writings by DuBrul, McNamara, and a number of other “bipolar” people. The theme animating The Icarus Project is expressed in the project’s mission statement, posted on their web-site: “We believe we have mad gifts to be cultivated and taken care of, rather than diseases or disorders to be suppressed or eliminated. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness and creativity can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world.”6
The booklet immediately sold the thousand copies that had been printed and went through five more editions. It was an inspired work, and it demonstrated that the so-called mentally ill were grappling with serious questions about the nature of our world. Included in this anthology were writings of some of the “best minds” of their generation, but unlike Allen Ginsberg’s peers who were destroyed by madness, these folks were determined to take care of their “mad gifts” and contribute to the world. The Icarus Project itself grew rapidly. DuBrul and McNamara could honestly say by 2006, “We bring the Icarus vision to reality through a national staff collective and a grassroots network of autonomous local groups.” Icarus groups met in New York, Minneapolis, Portland, Philadelphia, and spread every year.7
The mission statement of The Icarus Project was a bold and radical attack on the medical model of so-called mental illness. It stated, “While we respect whatever treatment decisions people make, we do not define ourselves as essentially diseased, disordered, broken, faulty, and existing within the bounds of DSM-IV diagnosis. We are exploring unknown territory and don’t steer by the default maps outlined by docs and pharma companies. We’re making new maps.” This affirmation that the so-called mentally ill were not (really) ill and that the psychiatric paradigm was useless and misleading placed The Icarus Project on the radical wing of the mental patients’ rights movement. Furthermore, although all psychiatric users and survivors were welcome to join “whether you take psychiatric drugs or not and whether you describe yourself with diagnostic categories or not,” DuBrul and McNamara pledged “[t]o ensure we remain honest and untamed, we do not accept funding from pharmaceutical companies.” They even adopted a Laingian concept of madness, although neither (as I learned) had read Laing. “We recognize that we live in a crazy world, and insist that our sensitivities, visions, and inspirations are not necessarily symptoms of illness. Sometimes breakdown can be the entrance to breakthrough.”8
Thus a radical new organization was launched, an organization that would prove to be on the vanguard of the Mad Pride movement. No one could have predicted reading DuBrul’s propsychiatric article in 2002 that he would become the cofounder of this organization, but the Mad Pride movement in the United States has not emerged from the minds of its founders with its sense of identity fully formed. Rather it is in process—with one foot in the past and one foot in the future. No one embodies this contradiction more starkly than DuBrul, arguably for a brief time the most prescient and influential leader (before he reduced his activism in 2009 in order to simultaneously pursue other educational goals) of the new generation of Mad Pride activists—although The Icarus Project staff denies attribution of leadership to any individual and disdains “heroic individual narratives” (see the introduction to this book).
DuBrul’s own life journey has been rocky. His 2002 article was written after his third hospitalization in 2001. (His first hospitalization was when he was eighteen, and his second took place six years later.) Although DuBrul expressed ambivalence in the article about Psychiatry, there was nothing particularly critical of the mental health professions; he did not, for example, express the kind of highly critical stance taken by David Oaks immediately after his hospitalizations. Even today, despite the radical mission statement of The Icarus Project, DuBrul is not entirely critical of Psychiatry or of psychiatric drugs, as I discovered when we met in 2007 and when I interviewed him recently. However, it is characteristic of DuBrul’s temperament that despite the emotional turmoil in his life, he is self-confident enough to respond to criticism without becoming defensive or hostile. When he agreed to let me interview him he knew that although I was impressed by The Icarus Project I would be critical of him for taking too tolerant a view toward Psychiatry. Yet he agreed to be interviewed and displayed the kind of affable and generous attitude that is constitutive of responsible leadership.
The Crack Up and Birth of a Movement
When reading DuBrul’s 2002 article,9 “The Bipolar World,” I wondered to myself if there had been any life events that led to DuBrul’s first breakdown. He did not look backward—as others did (e.g., Grossberg)—and attempt to discover the events and relationships that may have been the cause of the stress that precipitated his breakdown. Later, reading his blog online, I discovered how difficult his adolescence was. He wrote, “My parents were always fighting. And my Dad was slowly and painfully dying in front of me; hooked up to machines in the hospital” (May 15, 2008, Sascha/Scatter blog).10 The article did not mention any of this; he accepts the psychiatric explanation that he has a biochemical disorder.
Nonetheless it is a dramatic account of his breakdowns and unwittingly reveals how he was inducted into the psychiatric system and why he still has mixed feelings about Psychiatry. At the very beginning DuBrul was convinced the drugs had saved him, and in the article he disparaged as extremists those who criticized the pharmaceutical industry. On the other hand, Psychiatry did not have all the answers.
The nightmare began when DuBrul was eighteen.
I was eighteen years old the first time they locked me up in a psych ward. The police found me walking on the subway tracks in New York City, and I was convinced the world was about to end and I was being broadcast live on primetime TV on all the channels. I hadn’t slept for months, and I thought there were microscopic transmitters under my skin that were making me itch and recording everything I was saying for some top-secret branch of the CIA. After I’d walked the tracks through three stations, the cops wrestled me to the ground, arrested me, and brought me to an underground jail cell and then to the emergency room of Bellevue psychiatric hospital, where they strapped me to a bed. Once they managed to track down my terrified mother, she signed some papers, a nurse shot me up with some hardcore antipsychotic drugs, and I woke up two weeks later in the “quiet room” of a public mental hospital upstate.
In the article it is clear that DuBrul accepted as scientific (initially and at the time he wrote the article) the psychiatric diagnosis eventually given to him: “bipolar disorder,” or “manic depression” as it was termed previously. If he had any objections to the rough and insensitive way he was treated in the hospital, he did not mention them. The article poignantly conveys the sense of despair he felt when he was given his diagnosis; at that point DuBrul had no awareness of the critics of Psychiatry, no basis on which to question its pronouncements. He realized he had been given a sentence of neverending torment, if not doom, and he accepted it as his fate. This is typical for most patients today, for whom the prognosis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
After I’d been in the psych ward for a while, the doctors diagnosed me with something called bipolar disorder (otherwise known as manic depression) and gave me a mood-stabilizing drug called Depakote. They told my mom to get used to the idea that I had a serious mental disorder I was going to be grappling with for the rest of my life and that I was going to require daily doses of medication to be able to function healthily in the outside world.
Furthermore he was evidently informed later (I’m sure that the doctors told his mother at the time) or read later that there was a high risk that he might kill himself.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I, like millions of other Americans, would spend years wrestling with the implications of that diagnosis. Manic depression kills tens of thousands of people, mostly young people, every year. Statistically, one out of every five people diagnosed with the disease eventually commits suicide. But I wasn’t convinced, to say the least, that gulping down a handful of pills every day would make me sane.
This is a psychiatric lie. Bipolar disorder does not kill tens of thousands of people every year: Psychiatry does. There may be a correlation between bipolar disorder and suicide but it is a fundamental principle of scientific research that correlation does not entail causation. The higher suicide rate among “bipolars” is a result not of having a so-called bipolar disorder, but rather of the psychiatric treatment of the “disorder”: the sentence of doom, the feelings of unworthiness engendered by the diagnosis, the brain-disabling iatrogenic “side effects” of the psychiatric drugs. (Furthermore, teenagers who are suicidal are more likely to attract attention and thus be labeled “bipolar.”) In fact, studies show that antidepressants (SSRIs)—usually given to all hospitalized patients—increase the risk of “suicidality.”11
I had been friends with two different women who were given this diagnosis who did kill themselves in the early 1990s. Both of these women, in their late thirties or early forties, were devastated by their diagnosis. Their sense of worth was profoundly undermined by the label. They became convinced they were defective. One of the women, the sister of a famous American actor, had called me from California. She felt better every time I told her she was merely going through a crisis. She was devastated when her Chinese husband left her shortly after she was given the label. She was upset because her brother, whom she adored, would not talk to her once she was labeled psychotic, or so she said.
I advised her to try to get off the drugs (gradually) but she was emotionally dependent upon her psychiatrist who told her she needed the drugs. She begged me to move from New York to California to counsel her. Several months passed and I had not heard from her. One day a mutual friend told me she had killed herself. Once she was labeled she felt like “damaged goods.” And her loved ones seemed to agree—they shunned her.
In Robert Whitaker’s 2010 book, he shows that “bipolars” are put on and “maintained” on a “cocktail” of psychiatric drugs, prescribed by psychiatrists, which over time have a deleterious effect on them, preventing them from recovering their “pre-morbid” level of functioning. In the predrug era, the overwhelming majority of “bipolars” (then called “manic-depressives”) had recovered entirely within two years after their first episode. Today the majority tend to have a chronic condition. The drugs prevent them from recovering!12
From my perspective there is no “bipolar disorder” [see chapter 2], although I believe there is evidence that those labeled “bipolars” tend to be more sensitive than most people, have a more expansive awareness, and are thus more emotionally vulnerable. Like all diagnoses, the diagnosis of “bipolar disorder” often masks ongoing life issues that are never acknowledged or resolved once they are attributed to the alleged brain disorder.
Those labeled “bipolar” may be more psychic. Some of the experiences DuBrul had seem prescient.
DuBrul described his experiences in the months before his hospitalization.
I started to think the radio was talking to me, and I started reading all these really deep meanings in the billboards downtown and on the highways that no one else was seeing. I was convinced there were subliminal messages everywhere trying to tell a small amount of people that the world was about to go through drastic changes and we needed to be ready for it. People would talk to me and I was obsessed with the idea that there was this whole other language underneath what we thought we were saying that everyone was using without even realizing it.
In this article DuBrul repeats the psychiatric propaganda as if there is no doubt about its veracity. The psychiatrists convinced him that he had a genetic disease and that his instability was a result of a biological abnormality. DuBrul himself astutely observes that his sympathy to the psychiatric establishment seemed to conflict with his background and philosophical outlook.
I was raised by parents with pretty radical leftist politics who taught me to question everything and always be skeptical of big business and capitalism. I spent my teenage years growing up in a punk scene that glorified craziness and disrespect for authority. . . . My worldview didn’t leave any room for the possibility that my instability and volatility might actually have something to do with biology.
But this is not as unusual as DuBrul thought. As Kate Millett had learned, even radical leftists and feminists tend to lean toward credulity when it comes to Psychiatry. DuBrul ended up back in the psychiatric system six years later. He does not describe what environmental factors might have led to this development since at the time he wrote the article he had become convinced he had a biological disorder.
When I was 24, I ended up back in the same program, out in the New York suburbs, that my mom had put me in as a teenager. I was miserable and lonely. The doctors weren’t quite sure what I had, so they diagnosed me with something called schizoaffective disorder. They gave me an antidepressant called Celexa and an atypical antipsychotic called Zyprexa. I was in group therapy every day. There was an organic farm to work on down the road from the halfway house, and after a couple weeks they let me volunteer there a few hours a day sowing seeds and potting plants in the greenhouse. Eventually I convinced them to let me live there, and I moved out of the halfway house and came for outpatient care just a couple of times a week.
Soon after this DuBrul realized that despite his previous doubts, the drugs were “working.” It is at this point that DuBrul first became an ambivalent convert to the biological model of Psychiatry.
It took a few months, but for the first time I could see that the drugs were actually working for me. It was more than the circumstances, it actually felt chemical. Slowly all the horrible noise and thoughts faded and I started to feel good again. I remember watching an early summer sunset over the fields at the farm and realizing I was happy for the first time in months and months. Once I moved onto the farm full-time, I would come into the city on the weekends to work at the farmers’ market and hang out with my friends. As obvious as it was that the drugs were helping me, I really just saw them as a temporary solution. They made me gain a bunch of weight. I always had a hard time waking up in the morning. My mouth was always dry. They were relatively new drugs, and not even the doctors knew about the long-term side effects of taking them. Besides which, the whole idea just made me feel really uncomfortable. How would I talk to my friends about it? What if there were some global economic crisis and instead of running around with my crew torching banks and tearing up the concrete I was withdrawing from some drug I suddenly didn’t have access to anymore? I didn’t want to be dependent on the drugs of the Man.
But were the drugs really responsible for DuBrul’s sudden happiness? It is impossible to be sure, but I do not believe it. DuBrul’s certainty is belied by story he tells—by the radically positive changes in his environment and by what we know about the placebo effect. DuBrul felt better, but it is more likely that his happiness was a result of his change of environment—of getting out of the city and suburbs and working on a farm, of sowing seeds and potting plants and watching sunsets. And, most importantly, of being part of a community. It is significant that at first DuBrul was “miserable and lonely” in the halfway house, but he was able to get out of sick role—to move out of the halfway house and live on an organic farm, no doubt with a group of people (“hippies” they might have been called in another era, or self-reliant Americans in the age of Emerson) whose philosophical affinities were similar to his.
Added to this is the powerful impact of the placebo effect itself. Let me emphasize that it is clear that both placebo effects and environmental changes can induce actual chemical changes as powerful as that of any drug. DuBrul’s conclusion that his happiness “was more than circumstances, it actually felt chemical” was undoubtedly true. But that does not mean his emotional change was caused by the psychiatric drugs. What is significant and unfortunate is that DuBrul became convinced that the psychiatric drugs had saved him. In addition to the placebo effect induced by the drug itself, one must take into account the expression of concern by the treating psychiatrist (usually included in the placebo effect). One would expect that a young man who had tragically lost his father at such a young age would be responsive to the psychiatrist’s paternal (or maternal) concern and to the magic pills the psychiatrist told him would help him.
In this article DuBrul overlooks all these environmental factors, these privileges he had that are not available—although they should be—to the typical patient less resourceful than he was, and he attributed his improvements solely to psychiatric drugs. It is revealing that the witless psychiatrists did not even give him the diagnosis that he had been given on the previous occasion—“bipolar disorder”—but instead labeled him “schizoaffective” and put him on an antidepressant and an “antipsychotic.” Later he would decide he was bipolar and attribute his recovery to lithium.
Would DuBrul have felt the same uplifting feelings had he been taking the drugs but in a less idyllic place—had he stayed in the city in an apartment with his mother? Would he have experienced the same recovery had he been stuck in the halfway house like the other patients? In my experience as a psychologist, halfway houses and day treatment have a discouraging and demeaning effect on persons; they convert persons in crisis into chronic patients with “low self-esteem.”13 It is depressing just to visit these grim places.
DuBrul himself tells us that he was “miserable and lonely” at the halfway house he was placed in. DuBrul tells us that he “convinced” the people with the organic farm to let him live there, rather than the halfway house. One can infer that DuBrul felt an aversion to the halfway house, and he obviously did not find his daily group therapy very helpful as, once he moved into the organic farm, he went for outpatient care “ just a couple times a week” (my emphasis), instead of daily. The fact is, DuBrul designed his own “milieu therapy” and improved in spite of the “therapeutic treatment” of the doctors, which he resourcefully got out of.
The “illness” recurred again in 2001. And this time he was diagnosed as being bipolar, as he had been the first time.
The police picked me up wandering the streets of Los Angeles on New Year’s Day 2001. I’d been smashing church windows with my bare fists and running through traffic scaring the hell out of people screaming the lyrics to punk songs, convinced that the world had ended and I was the center of the universe. They locked me up in the psych unit of the L.A. County Jail, and that’s where I spent the next month, talking to the flickering fluorescent lightbulbs and waiting for my friends to come break me out. I was quickly given the diagnosis of bipolar disorder again and loaded down with meds.
DuBrul spent a month in jail before he was sent to the psychiatric ward and given the diagnosis of bipolar. One imagines that even the grimmest psych ward would look pretty good compared to being crazy in a prison cell in L.A. This incident may be one source of the positive feelings DuBrul still had for psychiatrists. For reasons DuBrul leaves to our imagination he did not call home. One phone call to his mother would no doubt have gotten him transferred expeditiously to a hospital. After the hospital he spent another four months in a halfway house for the “severely mentally ill.” Finally he moved back into his “old collective House” in Oakland.
At home he continued to take lithium and Wellbutrin (an antidepressant). Nowadays he would have been prescribed and told to take at least five drugs—a drug “cocktail” (see chapter 1). And then he started doing research.
And that’s when I finally started doing the research I’d been putting off for so long. After a year of not being able to read, I started to pick up some books I’d collected about manic depression. And that’s when I really began the internal and external dialogue about my condition, when I began to put the puzzle together and to make sense of it all so it wasn’t just a bunch of isolated pieces that didn’t fit together. I started talking to friends really openly and using the column I had in a punk rock magazine as a forum to talk about madness and manic depression. And I started coming to terms with the paradox that, however much contempt I feel toward the pharmaceutical industry for making a profit from manic-depressive people’s misery and however much I aspire to be living outside the system, the drugs help keep me alive, and in the end I’m so thankful for them.
But judging from DuBrul’s reading list, his research was incomplete. He may not have realized it, but he only read those authors who accepted the standard psychiatric model of emotional problems—of bipolar disorder as a disease caused by faulty chemistry. Missing from his list were the three most prominent psychiatric critics of Psychiatry in the twentieth century: Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, and Peter Breggin. Dr. Breggin has done more than any person to debunk the myths behind biopsychiatry and to expose the harmfulness of psychiatric drugs.
Probably at this time DuBrul had not heard of any of these critics; we can assume their books were certainly not recommended by the psychiatrists who were treating him. But for some reason he did not seem to be aware of their writing when I spoke to him later—after he had become critical of psychiatry and after he had learned who they were. He read Kay Jamison, a psychologist and fervent apostle of the biopsychiatric model who was herself “bipolar”; her book (The Unquiet Mind) was recommended by his doctors and was, as DuBrul notes “the standard reading of the time, the book all the doctors recommended.” He never read Kate Millett, who tells the story of how she escaped after thirteen years of spiritual captivity to lithium and Psychiatry. Millett has described how (this was after she had become a celebrated author) her sense of self was diminished—rendered inarticulate—not by her alleged “chronic manic-depression,” but by the chronicity of her degradation by psychiatrists, of being continually told her mind was defective. She felt taking the lithium was a ritual reenactment of her own inadequacy and the legitimacy of the psychiatric narrative. And she describes at the end of the book how she heroically broke free and got off lithium.14 Thus the results of DuBrul’s research were to bolster the myth that he had a bipolar disorder that could be controlled by psychiatric drugs. But he also derived from the writings of Kay Jamison a different idea that began to germinate in his mind—the idea that there was a link between creativity and “manic-depressive illness.”
Nowhere in the 2002 article does DuBrul discuss the destructive side effects of psychiatric drugs, particularly of the nephrotoxic drug he was taking—lithium. He became more aware of these by the time he wrote his blog (see The Revolt against the Monoculture in this chapter). These are discussed in detail in the works of Breggin. I have found many people who take lithium do not realize that the reason their blood level is tested regularly is because if their level is too high it could cause severe harm.
The effects of lithium were discovered in 1949 when John Cade injected two guinea pigs in his lab in Australia. He noted that after two hours the animals became “lethargic and non-responsive to stimuli.” It was not long before lithium was being given to human beings, not because it corrects an imbalance but because it has a general subduing effect on patients. The tremor typically caused by lithium (see the section titled The Revolt against the Monoculture in this chapter) is a result of its toxic effect on the brain and nervous system. DuBrul confesses that although he does not trust capitalism, he has in fact learned that psychiatric drugs have helped him. On the other hand, he says in the next paragraph, clinical language does not fit his own experience. He’s looking for others who have had similar experiences and presumably share his ambivalence. A few weeks later he was contacted by McNamara.
In the end, what it comes down to for me is that I desperately feel the need to connect with other folks like myself so I can validate my experiences and not feel so damn alone in the world, so I can pass along the lessons I’ve learned to help make it easier for other people struggling like myself. By my nature and the way I was raised, I don’t trust mainstream medicine or corporate culture, but the fact that I’m sitting here writing this essay right now is proof that their drugs are helping me. And I’m looking for others out there with similar experiences.
But I feel so alienated sometimes. . . . Words like “disorder,” “disease,” and “dysfunction” just seem so very hollow and so crude.
DuBrul ends the article with the affirmation that he is a moderate who is neither “for” nor “against” the mental health system—and yet he still feels there is something artificial about psychiatric language.
Our society still seems to be in the early stages of the dialogue where you’re either “for” or “against” the mental health system. Like either you swallow the antidepressant ads on television as modern-day gospel and start giving your dog Prozac, or you’re convinced we’re living in Brave New World and all the psych drugs are just part of a big conspiracy to keep us from being self-reliant and realizing our true potential. I think it’s really about time we start carving some more of the middle ground with stories from outside the mainstream and creating a new language for ourselves that reflects all the complexity and brilliance that we hold inside.
DuBrul is far more critical of the pharmaceutical companies today, even after his “retreat” from his radical views in 2007 (see chapter 9). He realizes that the pharmaceutical companies do conspire with psychiatrists to increase their sales and to discourage patients’ self-reliance. On April 18, 2010, he posted an article that he had written on the Icarus website. The article was titled “Unraveling the Biopsychiatric Knot: the Future History of the Radical Mental Health Movement.” The article discuses the hegemony of the pharmaceutical companies, within the economic context of neoliberal capitalism. For example, he wrote:
The pharmaceutical industry sponsors much of the clinical research on depression. Industry-academic collaborations are becoming an increasing source of funding for universities, academic medical centers, and hospitals. Never before has this “biopsychiatric” culture, which defines our health and happiness in terms of brain chemistry, been so heavily promoted through the mass media, become embedded in central institutions, and embraced by policy makers.
In 2002 he would have disparaged this kind of analysis as “extremist” and as simplistic.
McNamara was one of forty or so people who read the San Francisco Bay Guardian article and wrote to DuBrul. She felt his experiences were similar to hers. She shared his confusion and his desire to reach out to people and to create something new. Their meeting was to result in one of the most productive collaborations in the history of the patients’ liberation movement: the two of them gave birth to The Icarus Project. Two years after their meeting they had both edited, wrote, and produced on their own The Icarus Project’s first book, described above—Navigating the Space between Brilliance and Madness. They took off in a truck together, with a thousand copies of the booklet to distribute to colleges and clinics, with the determination to build a new Mad Pride movement and to preach their message to the world: madness is not all breakdown, it can also be breakthrough. Mad people are not mentally ill or psychiatrically disabled. On the contrary they are gifted; you are gifted. You have mad but dangerous gifts, like the wax wings of Icarus in the myth. You, the mad, have a responsibility to cultivate your gifts and to use them for the benefit of the world.
The transformation of DuBrul from a brilliant but confused young seeker who had placed his faith in Psychiatry into a leader who placed his faith in the mad was extraordinary. It was as if DuBrul was channeling something bigger than himself, a new myth, a new zeitgeist seeking to be born. And so the young man who had been indoctrinated by Psychiatry, who expressed how very “grateful” he was to lithium and Zyprexa and Eli Lilly for saving his life became—perhaps to his own surprise—a founder and leader of the first Mad Pride organization in the country. His journey, as we will see, led him not only over the mountains, but also into deep valleys.
The Revolt against the Monoculture
In 2007 I had first discovered The Icarus Project and was fascinated by what I read on the website—scintillating, highly intelligent, and often brilliantly perceptive online conversations between many psychiatric survivors regarding madness and spirituality, corporate capitalism, and the soullessness of modern society, to name just a few topics. I had been particularly impressed by some of the online articles written by the cofounder of The Icarus Project, McNamara. I wrote DuBrul that I was planning to write a book on the Mad Pride movement and would like to meet him sometime since he was located in New York. Since he had not read my first book, I wanted to give him a copy.
We met a few weeks later at a local coffee shop. I was impressed by his maturity (he was twenty-nine) and his personable manner. He was thin, pleasant looking, casually attired, with an appealing air of self-confidence and enthusiasm. (I should add that he did not conform to the stereotype of the ex-mental patient—displaying a bizarre manner created by high dosages of psychiatric drugs—but in appearance and manner seemed like other social activists I knew in the various antiwar movements over the years.) I told him I was impressed by The Icarus Project’s exploration of the connection between madness and spirituality, but I wondered why he did not more explicitly repudiate the mental illness construct.
He responded that he thought it was irrelevant. I was disappointed when I discovered that DuBrul had not read any of my favorite critics of “the myth of mental illness”: not Szasz, not Laing, not Peter Breggin. At this time I had not read his 2002 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, so I was taken aback when he told me that he was “grateful” to lithium since it had “saved his life.” “But why do you feel a need to take lithium now?” I asked. He responded, ‘‘What if I told you I take it to control my superpowers, which otherwise could overwhelm me?” I was baffled. I asked him if he was aware of the harmful “side effects” of lithium. He was. He said he had been on the radio with David Oaks, and he suspected my ideas were similar to Oaks’s; nonetheless, he had not read Oaks’s mentor, Dr. Breggin, whose writings had steeled Oaks’s resolve to stay off psychiatric drugs. He shrugged when I wondered how it is that one of the leaders in the Mad Pride movement, an intellectual who reads many books, avoids reading the critics of mainstream Psychiatry!
I took out a copy of my book Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels, quickly inscribed it to him as a comrade in the movement, and then gave it to him. (I discovered later that he never read my book either—at least not a couple years after our meeting.) Before we parted he warmly invited me to not just visit the Icarus website but to introduce myself and post on it. I said I would.
I noticed DuBrul’s ideas became surprisingly far more radical in the course of the next year—from 2007 to 2008.15 I was surprised when I read some assertions on his blog indicating he was reassessing the whole mental health system. I think he was moving closer to a consistent critique of Psychiatry and developing an alternative way of interpreting madness. His original position, as I stated above, was inconsistent: on the one hand, The Icarus Project asserted that the disease model was misleading and did not do justice to the human soul and its quest for meaning, while on the other hand, he claimed he suffered from a biological defect, a biochemical imbalance that was corrected by the daily ingestion of lithium.
Thus on June 15, 2008, about a year after DuBrul had told me that he was grateful for lithium and ten months after he had written to me in a open letter on The Icarus Project website that if it were not for the lithium he was given he might be dead, he wrote on his blog:
So I don’t profess to really understand what’s going on, but I’ve come to believe that somehow I, like a bunch of the other people who have gravitated to The Icarus Project, have the ability to cross back and forth between different “realms” of reality that most people do not have access to and usually don’t even know exist. I am very aware that this makes me “crazy” in the eyes of the society we live in. Nonetheless, I believe that I crossed over to the other side of reality for the first time when I was eighteen and I didn’t know how to handle it and there was no one around to help me figure it out. I also believe really strongly that if I, and the other people around me, had had different language to talk about what I was going through back then—possibly a language of “spirits” and “possession”—that I never would have gotten locked up in the psych hospital and stuck on all those drugs in the first place.
I was stunned. DuBrul had not read Laing, he had not even read the book I gave him, but he was now expressing ideas similar to Laing’s. According to Laing the “psychotic” was thrust into a different realm, the “inner world,” a realm equally as “real” as that of the normal world. The suffering and confusion of the “psychotic” arose not because he was in a different realm but because (as DuBrul put it) he “didn’t know how to handle it” and because (as Laing put it) there were no guides. DuBrul said that “there was no one around to help [him] figure it out.” Furthermore, DuBrul goes on to state that had there been a different model available to render intelligible what he was going through, he would not have needed to be hospitalized or placed on psychiatric drugs.
The spiritual nature of what DuBrul had gone through was of course not recognized by the psychiatric establishment. As they saw it his strange experiences were symptoms of illnesses, and DuBrul had believed them, partially. He equivocated, but in this blog in 2008 he says that the psychiatrists have missed the most important part of what occurred to him. When DuBrul had his first breakdown he had an intuition of this spiritual realm. “With enough psych drugs they reintegrated me into society and convinced me that I was just bipolar” (my emphasis added). When it happened again “the drugs and time in the hospital allowed me to reintegrate.” By “reintegrate” DuBrul means to readjust—that was the purpose of the hospitalization and the drugs. However, DuBrul’s goal was creative maladjustment, and now he was even critical of lithium. As a result of eight years on lithium, “I still shake like an old man at thirty-three. I hope the shaking stops when I kick the lithium. It’s such a deal with the devil.”
DuBrul had finally rejected the biopsychiatric model he had embraced in 2002 and finally rejected the diagnosis he had clung to for so long. How did this happen? Because of the support he received from the mad community. He explained (May 15, 2008):
To really delve into this “spiritual” stuff, especially after being raised the way I was [as an atheist] and diagnosed by the Western medical system as having “Bipolar I with Psychotic Features—a serious and persistent mental illness,” has taken some real faith in myself, not in small part because of the success of this incredible mad community of ours. The recent collective victories of The Icarus Project have given me a whole lot more faith in the power of big dreams and the power of the “mad ones” to shape the material realm and the public dialog around us. All of you people who have come together to tell your stories like I’m telling mine right now, and the formal and informal support networks that are clearly growing because of our group work—all of what we are doing together is giving us the ability to truly rewrite our Collective History. And more people are starting to listen to us because what we’re saying is not only interesting, but seems to be helping lots of struggling folks who aren’t being helped by the mainstream medical system. There is an incredible amount of visionary power in this mad little community of ours.
The community of mad people had given him the courage he lacked in 2002. DuBrul was no longer sitting on the fence. He rejected the idea that he had a psychiatric disability, and he was decreasing the drugs he was taking. He would not have been on the drugs in the first place had there been people around who could place what he was going through in a different nonpsychiatric model—as he put it if they had had a “different language to talk about what I was going through” (my emphasis). He clearly believed that once he learned to “swim” in the inner world, the spiritual world, he would not need the drugs at all. DuBrul had adumbrated a new Mad Pride theory with all the seven aspects I delineated in the introduction. He studied shamanism and learned to meditate. He wrote (May 15, 2008), “[I]n the last couple years, in different ways, I’ve been studying Shamanism and Mysticism, catching up on all the interesting stuff I always wrote off as being New Age . . . hippy crap: learning how to meditate and control my dreams, listening to the voices in my head and getting them to talk to each other rather than taking drugs to try and make them go away. I still take psych drugs though at lesser doses . . .” (my emphasis).
The affirmation of the reality of a different spiritual realm is integral to shamanism—to which DuBrul frequently referred. Many groups in the Western esoteric tradition (e.g., the Theosophists) have also attested to the existence of an “astral realm” that human beings can enter through various meditative exercises—or spontaneously after death. The body in the astral plane is similar in form to the physical body, but it has different properties and abilities.16
Unlike David Oaks, DuBrul believed that mad people were more inclined than “normal” people to experience these nonordinary states. This explains The Icarus Project’s frequent use of the term dangerous gifts. Mad people had a responsibility to “cultivate” and “take care” of these gifts. The mad had a distinctive sensibility that made them more sensitive, made it harder for them to adjust to normal society, to the insanity of “the monoculture.”
Allen Ginsberg argued in the 1950s that the mad were revolting against the violence and materialism of normal society—symbolized for him by “Moloch.” Ken Kesey believed the mad were rebelling against the repressive authoritarian conformist order of normal society, which he called “the Combine.” Millett had seen through and denounced the coercive rationality of those who sought—in the name of sanity—to constrain the unfettered imagination and to drug the mad into oblivion. DuBrul also now believed that the mad were rebelling instinctively against the homogeneity of normal society; it responds to this revolt by labeling them ill and seeking to silence them.
DuBrul drew an analogy between monoculture in agriculture and mass culture in modern society. On March 31, 2008, he wrote in his blog:
You can see it all from the highway: enormous monocrops of identical corn plants that reach for miles bordered by an endless sea of strip malls, parking lots, and tract housing. You can see it on our kitchen counters and in our classrooms: the same can of soda on the table in Cairo and Kentucky, the same definitions of “progress” and “freedom” in textbooks around the world. Monoculture: the practice of replicating a single plant, product or idea over a huge area, is about the most unstable, unsustainable, unimaginative form of organization that exists, but in the short term it keeps the system running smoothly and keeps the power in the hands of a small number of people. In the logic of our modern world, whether it’s in the farmer’s field or in the high school classroom, diversity is inefficient and hard to manage.
In the book without a date written by The Icarus Project, Friends Make the Best Medicine, it is stated that mad people have a hard time tolerating the monoculture, the insanity of normal society—and they have visions of an alternative society that is actually more sane.
We believe that people do not belong in grids and boxes of rootless lonely monoculture. Humans are adaptable creatures, and while a lot of people learn to adapt, some of us can’t handle the modern world, no matter how many psych drugs or years of school or behavior modification programs we’ve been put through. . . . There are so many of us out here who feel the world with thin skin and heavy hearts, who get called crazy because we are too full of fire and pain, who know that other worlds exist, and who are not comfortable with this version of reality. . . . We’ve been busting up out of sidewalks and blooming all kinds of misfit flowers for as long as people have been walking on this earth. . . . You could think of us like dandelion roots that gather minerals from hidden layers of the soil that other plants don’t reach. If we’re lucky we share them with everyone on the surface. . . . A lot of us have visions about how things could be different, why they need to be different, and it’s painful to keep them silent. Sometimes we get called sick and sometimes we get called sacred, but no matter how you label us we are a vital part of making this planet whole. We need to recover our dreams and scheme up ways to make them happen.17
It was an expression of a messianic-redemptive yearning.
By May 2008 DuBrul was even more explicit about the potentiality of “the mad ones” to make a decisive contribution to a radical transformation of society. As he wrote (quoted above), “The recent collective victories of The Icarus Project have given me a whole lot more faith in the power of big dreams and the power of the ‘mad ones’ to shape the material realm and the public dialog around us.” The mad then had increased his faith in humanity’s ability to attain high ideals. “I think it’s important for us to understand that on some level people like us really are dangerous to the system because we don’t believe in its future and we actually listen to the voices in our heads. And that’s ‘mad.’ In the eyes of the State we’re the equivalent of Islamic Fundamentalists. . . . Maybe just call it The Spirit of the Times.” The mad are not committed to the status quo but believe in the possibility of realizing their visions: “I have faith in the power of the mad ones because they’re the only ones that are crazy enough to think they can change the world and have the outlandish visions and drive to be able to do it” (March 31, 2008). DuBrul made the point that we have to imagine a new possibility before we can realize it. “[A] strategic relationship to the mass is essential for large scale social change. What would mass change look like if it was positive? Can we even imagine it? We have to be able to imagine it if we want it to happen” (March 19, 2008).
DuBrul argues that there is strategic value in using the term mad as a way of eradicating stigma and building a movement that encompasses different social classes and ethnicities. He writes on April 6, 2008 (emphasis mine):
If we’re really going to be breaking down stigma we need a term that is going to bring together everyone from the middle-age homeless schizophrenic black man that has chronic tardive dyskinesia from too much thorazine to the rich white girl who’s cutting herself because she can’t feel anything in her sheltered suburban life. And everyone in between. There are a lot of us out here. And clearly we need to be reframing the conversation to talk about community mental health—not individual mental illness. Somewhere in this vision are beautiful mad maps of many shapes and colors and styles, the excuses for us to talk in groups about the hard stuff, about how we can support one another individually and collectively amidst it all. Somewhere in there is an understanding that some people are really sensitive and good at crossing boundaries and we need spaces to cultivate those skills. Somewhere in there are collectively developed skills and spaces that feel safe to talk about power and privilege and shame and can build the bridges and networks that will hold together a growing movement. Maybe “mad” isn’t a term that everyone is going to relate to. But I think it’s worth adding to the mix.
Mad Pride is creating space for those who have been silenced for centuries; they can finally speak and hopefully be heard. As DuBrul writes on May 15, 2008, “[I]t really does all feel like a riddle to me, and as weird as it sounds I think part of the answer to the riddle has to do with the Mad Ones, the sensitive ones, the ones that feel injustice and power struggles like knives under their skin, the ones who aren’t only struggling for decent living conditions but are viscerally fucking haunted by the ghosts of slavery and genocide and the mass rape of women and the Earth. It seems like it’s our responsibility to carve some space for those voices, not just drug them into silence.”