The Spiritual Gift of Madness

Thalbourne defines transliminality as “a largely involuntary susceptibility to, and awareness of, large volumes of inwardly generated psychological phenomena.” The latter can more easily cross (trans-) the threshold into conscious awareness. Michael Thalbourne finds that transliminal personalities have a high rate of psychic, mystical, and manic experiences.2 They tend to be more creative. (Thalbourne states he is himself “bipolar.”) One could conclude that transliminality predisposes one to have “psychotic” experiences. I would draw the reader’s attention to David Oaks’s disclosure (chapter 2) that he now has so-called psychotic experiences while remaining calm, thus illustrating that the line between “schizophrenic” and “mystical’ experiences is very fine. In fact, one cannot draw a line, as Dubrul suggests, between the traumatic and the spiritual-ecstatic, because they often go together.3

Thus the so-called psychotic disorders are frequently based on a transliminal personality that is constitutionally more sensitive and more aware. As we have seen, rather than an illness, a “breakdown” in a supportive environment—such as Diabasis or Soteria—could be a regenerative process. Thus madness can be personally adaptive. In part 4, I discuss the evidence for my contention that the schizophrenic or bipolar is frequently a prophet at an early stage of development—a process that is aborted by the psychiatric system.

I was surprised to discover Anthony Stevens had propounded the same thesis as I had from a different perspective. Stevens and Price write “[C]ertain life events could switch the individual carrying the genetic predisposition into a career either as a schizophrenic patient or a charismatic prophet.”4 A plethora of anecdotal and experimental evidence supports the thesis that as The Icarus Project collective had originally asserted, madness consists of “dangerous gifts” that can be of value to humanity.

Nevertheless, despite my agreement with DuBrul about many of these issues, I still sense that our perspectives are very different. DuBrul seems to have abandoned the ideas I found so exciting and inspiring in The Icarus Project’s mission statement: the ideas that the mad have dangerous gifts and that because of these gifts they can make a major contribution to saving the planet. Ironically, DuBrul’s views sound more like that of Mind Freedom (of which he originally was critical), with its focus on a revolution in the mental health field.

There is some inconsistency between DuBrul’s theory and practice, just as there is with David Oaks. Both strongly believe in the ideal of a new order, nonviolent, anticorporate, based on equality, freedom, and fraternity. Both are (as of October 2011) very enthusiastic about the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet both seem to think the mad movement should focus primarily or exclusively on “mental health” issues: on the issues of creating more humanistic kinds of healing and opposing coercive treatments.

I agree with the need for a “healing narrative” (as I’ve made clear throughout this book), but I think it is a weaker and less expansive narrative than the messianic or utopian metanarrative. I think it is and should be encompassed by the greater messianic or utopian metanarrative. This metanarrative is not based on a fairy tale, however. Humanity is literally on the verge of annihilating itself and all life on the Earth. Mad people have seen the nightmare, and they have seen the promised land in their visions. DuBrul writes that “social movements need good communicators and organizers more than charismatic leaders and messianic visions.” They need both, as I’ve tried to show. Right now more than anything we need many charismatic spokespersons whose actions and words are informed by a messianic vision of a collective spiritual life on Earth. (“Let the dead bury the dead and follow me,” Jesus said.)

DuBrul is right, of course, that we need new ways of healing the wounded self. However, this is not a sufficient basis on which to build a movement of the mad. However important, it is too niggardly a goal in the light of the overwhelming magnitude of the problems that threaten our existence as a species. The political and economic elites that run the world are committing ecocide, and if we will not be around to experience it, our children will. Scientists leave no doubt that if we do not reverse the trajectory, the ravages of global warming will create millions if not billions of tragedies this century. We are staring into the abyss of doom—a doom our fellow human beings, the corporate elites, have imposed on us all.

It remains a fact that the problem of the world impinges on the psyches of our most psychologically vulnerable population in the United States—the mad. One of the most therapeutic things they can do for themselves is to bring their gifts to the new commons of those who are fighting to save the world. We need their visions, their contribution to a narrative of redemption, their sense—as Serine put it—that God has called them to help save the world. We need prophets who will call humanity to remembrance, we need messiahs who will remind the normal ones that they too have dreamed of paradise, of the homecoming. Perhaps the mad can evoke chords long forgotten because they know how to talk naturally in our native tongue—in the language of dreams, of madness.

What is the future for The Icarus Project? It has chapters all over the country, but can it contribute not just to helping the mad but healing the planet? In 2007 The Icarus Project published Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off of Psychiatric Drugs.5 It is available free online at the TIP website, and it’s a valuable resource. Ashley McNamara—now known as “Jacks”—has not published anything on this topic since then. DuBrul and McNamara are both in the Bay Area now; DuBrul moved there in 2009. They have traveled together to promote the documentary about McNamara’s life and artwork, Crooked Beauty, an extraordinarily moving documentary. The film is about her artistry (she is a painter and sculptor as well as a writer) and her emotional pain. It undermines the stereotype of mad people as helpless and pitiful. Unfortunately, it evades the topic of psychiatric drugs, but that was the decision of the filmmaker.

In 2007 McNamara had some sort of conflict with some of the people in TIP. She has not written anything on the TIP website since then. But she is active in the Bay Area Radical Mental Health Collective. I don’t know if she, like DuBrul, has revised her views on Mad Pride. But both McNamara and DuBrul were the cocreators of the new Mad Pride narrative. She had big dreams for Mad Pride. McNamara attributed her proclivity to imagine grand possibilities to her own madness. In a brilliant essay “Drawing New Lines on the Map”—included in the first book The Icarus Project published—she wrote (the emphasis is mine), “We are people with a dangerous gift that sometimes grants us the vision to see new possibilities and to draw new lines on the map. Drawing new lines on the map requires free access to our imaginations. Drawing new lines requires the courage to resist authority—and ultimately the solidarity to do it well.”

After discussing the parallel between shamans and mad people, she concluded,

Is it possible that the very pieces of ourselves that get labeled pathological could also be like keys in the dark, their edges barely glowing, like silver question marks too easy to overlook? After all, would I [a so-called psychotic] be making the imaginative leaps necessary to write this piece you’re reading if my mind wasn’t prone to unifying visions, dendritic and unusual connections across vast swaths of thought, and the “ delusions of grandeur” that get labeled symptomatic of disease but also allow me to have a wide open vision that reconsiders the role madness can play in our culture and imagines big possibilities?6

This is what I call the messianic-redemptive vision. To have a wide-open vision and to imagine big possibilities—for each individual, for Mad Pride, and for the Earth.