The Messianic or Postmodern Paradigm?
As we have seen, Mad Pride began in America with the foundation of The Icarus Project in 2002 by DuBrul and McNamara. The Icarus Project (TIP) was created “for people living with dangerous gifts that are commonly diagnosed and labeled as ‘mental illnesses.’” The bold mission statement of The Icarus Project declared, “We are a network of people living with and/or affected by experiences that are often diagnosed and labeled as psychiatric conditions. We believe these experiences are mad gifts needing cultivation and care, rather than diseases or disorders. By joining together as individuals and as a community, the intertwined threads of madness, creativity, and collaboration can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world. Participation in The Icarus Project helps us overcome alienation and tap into the true potential that lies between brilliance and madness.”1
This statement is subversive of received wisdom in several ways. It emphasizes the idea of the distinctiveness of mad people, which, it is stated, enables them to make an unusual and indispensable contribution to the healing of the world. This is an extraordinary claim and one that had never been made by the patients’ rights movement in the past. In the past, as we have seen, the patient’s movement emphasized the commonality that the former “mental patients” shared with other (normal) citizens. Only R. D. Laing had praised the mad for being different, and Laing had been ignored by the patients’ movement. After the Icarus statement proclaimed madness as a gift, other members of The Icarus Project who posted on its website made similar statements. Ashley McNamara highlighted this theme in several powerful essays. Note the mission statement also defines madness as a “gift”—a gift to the mad person and to the human community. Mad gifts entail responsibility: to care for and cultivate these gifts. Although the sentence with the word transformation is vaguely formulated, the implication is that mad persons as a community, as Mad Pride, can contribute to the profound transformation—ultimately, the salvation—of the world. It is based on the radical idea that the mad were not just equal but in some respects superior to normal people and thus could contribute to the redemption of the world. This is what I have termed a messianic-redemptive vision.
The Postmodern Vision
The secular pluralist zeitgeist seems to be dominant today within the Mad Pride movement, although The Icarus Project forum still teems with discussions about spirituality. In early 2008 DuBrul was experimenting with explorations in “the spirit world”—one can find a similar distinction between two worlds both in shamanism and in the literature on out-of-body experiences2—and he believed that as a mad person he had a natural penchant for exploring the spirit world. As discussed in chapters 9 and 10, in 2008 DuBrul went to a Hindu ashram in upstate New York to study, meditate, and worship and to develop a greater capacity for mental and spiritual discipline. After this DuBrul shifted from a future-oriented utopian model (what I call messianic) to a more moderate conception of social change, a conception consistent with the more distant and ironic stance encouraged by postmodernism. This is a perspective that I think sacrificed what was most interesting about the original perspective of The Icarus Project.
DuBrul’s theoretical perspective has radically changed several times since he became an activist in the Mad Pride movement. In his 2002 article DuBrul had defined his belief that psychiatric drugs were indispensable (for some people) as the sensible “middle ground.” As he states, “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.”3 To my mind, this last phrase—“creating a new language”—suggests that DuBrul had something else in mind besides a middle ground, if the middle ground means taking a politically moderate stance toward Psychiatry. Thus, it is not surprising to me in hindsight that by the time he coauthored the Icarus mission statement he was far away from the middle ground (although he continued to feel he needed psychiatric drugs) and was moving increasingly toward a commitment to a messianic-redemptive vision. As discussed, this trajectory came to a halt after his hospitalization in 2008.
The postmodern pluralist perspective (as defined by Tarnas in the introduction, under the subhead Mad Pride in Transition) is antithetical to the “totalizing” perspective of the redemptive vision. Mad Pride activists are increasingly attracted to postmodernism for a number of reasons. In the first place it accepts difference per se and promotes acceptance of madness in its myriad forms. Second, it is in accord with the ironically detached and skeptical temper of the times, unlike an explicitly spiritual messianic-redemptive vision, which sounds passionate, “fanatical,” intolerant—too mad, a product of the feverish 1960s. As Mad Pride grows and becomes more socially visible, the temptation increases to accommodate to larger cultural forces and to sound “reasonable.” Third, a relativistic even-tempered pluralism is friendly and inclusive of everyone; it avoids the risk of alienating those mad people who have not yet broken free of the influence of Psychiatry. Repeatedly, I was told by the more radical psychiatric survivors that different paradigms worked for different people—even the psychiatric paradigm.
It is not my intention here to attempt to address complex epistemological questions: I do not deny that postmodernists have incisively critiqued naively doctrinaire modernist and scientific approaches. In this case, I object specifically to postmodernism’s stubborn tendency to disparage synthesizing visions while promoting relativism or nihilism. Postmodernism discourages the kind of unconscious archetypes—visions of wholeness—that have a catalyzing effect. But it is precisely these kinds of messianic archetypes and narratives that have driven the movements beyond the narrow parameters of the status quo, as demonstrated in great revitalization movements, or Great Awakenings (see chapters 15 and 17). It is precisely the kind of unconscious archetypes that postmodernism discourages—visions of wholeness—that have a catalyzing effect. Paul Levy’s quote from Jung clarifies the process of revolutionary change: “The new ideas spread rapidly because parallel changes have been taking place in the unconscious of other people. . . . If the translation of the unconscious into a communicable language proves successful, it has a redeeming [redemptive] effect” (see discussion in chapter 13).
Any great revolution inevitably evokes archetypes of new birth. Even the political moderate Abraham Lincoln evoked in the Gettysburg Address the natal archetype of a new birth of freedom that had been a motif for decades in the literature of the abolitionists. When Mad Pride first burst out it unleashed utopian or messianic aspirations. The danger is that postmodernism will suppress these archetypes in the name of its radical skepticism.
In its most extreme manifestation postmodernism engenders ethical relativism. I have even been told on a few occasions by different Mad Pride activists that it is cruel and dogmatic of me to tell people for whom psychiatry “works” that they are not “mentally ill.” Their argument often goes like this: “For some people the psychiatric model works. Some of us need psychiatric drugs. Some of us bipolars cannot function without taking the drugs prescribed by the psychiatrists. The biochemical model has its place. For others, your mystical model may be more appropriate.” One does not have to repudiate the doctrine of “mental illness,” as I do, to see on an objective level that the medical model has been extraordinarily destructive, even to those who embrace it. The formerly mainstream psychologist Gail Hornstein wrote in 2009, “It is now absolutely clear that diagnosing people with ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘bipolar illness,’ giving them high doses of medications over long periods, and not talking to them about their experiences produces a chronically disabled population.”4 The psychiatric model produces the data that seems to validate it—a chronically disabled population, as Paul Levy has pointed out repeatedly. The psychiatric model has no value—even for those who claim it works for them. The only honest—indeed the only compassionate—way to talk to patients who think they are “mentally ill” is to tell them that they have been misinformed and deceived: they are not mentally ill, they do not have a chemical imbalance (see chapter 2), but they had undergone a crisis, they have dealt with a difficult problem in living, and they do possess the inner resources to overcome their personal problems and to contribute to saving the planet—and they do not need toxic psychiatric drugs. The psychiatric model deserves moral and epistemological condemnation, not “tolerance,” much like previous institutions that were considered right at one time but that are now almost universally condemned (slavery, for example).
If one believes that the mad do not have to remain chronically disabled patients, then one has to tell them that the psychiatric model does not work—for anyone. If one believes that persons grow and evolve, it is only logical to assume that there will be leaders who are more evolved in some ways and will assist the process of growth and learning in others so that they can become leaders themselves. This requires taking a definitive point of view. A wishy-washy movement might succeed in helping the mad cope with life, but it has no chance of inspiring them, let alone spurring them to bring “hope and transformation” to “an oppressive and damaged world.”
The reluctance of many of the leaders of Mad Pride to even admit they are in leadership positions is at least partially a reaction to the bullying they experienced as patients under the dominion of the mental health system. The “anything goes” position is appealing because it is antithetical to the kinds of spiritual and physical impositions to which patients are subjected in the mental health system. However, taking this position is an abdication of responsibility that is not conducive to the growth of a liberation movement. Whether certain leaders acknowledge that they are leaders or not, the fact is that there are still hundreds or thousands of persons deferring to their authority and looking to them for guidance.
Another shortcoming of the Mad Pride movement is the refusal of some of its leaders to read the work of theorists of previous generations. I get the impression from discussions with mad activists and readings that many Mad Pride leaders—who are mostly in their late twenties and thirties and who are mostly college-educated intellectuals—like to think of their movement as sui generis, as the product of bold innovation unfettered by any transgenerational intellectual bonds. This attitude severs the organic connection between the past and the present, and thus hinders Mad Pride activists from developing an alternative paradigm that draws on all the intellectual and spiritual resources of the past.