The Spiritual Gift of Madness

Finding Oneself at the Age of Forty-five; Messianic Visions

One night in May 1994 I was stopped by the police as I wandered on the beach in my underwear and T-shirt, merging with the electrons in distant galaxies and looking for God. I was not sure whether Hitler, Elijah the prophet, or King Lear had gone mad. All I knew for certain was that I had surrendered my customary frames of reference and had chosen to trust a process over which I no longer had control.1

ED WHITNEY, M.D.

Ed Whitney is by degree a doctor of medicine; he is a former physician and works now as a medical researcher in Seattle. At the time of Dr. Whitney’s first breakdown he was forty-four and working as a doctor. He had recently been thinking a lot about his father, who had died in a tragic mountain climbing accident when Dr. Whitney was fifteen. His father had been a successful internist, and Dr. Whitney felt himself to be “never as good as he was at being a doctor.” The year Dr. Whitney had a breakdown he was the same age his father was when he was born. It was also the same age, Dr. Whitney remarked, as when Nietzsche—his favorite philosopher—went mad.

Dr. Whitney was raised in a liberal Christian family. He had an interest in spiritual questions, an interest that began when he was seven or eight, when he would lie awake at night wondering how anyone knew that God existed. Before his breakdown he had been a “normal,” well-adjusted person, with no history of “psychiatric problems.” He had moved to Santa Cruz from Colorado in 1990, ten years after he finished medical school. He was a financially successful doctor practicing in California, but as he said, “My heart wasn’t in my practice.” It was not the right livelihood for him. Furthermore, he had not married and “settled down,” nor had he had kids.

Around this time Dr. Whitney began having an intense series of dreams. He remembers one in which he was on some kind of expedition hunting lions, which he had thought of as “forbidden,” so he interpreted this dream as a message that he could go beyond his boundaries. Most of Ed’s friends in Santa Cruz were Jewish, and in his new movement to transcend his boundaries he had become very interested in Judaism and in Jewish mysticism.

In 1992 he went to a concert by the guitarist-singer and New Age Jewish icon Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. Carlebach said that if only we could be a “little better, a little kinder, a little more moral” then Elijah would return. (Elijah is the prophet whose return heralds the coming of the Messiah; every Passover a cup is filled with wine for Elijah.) In the Bible, Elijah has a confrontation with worshipers of Baal, a Canaanite deity. He challenges them to prove the power of their god. They keep summoning him, but nothing happens. As Dr. Whitney described it, “And Elijah pours a lot of water over his altar, calls out the name of the Lord, and whoosh!—out comes this fire and consumes the ox plus the altar, and all the people fall down on their faces and say, ‘God! The Lord! He is God!’ And that’s where the reading ends the service in the synagogue, but in the Bible it goes on to say that Elijah then slaughtered the prophets of Baal.” The slaughtering of the prophets of Baal seemed unrighteous to Dr. Whitney. It bothered him that Elijah, the herald of the Messiah who was to inaugurate the reign of peace on Earth, had committed this act of mass slaughter. In March and April of 1994, Dr. Whitney read numerous commentaries on this passage in the Bible. He began to talk constantly about the coming of the messianic age, which he felt was imminent.

In addition to studying Judaism, Dr. Whitney attended the Four Square Gospel Church, where they had “soul-lifting” gospel singing every Saturday night. He wandered around the beach a lot, marveling at every grain of sand. He also became obsessed with Rabbi Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitcher Hasidim, an orthodox group of Jews centered in Brooklyn. Schneerson was ninety-two and had had a stroke. His followers were expecting a miracle as they had come to believe Rabbi Schneerson was the Messiah, which was a heretical position for an Orthodox Jew.

Dr. Whitney saw a program about this on CNN at the time, and his mind was divided. He thought maybe Schneerson was the Messiah, but on the other hand, he entertained the notion that perhaps what will happen at the beginning of the messianic age is that everyone will be the Messiah. Dr. Whitney had a sense of humor about this. He talked about this to his roommates: “I said, what’s going to happen is, when the day comes, everyone’s going to think everyone else is the Messiah. I was going on, and it was kind of like a version of Life of Brian. One person would say, ‘I thought you were the Messiah.’ Then the other person would say, ‘No, I thought you were the Messiah.’ And it would kind of go around and everyone would think everyone else was the Messiah.”*35

Dr. Whitney knew he was becoming “weird.” His strange behavior worried his roommates and friends, who said, “Ed is getting kinda weird,” but this was Santa Cruz, where mystics and seekers and gurus and holistic healers abounded, so Dr. Whitney’s behavior was tolerated.

This was the background to his adventure that began that night in May when he went out onto the beach in his underwear looking for God. As Dr. Whitney writes:

I was intercepted by the police, and they shined this light in my eyes and asked me what I’m doing there at the beach. I tried to come up with a story that they might accept. I told them that I was a doctor who was deeply concerned about the Clinton health plan, that I lived four blocks away, and that I needed to go home. I was certain that they were angels sent by the Lord to prevent me from disrupting the flow of energy in the galaxies with which I was merging. Since God had sent them, then all was well; I could trust them.2

In 2009 I interviewed Dr. Ed Whitney over the telephone. He was at his home in Seattle.

Farber: This is what you were thinking then?”

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. I figured I was stirring up the electrons in the universe; they’re going to be there to make the process safe for the rest of the universe. You see, I heard their police radio say something that included the words seven four. Thus they were checking the seventy-fourth decimal place of their calculations; this was the precision they needed to be sure that all the electrons in the universe were still in place. They were connected to the mind of God—even if they did not know it.

Farber: You did not tell them this?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh no, I knew that would sound too weird. I just talked to them about the Clinton health plan. And they let me go home.

Farber: Okay, you wrote, “I felt a deep transformation of the meaning of everything that had ever happened in my life. I was receiving assurances from Heaven itself that I needed to feel ashamed no longer, that I was loved for all eternity.”3 You felt this that night?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes.

Farber: Then what?

Dr. Ed Whitney: The next day I went for a walk. There was a bed-and-breakfast about three miles away from the house, called the Apple Lane Inn. Ahh! I thought. Apple Lane! The apple—Adam and Eve—and Eden! This was where everything began. I walked in—in that state—to get a room for the night, but the manager said they were all booked up. So I walked away from the desk, went into a room, and picked up an apple from the bed.

Farber: From the bed?

Dr. Ed Whitney: They put apples on their beds! I’d just picked one up and chomped into it. This was the apple. I was Adam. This was the beginning all over again, except now God had given me permission to eat the apple. So this was a second chance—for all of us. Anyway, the proprietor was getting uptight. I told him I was leaving, but he became belligerent. I ended up bellowing at this guy, “I’m God Almighty!” I bellowed that with absolute full congruence, full commitment, with my whole being, and then I walked away, and I left my billfold behind; I wouldn’t need it anymore. That was from the old world that had passed away.

Farber: You were God? Did you see yourself as running the universe? Or was everyone God?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. I guess it was democratic. I thought everyone was God—although it was not clearly thought out in my mind.

Farber: Then what?

Dr. Ed Whitney: I was walking home, and I thought maybe I could fly through the air, and so I tried that a couple of times; I kept coming back down to the ground. Then I went to the ocean. I stood on the very limits of the water, and I stretched forth my hand, and I commanded the waves of the ocean to stop. The thing is, if they stopped I’d know that I was indeed the Omnipotent One.

Farber: Did they stop?

Dr. Ed Whitney: No, I was ankle deep in brine, not getting anyplace.

Farber: This is funny looking back, and you describe it with wry humor. But at the time it was serious stuff.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, absolutely. Anyway, so I thought, I’ve got to find out my facts. I went back to the house. My housemates and I had a cat named Bandit. Years ago I was very attracted to a woman named Robin, and I reasoned that a bandit is a robber and robbers engage in robbin’, therefore Bandit could be transformed into Robin for my carnal delight. I visualized the metamorphosis, lifted Bandit to my face, and rubbed noses with him. He blinked at me and meowed. “Fantastic!” Cats were cats, and women were women; reality had limits, and therefore my thoughts could not destroy the universe. Therefore, I was not God. I was relieved beyond measure.

Farber: It’s like the logic of a dream. So you were not so keen on being God.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Not in the sense of absolute control. It was reassuring to learn that there is a structure to the universe.

The next day Dr. Whitney had some friends who had come down to visit from Berkeley. The police, who had been alerted by the manager of Apple Lane Inn, stopped over to ask his roommates questions. His roommates acknowledged that Dr. Whitney had indeed been acting a “little odd” lately.

Dr. Ed Whitney: My friends were trying to see if they could talk to me and keep me out of the hospital, because once the police get involved, people get a little more worried—and especially since I had created a disturbance that afternoon at the bed-and-breakfast. Of course, I kept having an answer to practically everything—everything they said—meaning that I was thinking about all of it, but I couldn’t give a coherent account of where I’d been for the last twenty-four hours. I didn’t know that, but I knew what must be done to bring the Messiah.

Farber: Which was?

Dr. Ed Whitney: It was mostly babbling. I still felt Elijah had screwed up, and that’s why the Messiah had been delayed. . . . I was getting more and more emotional about things, crying a lot, my friends were watching the TV—there was an advertisement trying to get people to use condoms for prevention of AIDS, and in the middle of this commercial I just broke down sobbing, saying that fears were putting barriers in between people, which were signified by the condom, a kind of barrier.

Farber: Were you sobbing for the people with AIDS?

Dr. Ed Whitney: People who had AIDS, and I was sobbing for all of humanity. There was a spirit of fear put in there—like paradise lost. I had an awareness of the devastating effects of fear.

Farber: That was an astute insight for a mad man.

Dr. Ed Whitney: My friends were worried because I could not stop sobbing—although it was a release for me—and then they said, “Okay, we better take you to the hospital.” At the same time, they were trying to find a more spiritual counselor. It was funny. They called the Spiritual Emergency Network, and the woman there said, “We have a great doctor in Santa Cruz who can help you, Ed Whitney.” One of my housemates kept saying, “Ed’s getting awfully strange. He seems to be falling apart.”

So Ed went along cooperatively to the hospital. He figured that going to the hospital was also part of God’s plan.

Farber: You had no fears about the hospital, about being abused, electroshocked?

Dr. Ed Whitney: I was taken to Dominican—where I went every week for medical grand rounds—so it was a general hospital. They did not do ECT. I think the thing that convinced me to go along to the hospital was this friend of my housemate who was visiting; I knew that he had lost his adolescent son to cancer, about twenty years ago. So I felt this perfect symmetry, because I had lost my father when I was fifteen, and he said to go to the hospital. So I thought that was what the universe had prearranged.

I got to the emergency room, and I was admitted for a three-day hold. I thought “Wow! Of course! Jonah, three nights in the belly of the whale”—and I was on a three-day hold. And the place was Dominican Hospital so that was associated with Thomas Aquinas, and he’s the doctor of the church. And then, the other thing that happened was they said, “We’re going to have the doctor see you. His name is Dr. Luther.” So I thought, “This is where the Reformation is going to begin.” Then they gave me an antipsychotic, Risperdol. Within thirty minutes I began seeing beautiful luminescent rivers of light, glowing right in front of me. I assumed that was the intended therapeutic effect of the drug. It meant I had been too uptight all my life and too closed-minded about psychedelic experiences, and I needed to be more open to them—because I thought they had given me a psychedelic drug.

Farber: You have previous negative associations with psychiatric hospitals.

Dr. Ed Whitney: I did! Hell, when I was in college in 1970 I worked weekends at the state hospital, which was horrible. But now the world was transforming; you no longer needed to be fearful. If I wasn’t suspicious of them, then they weren’t going to harm me, and all would be well. The drug they gave me that caused the psychedelic experience was proof, and then they started me on lithium. I thought “Aha!” Lithium was the lightest of the metallic elements, number three in the periodic table. It was the ideal conduit by which cosmic energies could be grounded. The stars were mostly hydrogen and helium; lithium was the vehicle through which their messages could come to Earth. How wise the psychiatrists were! They really knew what I needed.

Farber: Yes, of course. The irony, as you noted later, is that they had no idea what you were going through; they are not capable of construing such experiences as anything other than mental illness. Thus from their perspective your euphoria was a symptom of your illness. You had a “manic episode,” the defining feature of which is “an abnormally and persistently elevated mood”*36—elevated meaning euphoric, good, cheerful, or high. Furthermore, part of the problem according to them, is that persons experiencing “mania” often “do not know that they are ‘ill’”—as the DSM puts it. That is, any attempt to interpret your experience as other than illness would be seen as a sign of illness! They had no idea what you needed, and the drug that triggered your vision of flowing light was intended to suppress your entire experience—even your happiness, your joy.

Farber: You wrote aptly in your essay:

[T]he mental health care system and I were at cross purposes; what I was experiencing as a wonderful healing process was construed by my doctors as a serious disease process. Neither of us had a clue about the other’s perspective. They knew nothing about my issues with my father, the spiritual and religious interests I had had since childhood, and my recent fascination with the Lubavitcher Hasidim, who were saying publicly that their elderly and ailing leader was the promised Messiah. If the Lubavitchers were right, then the healing of the whole world was at hand, and we would have no more war. Fear and hatred would rule no longer. God would no longer be a tool of oppression. With my entire being, I wanted this to be true. For their part, the doctors knew messianic obsession as a symptom of illness, a medical disorder of the brain.4

Farber: What did you mean by your statement, “God would no longer be a tool of oppression”?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Just the two-thousand-year war persecution of Jews by the church.

Ed was released after three days and went back to work. He stopped taking the psychiatric drugs. He had intended to stay on the lithium but he found it was causing nausea and vomiting, and decided it had served its purpose. He was doing a lot of osteopathic manipulations in his practice and getting better results than ever before; he thinks his hands were more sensitive. Patients were saying, “Wow. I really feel better.” He still felt that the messianic age was going to begin, but he was calmer and able to appear normal to his patients.

Farber: You were practicing, and you were doing better than ever before. Did this overcome your sense that you were inferior to your father?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh yes. The very last afternoon in my office, before my second hospitalization, I had a patient, a woman I saw for the very first time. She’d been referred by someone else, who was satisfied with what they got from me and said, “You should see this guy.” She had some chronic pelvic and back pains, which had been around for a number of years, and she had a lot of stuff going on. And I said to her, “Think of all the fear that we’ve been through in our lives, and how much that’s affected our bodies.” And meantime, I’m working with her. . . . I began to feel her unwind, the stuff with her legs . . . I just let her carry that process along the way a really good osteopath can do, till she settled down and sat quietly for a few minutes. Then she stirred, and she got off the table, and she said, “Wow!” And she touched her toes, and she said, “This is amazing!”

Farber: Was there an element of the miraculous there?

Dr. Ed Whitney: There was an element, certainly, of healing.

Farber: Do you think you were more intuitive than you had been?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh, yes.

Farber: Because of your state of consciousness, you were more intuitive?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. An altered state of consciousness and just trusting my unconscious mind.

Farber: This actually resolved your complex about not being as good as your father?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, it certainly did. I felt that I was there to be a healer.

Farber: And you didn’t feel this inadequacy, as compared to your father anymore?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Right. That was gone.

Farber: Did you have a sense that it was finally resolved?

Dr. Ed Whitney: All the way, I was doing something new here.

Farber: So the altered state of consciousness—that began around the time you were the same age as your father’s age at the time of your birth—was part of a healing process, as Laing or Perry would have seen it.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. I felt it was a healing process.

Farber: But you now are a medical researcher, not a practicing doctor.

Dr. Ed Whitney: I decided I had to make a living. I found that the healing encounters worked well when there was no money changing hands. Most of the sessions I had done that worked so well that summer were gratis. I did not work so well as a doctor when I had to charge money and think about competing and making a living. So I went back and studied epidemiology, which had always fascinated me.

On June 12 the Lubavitcher Rebbe Rabbi Schneerson died. Dr. Whitney became very excited. As he said, “And I thought, ‘Well, on the third day after the crucifixion of Christ, He rises from the dead.’”

Dr. Ed Whitney: And the thing is solid, the night after the Rebbe died, two of his leading followers were on Larry King Live, and Larry King said, “Was he the Messiah?” And one of them said, “Yes, he met every single criterion the Messiah must meet.” And so I said, “I’m going to stay tuned. I’m going to watch.” And it was on the third day that the newspaper had the story of the Vatican and Israel establishing full diplomatic relations. And that meant to me that the oldest wounds were healed and . . . soul . . . was made whole. And Maimonides had said eight-hundred years earlier that this was the kind of thing that would happen with the Messiah, not to look for miracles or supernatural events. So there, in The New York Times, was the confirmation.

Farber: So, did they claim it as the work of the Rebbe?

Dr. Ed Whitney: No, they had no idea. They weren’t looking and hadn’t noticed. I thought the whole world—I thought tens of thousands of people around the world would have done what I was doing and looked at the damn newspaper and listened to CNN—but there you go!

Farber: How could they claim that he was the Messiah, if he didn’t usher in the messianic age?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh, because the messianic age was right there, three days later. And I thought, “Well, on the third day after the crucifixion of Christ, He rises from the dead.”

Farber: That’s what you thought. But what did they [the Rebbe’s followers] say?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh, yes. I wondered what they must have thought, because I called them up a few weeks after. It was early on a Friday afternoon, before Shabbat. I’ll always wonder what they thought when they heard this guy talking excitedly on their answering machine saying. “He did it! He’s the Messiah! Hallelujah!” Some crazy guy that was obviously from another tradition.

Farber: So how were you able to function for so long with a view of the world that was so discrepant with the ugliness and things that were really happening in the world?

Dr. Ed Whitney: I was getting higher and higher, because there were these other signs I noticed. There was Castro showing up for the first time ever in a civilian shirt, and so that meant the swords will be beaten into plowshares, the instruments of war were turning to peace. And finding this again in The New York Times again; I still have the picture to prove it.

Farber: In your mind was this the messianic age as described by Isaiah and the biblical prophets? The lion and the lamb lying down and the Earth as house of prayer for all peoples?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Of course, that was absolutely central. This whole thing.

Farber: You were functioning, you were doing well, and the world wasn’t doing so well, but you thought it was getting better.

Dr. Ed Whitney: I thought it was, yes.

Farber: You thought it was the messianic age?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, once I went through all the evidence. I said, “No, I checked this out. No, I’ll look once again at the videotape of Larry King.” I began going around proclaiming, “Look! What more do you want?”

Farber: Oh, you still thought Rabbi Schneerson was behind it . . .

Dr. Ed Whitney: Simultaneously, when Jimmy Carter went to North Korea—when they were having that crisis, the nuclear inspections crisis, North and South Korea were on the verge of war—and Jimmy Carter goes there and sits down, takes his wife with him, introduces her to Kim Il Sung, and pays him the goddamn common courtesy of listening to him for a few hours, which he had never experienced. Then he goes to the Torah.

Farber: The exact opposite of what George W. Bush is doing today.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. That final piece fell into place. What more could you ask for? Because the question here becomes do we expect Elijah the prophet at Mt. Carmel?

Do you insist on fire and miracles; do you want a high amplitude signal or a low amplitude signal?

Farber: Were you aware there was still suffering in the world?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, I was, because Rwanda was still happening. And the other thing was, O. J. Simpson was dominating the headlines. I couldn’t forget about that; he just killed his wife the day the Messiah died. I was trying to incorporate all this stuff. You take some liberties with logic in order to get the process going, but what happened was, I began to . . .

Farber: But you thought all this bad stuff was going to stop?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, and I was babbling to everyone I knew about Larry King Live, and my office manager said, “Let’s go back to the hospital.” So I went with her.

Farber: She felt this was necessary because of the things you were saying?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, and I was talking excitedly and rapidly.

Farber: Not because you were doing anything dangerous?

Dr. Ed Whitney: No, nothing to endanger anyone, including myself. So it was eight days after the rebbe had died. I had another interview with some social workers at the hospital, and they said, “Well, okay, we’ll let you leave the hospital, we’re not going to bring you back in, but you’ll have to have an appointment tomorrow morning with one of our doctors.”

Farber: Oh, they let you go! This was a liberal hospital, then.

Dr. Ed Whitney: A friend was going to pick me up—a friend from church. I went to visit him that night, and we were sitting around talking about how maybe this is what the Second Coming looks like, and suddenly then: bang! Here’s a moment I’m never going to forget. Suddenly I realized that everything I had thought was wrong, and I was actually Satan, and I was going to be punished: I would implode into the size of a proton, crushed down.

Farber: This is what you thought, just suddenly?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. I was going to be crushed down to the size of a proton, and this being an implosion, like the big bang, into a nightmare universe, like it would go on forever and ever and ever, and I would be stomped on, I would be tortured, each one worse than the previous. That was the most intense experience that ever happened. And so, “Let’s call the ambulance.” And they whisked me . . .

Farber: Wait a minute. Even though you were going to go back to the hospital the next day, he called an ambulance?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, this was way the hell out of what we’d planned for.

Farber: So you went from the so-called manic state to the so-called depressive state?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. I thought, “Oh, nothing touches this!” I don’t know what kind of—how the clinical terminology would work—but this was way beyond anything you would call depression. It was a full immersion in the dysphoric state.

Farber: A dark night of the soul, I would call it. Custance 5 describes the same kind of things—and many of the mystics—you know, being abominable to God. Of course the shrinks would call it a major depressive episode.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, it was absolutely real, that the resurrection of the dead was going to take place. And each person, as they rose from the dead, all the pain that they’d had in their life was my fault, and they were going to stomp on me and inject their pain into me; I was the archfiend who had ruined a universe.

Farber: Very medieval.

Dr. Ed Whitney: It was going to get worse and worse and worse, forever and ever and ever, infinity upon infinity. And I was just screaming, eyes wide open, in absolute terror. So of course, they had . . .

Farber: Well, you know, James Joyce describes—these kind of things were said to people by the churches throughout the ages . . .

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, it was the whole thing from Portrait of the Artist, multiplied a hundred times.

Farber: This is part of what I call Augustinian Christianity.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, it was kind of that, only more so.

Farber: It’s part of Luther, and particularly, Calvin.

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. Except that I was Satan himself. I had always been Satan, from the foundation of the world till now.

Farber: And other people were bad, or they weren’t as bad?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Well, the people were not as bad. They were going to stomp over me, and I would deserve it. And all their pain would be injected into me, and then—because I had felt so bad about the way that gays were persecuted—well, it meant they really were abominable in God’s sight, and I was going to have a red-hot watermelon inserted into my rectum, and it would explode and tear my pelvis apart, and that would teach me to sympathize with the abominable. In other words, from God to death, and all this was going to happen. So the next thing that happened when I began to get oriented was that I was in the emergency room . . .

Farber: How many hours was this?

Dr. Ed Whitney: It was—not a clock time—maybe someday I can get the medical records.

Farber: Then it wasn’t more than a few hours?

Dr. Ed Whitney: It was less than that. Once I was back in the hospital, it was very intensive, total immersion and was, clock time, half an hour to an hour, max.

Farber: You weren’t going to kill yourself, though?

Dr. Ed Whitney: No, no.

Farber: But were you in a state of terror?

Dr. Ed Whitney: I was flat on my back, utterly unable to move. They strapped me onto a gurney and whisked me off to the emergency room, and then I realized that there was a bored-looking emergency room nurse, and she was taking my blood pressure, vital signs, and writing something down on a piece of paper. She was the most welcome sight I’d ever seen.

Farber: She was sympathetic?

Dr. Ed Whitney: No. She was kind of bored . . . but it wasn’t the pit of hell. I was back! And all that wasn’t going to happen. And then, about another seven-day hospitalization, with another yarn attached to it. Soon I went back into a highly euphoric state, I was . . .

Farber: The same kind of state again?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. Except it was much more stable and sustained.

Farber: How did you get from that dark night of the soul back to a euphoric state?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Well, I said, “All this has cosmic significance, evidently.”

Farber: When did you say this, right after you saw the nurse?

Dr. Ed Whitney: That same night I was taken off to the ward for the more seriously disturbed people. The first time I had been on the not-too-crazy side, but this time I was with the baddies. I sat very quietly on this couch on the ward, and I was really appreciative.

Farber: Was it seeing that woman that brought you out of that state?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Well, the nurse was the first person I saw who—I realized, “Wait, there’s a clock on the wall, I’m still on planet Earth. This is the hospital, and I’m not going to be tormented. This is where I am, and I’m not being tortured.”

Farber: In retrospect, that dark night of the soul had a meaning, as you saw it?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh, intense, yes.

Farber: And the meaning was obviously not that you were the devil. It was what?

Dr. Ed Whitney: The meaning was now I was Christ, after all, and I’d been through this to save humanity, like the crucifixion and resurrection.

Farber: So it was all part of God’s plan for salvation. You thought that you were Christ? Or you were wondering?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, my first thought was that I was Elijah the prophet after all, or one of those other bigwigs. But the hospital was undergoing accreditation at the time, so I thought, maybe I’d better be Jesus Christ, because if inspectors come through here, they might say, “How many Jesus Christs do you have?” And they didn’t have any. So I feared the inspectors would say, “What kind of booby hatch is this? You don’t have anyone here who says they’re Jesus. We cannot accredit you.” So I decided I’d be Jesus after all! So they’d check off on their list, “Okay, we’ve got at least one Jesus Christ.”

Farber: Were you really were thinking that?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Oh, yes. I was talking to God and stuff. Stuff that amused me, also financial worries and my practice not going well—money; suddenly I realized, we’re the only country in the world blasphemous enough to put “In God We Trust” on its currency. God knows we really worship the almighty dollar, and what God wants us to do is take “In God We Trust” off our currency and put it on our toilet paper. The toilet paper cleanses us, gives us comfort, and every time we use it we could be reminded that what toilet paper does for our bodies, God will do for our souls. It’s going to remind us that it’s a more appropriate place to say “In God We Trust,” not on pieces of paper that only make excreting endlessly worrisome. That kind of stuff—hilariously funny to me, and self-evident that not everybody is similarly amused.

Farber: So you were now basically in a positive frame of mind?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes. They had a terrace, and I remember going out there and looking up at the sun. I could feel all the galaxies in the universe were singing, and all of the electrons in the universe were jumping in and out of their orbits just for the fun of it.

Farber: Singing praise to God?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes.

Ed was released on June 28, after seven days in the hospital. He began to see patients again in a spare room in his home; he had the place to himself because his housemates had “fled.” The hospital had released him on a “mood stabilizer” (Depakote) and a neuroleptic, an “antipsychotic”; he was not sure which one. He stopped taking the neuroleptic as soon as he was released. Several days later he decided the Depakote had “served its purpose” and was no longer necessary, so he went to the beach and cast it into the sea.

Farber: Were you stable for the rest of the summer?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, more or less stable, but the development of certain ideas was going on at the same time. It was that month, July I think, that Israel signed a formal peace treaty with Jordan—after forty years of warfare, they formalized a peace treaty—and also with the other Arab states. They had been in a state of war since the founding of the state. So I said, “Well, what more evidence does anybody want?”’ And I continued to be accumulating evidence that the messianic age was here, and it was. In September I decided to go back to the hospital and talk to the doctor, to clear up some things. So I went to the administrator, and he directed me to the head psychiatrist, Dr. Weiss.

Farber: Why did you go?

Dr. Ed Whitney: I guess I was still looking for them to realize what had happened with me. Maybe it could help them with other patients. At that point I was more “sane,” and I realized they might look at things differently than me. So I went in to talk with Dr. Weiss. I said that I had this kind of religious conversion experience. He sat there in his chair, and in a very condescending way was saying, “No, no, what you have is a biochemical disorder, a bipolar disorder, manic-depression. . . . You need to accept that, and you’ll have to live with it the rest of your life and take your medication. Ted Turner has it, and Patty Duke has it,” blah blah and, “It’s biochemical, it’s genetic,” la de da de da.

Farber: In your essay you wrote:

The head of psychiatry at the hospital told me that I was in denial if I insisted that I had been having a spiritual crisis. No, he said, this is a medical disorder like asthma or diabetes. When I finally understood that he meant what he said, I was devastated—and I was feeling suicidal within hours. I could not argue with his self-assured, expert manner. Where, I wanted to ask, were the mast cells, the inflammatory mediators, the glycosylated proteins of this allegedly medical condition? But I was too demoralized to speak. I felt only like dying. The whole episode meant nothing; it was just a case of bad DNA making defective protoplasm. If I had accepted the medical model of my experience, I would not have survived to tell this tale. Despair would have consumed me.6

Farber: Did he know you were a doctor?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Sure, but that didn’t matter to him. I was just another mental defective in denial. He just wasn’t listening to me. He was snide and condescending. I came away from there, and within half an hour I wanted to die.

Farber: You also wrote, “It is a very serious matter when a physician mistakes a healing process for a pathological one. The intention of the doctors was positive, but their expression was most destructive.”7 That’s well put. This, by the way, was the basis of John Weir Perry’s work—that these psychotic experiences are the psyche’s way of healing itself and, of course, the mental health professionals who almost always interpret them as pathological are oblivious to the impact of this on the patient.

Dr. Ed Whitney: NAMI had this campaign to destigmatize mental illness, so I said to him, “Instead of stigmatizing these experiences by attributing them to a mental disorder and then trying to destigmatize the disorder . . . why don’t we just not stigmatize the experiences in the first place by labeling them mental illness?” But it was like talking to a wall.

Farber: So this was the only time other than the dark night of the soul experience in which you felt—actually, even in the dark night of the soul, you didn’t describe wanting to die.

Dr. Ed Whitney: I didn’t feel suicidal then, I was just completely immersed in being Satan. This was a different kind of thing, a different feeling.

Farber: More mundane?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, it was more mundane, but it was also very powerful; maybe everything was meaningless. But I was telling you, this was the most meaning ful thing I had ever experienced! I couldn’t even get some of my friends to go along with—to acknowledge—the synchronicities around the death of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. They said, “Drop it. You’re reading too much into it.”

Farber: You’re talking about in September? After the fact?

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes.

Farber: You mean, after you had the meeting with him, you went back to your friends and tried . . .

Dr. Ed Whitney: Yes, I was with a lot of the same—Jewish—friends. It was kind of the same, but they were saying, “Well, I think you’re reading too much into the death . . .” It seemed most of them now believed I was sick, and so they were saying, “Well, you’re probably reading too much into the whole . . .” And that, unintentionally, kind of kicked me down into the pits a bit more. I wanted to die. And that was when I called another doctor.

Farber: This was yet another dark night of the soul 8—excuse the phrase again.

Dr. Ed Whitney: It was. Probably a more modern version.

Farber: There are people who think about everything like that—philosophers, scientists—that all life is meaningless, for example, Richard Dawkins. Were you contemplating suicide?