*1. I am using the term Mad Pride to refer to the Mad Pride movement or the theories of Mad Pride formulated by participants.
*2. Socrates allegedly said, “God-sent madness is far superior to any self-restraint of human origin.”
*3. Of course, in the current age of ecological catastrophes the failure to resolve this crisis could lead to the destruction of the biosphere—and of humanity.
*4. According to Idel, “In modern Jewish philosophies . . . the assumption of multiple Messiahs has been advanced in order to fulfill the multiple messianic functions.”
*5. In 2007 when I first met DuBrul, The Icarus Project Collective (which DuBrul described as “the staff ”) consisted of two other people besides him and McNamara, the two cofounders. These two others were Will Hall and Madigan Shive. Hall, who is now in his forties, had been an activist in the antipsychiatric movement for over ten years and was the host of a radio show, Madness Radio. Madigan Shive, known as Bonfire Madigan, is a successful and talented cello player, singer, and songwriter who has a busy touring schedule.
*6. Kate Millett wrote, “But what if there were something on the other side of crazy, what if across that line there was a certain understanding, a special knowledge? Don’t you remember so many times during it, telling yourself, swearing, that you would never forget what you saw and learned, precious enough to justify what you suffered? And didn’t I then repudiate every vision—didn’t I even disparage the knowledge I had last time, trample it underfoot in my haste to rejoin the sane and the sane-makers, the shrinks and the family?”
*7. For further reading, Bradley Lewis’ book Moving beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Post-Psychiatry is probably the most trenchant and brilliant critique of Psychiatry and scientistic (not scientific) propaganda written since the original works of Szasz and Laing. Despite his epistemological radicalism—or perhaps because of it—his secular and pragmatistic premises seem to blind him to the idea that the very existence of Psychiatry is a symptom of a society that is ontologically thwarted as well as undemocratic. His agenda for the future of a reformed Psychiatry reveals the imaginative constrictiveness and conservatism of the postmodern vision—as compared to Romantic or messianic-redemptive visions.
*8. Szasz’s first path-breaking book is The Myth of Mental Illness. His best book in my opinion is The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement. A more recent look at psychiatric practice is his Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry.
†9. Breggin’s Toxic Psychiatry is his most comprehensive book and his best critique of the psychiatric system. It is accessible to the layperson.
‡10. Psychiatric Drugs: Hazards to the Brain is one of Breggin’s early books that marshals copious studies to document his thesis that psychiatric drugs (particularly the “antipsychotics”) have brain-damaging and “brain-disabling” effects and were known to have these effects by the psychiatrists who first discovered or used them. This early book was written in a more straightforward way as it was not aimed at a popular audience. Nevertheless, it powerfully makes its point: the “therapeutic effect” of the drugs—they made the patients less refractory and easier to manage—was caused by the brain damage. The idea that they correct a chemical imbalance was invented later and is not supported by the evidence. In 1997 Breggin updated his original thesis by examining the new treatments, as discussed in his Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock, and the Role of the FDA.
*11. Lehmann is a leader of the patients’ rights movement in Germany.
*12. Both Minuchin and Haley wrote numerous books, but the best introductions to their approaches are, from Minuchin, Families and Family Therapy, and from Haley, Leaving Home. Lynn Hoffman’s book Foundations of Family Therapy is the best text for an overview of the family therapy field in the 1980s.
*13. National Alliance on Mental Illness. For most of its existence it was called National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. NAMI is composed primarily of parents of children or adult-children who have been labeled “mentally ill.” A strong supporter of the biopsychiatric model and the use of psychiatric drugs, it serves as a lobby for the pharmaceutical companies from whom it receives large contributions.
*14. On average, Minnesota psychiatrists—who received at least $5,000 from drug companies who manufactured atypical anti-psychotic drugs from 2000 to 2005—appear to have written three times as many atypical prescriptions for children as psychiatrists who recieved less or no money.
*15. The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in Bronx, New York
*16. Biopsychiatry is the name given to the school that holds that all “‘mental illnesses” are caused by disorders of the brain.
*17. On one point I am in disagreement with both the APA and the dissidents. With the APA I think there very well may be a genetically influenced predisposition to become “psychotic.” However, a genetic loading does not imply pathology. There are many character traits that have a genetic component, from intelligence to sexual orientation. (See discussion of transliminality in chapter 11.)
*18. Solveig Wilder came up with some of the questions for this interview and participated in the interview process.
*19. In 2010, many Mad Pride events involved poetry readings, cabaret, and public performances based on the theme that normality is insane and oblivious to the destruction of the planet. As they put it, “Eco Madness!!! Or, Humans Are Killing the Planet and I Feel Fine.”
*20. Judi Chamberlin was one of the leading activists in the mental patients’ liberation movement. Her book On Our Own became a classic among people in the movement. She died in 2010 at only sixty-five years of age of terminal pulmonary disease.
*21. This section on David Oaks is based on an interview conducted with him in 1990 and appeared in my previous 1993 book Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels: The Revolt against the Mental Health System (printed with the permission of Open Court Press).
*22. There was certainly a kernel of truth in Szasz’s argument: in some cases madness consists of an act or acts of self-deception.
*23. In a 1989 conversation with Robert Mullan (see Mad To Be Normal: Conversations with R. D. Laing), Laing responds, “My work has not made the slightest difference [in Psychiatry]—in fact, it’s only entrenched them.” Laing was correct; ten years later (after his death), his name was virtually unknown among mental health professionals. If he is mentioned it is to assert (inaccurately) that his theories have now been proven wrong by biopsychiatry.
†24. Laing said this in seminars I attended and in a discussion I had with him in 1987.
*25. Perry writes revealingly that the persons most apt to undergo a psychotic episode are “usually endowed with a highly sensitive make-up, so that in childhood they were inclined to perceive falseness, defensiveness, and hidden emotions more than others.” The family “accustomed to denial” of course did not welcome this perceptiveness and these sensitive individuals were “made to feel in an awkward position.”
*26. Most, if not all, Mad Pride activists would agree with Campbell that the experiences of madness are often similar if not identical to those of the mystic—that there is something “spiritual” about them.
*27. BPD is the acronym for “borderline personality disorder”—considered by psychoanalysts who named the “disorder” to be a chronic disorder of the “personality” and thus intractable, if not incurable.
*28. Will Hall, another Icarus staff member, later interpreted this vision as a premonition of the social interaction that now takes place on the Internet.
*29. A bestselling book among young people in the 1970s, its influence led it to be characterized as a “countercultural bible.”
*30. Chapter 11 contains a written statement that DuBrul gave me two years after the interview in chapter 9, and shortly before this book’s publication (see pages 250–53). It suggests an alternative explanation for his hospitalization, one that is complementary to my own.
*31. As a trained family therapist I know that, as stated earlier, it is common in conflicted or “dysfunctional” families for one person to become psychotic—as documented by Laing and family therapists. One person gets the label, but it is the family or group unit that is having difficulty dealing with change.
†32. I have one friend who had been on “antipsychotic” drugs, as well as several other drugs, for twenty-five years before I met her. She had never heard anyone critical of psychiatry until she met me—and this was in New York City. Now, ten years after we met, she realizes the drugs have ruined her health and impaired her life, but she has been on them too long to get off. She did finally find a psychiatrist who was willing to reduce her dosage.
*33. The idea that “mental patients” are more violent or dangerous than the normal population is a canard, as demonstrated by the well-known MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study.
†34. As Dr. Stastny pointed out in chapter 1, it should be common practice to not put patients on the more toxic drugs in the first place and, when prescribing drugs, to keep the dosages as low as possible.
*35. I mentioned to Dr. Whitney that the idea that humanity as a whole was the Messiah was common in esoteric circles. He had not known that at the time.
*36. This is according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known as “the DSM”) published by the American Psychiatric Association, used by all mental health professionals in clinics or privately—required for imbursement by insurance companies, including Medicaid.
*37. Labile is a psychiatric term that means “inclined to mood swings.”
*38. Abzug argues that the “essence” of the antebellum reform movement was “the radical joining of heaven and earth. . . .”
*39. Niebuhr writes that due to his emphasis on social reform as integral to Christianity, Channing can be “legitimately counted . . . as one of the great heirs of the Evangelical movement and the Awakening”—even though Channing was a non-Evangelical Unitarian.
*40. Redemptive is the correct word. The term redeeming may have been an inaccurate translation, as it trivializes the point and is not the adjective for redemption.
*41. McLoughlin considered the Social Gospel movement to be a third Great Awakening. Most historians refer to only two “Great Awakenings.”
*42. In Western metaphysics, a noumenon refers to an object in itself, which is supposedly beyond the ability of the senses to perceive. A phenomenon, on the other hand, is the object as filtered through our senses. The mystic often claims that her intuition gives her direct non-sensual knowledge of the object itself. Levy is using this distinction metaphorically, as it often is used, to distinguish between the spoken text and the unspoken subtext of interpersonal interactions.
*43. In the Freudian model, transference is the redirection of a patient’s feelings for a significant person (usually a parent) to the therapist. Countertransference is the redirection of these feelings by the therapist onto the patient. The therapist is supposed to be aware and mature enough to be aware of countertransference when it occurs. The ideal for an adult is to overcome transference through therapy, but since no one achieves that ideal the more realistic goal is to be aware of transference and countertransference.
*44. In Greek mythology Chronos was the god of time, serpentine in form, with three heads—that of a man, a bull, and a lion. Chronos is usually portrayed through an old, wise man with a long, gray beard, such as Father Time.
*45. Most Americans confuse yoga with hatha yoga (stretching exercises), but in India the term refers more generally to set of practices (usually involving some sort of meditation), including hatha yoga, whose goal is to enable one to attain unity with the Divine.
*46. Although similar ideals exist today in pockets of Western Christianity, the Christianity Aurobindo was exposed to in England, where he studied in the late nineteenth century, was the otherworldly version based on reward or punishment in an afterlife.
*47. Aurobindo had little contact with his own mother, who was reportedly too self-absorbed by emotional problems to assume a maternal role.
*48. Aurobindo heard many voices when in prison, but he had learned to distinguish the voice coming from God—issuing adeshas, meaning “direct commands from the Divine.”
*49. Sadhana is the spiritual practice that one is given by the Divine or the “guru” to realize one’s spiritual potential, to fulfill one’s life mission.
*50. “No salvation should be valued which takes us away from the love of God in his manifestation and the help we can give to the world.”
*51. As we go to press, I am encouraged by the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
*52. The philosophical system (of Sankara) most revered by scholars of Hinduism.
*53. A problem that Aurobindo does not discuss, despite his egalitarianism and his sympathy to socialism, is the tremendous resistance to change presented by the ruling classes in the world with their control of the enormous military forces of the state. Aurobindo died in 1950, when it was still possible to be cautiously optimistic about the development of the United States—as he was—but America’s trajectory has been steadily downward with the ascendancy of the American empire and, since 1980, with the subordination of all realms of life to corporate control and exploitation.
*54. Despite some fundamental differences between Sri Aurobindo and Whitehead and Griffin, one would have expected, for example, that the ecumenical Christian theologian David Ray Griffin would have grappled with Sri Aurobindo’s work, (as he does with many spiritual traditions) but it is evident from Griffin’s writings that although he has heard of Aurobindo, he has not read him. Aurobindo’s perspective, in fact, anticipated many of the very same points made in Griffin’s scathing critique of what Griffin terms “deconstructive postmodernism”—as opposed to what Griffin terms “revisionary/constructive postmodernism,” which, he contends, preserves such modern concepts as the self and historical meaning, while at the same time seeking to reveal or recover a positive meaning for such “pre-modern ideas” as divine reality or cosmic meaning. Clearly there are remarkable similarities with Sri Aurobindo’s work.
*55. Frankly, I personally find the very idea of a “mental health system” dispiriting.
*56. This poem is over 700 pages. I can only convey a general sense of his vision in these short excerpts.
*57. The Hindu term for bliss, ananda, has a different meaning in the Hindu context, closer to bliss-happiness. It has the intensity of bliss, but unlike the English term, ananda connotes a spiritual and existential bliss, as opposed to a mere pleasurable sensation.