Discovering the Higher Sanity within Madness
“Mad Pride”*1 is the new twenty-first-century rallying cry of three generations of radical ex-mental patients who refuse to genuflect before the altar of Psychiatry. The Mad Pride movement is a recent outgrowth of the larger mental patients’ liberation movement—now called the psychiatric survivors’ movement—that originated in the early 1970s and is composed today of thousands of “schizophrenics,” “bipolars,” “schizotypals,” “borderline personality disorders,” and whatever new categories of the “severely mentally ill” are invented and christened by the psychiatric establishment. The mad constitute an increasing percentage of the population in the United States. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over eight million Americans have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, the two most common forms of “psychosis.”
The Mad Pride movement is not merely a movement for mental patients’ rights. It is a movement about the right to be different. Where will it lead? Will it become a broad-based revolt against the psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex, against the corporate capitalist system and its destruction of the Earth, against the bureaucratic state, which has become a tool of psychiatry and of other corporate interests, against the pervasiveness of the surveillance and social control of “deviants” in the modern world, against the legitimacy granted to the Psychiatric “scientific” authorities who sanctify adjustment to the current criminally insane social order as “mental health”?
Clearly the leading activists in Mad Pride would like to see such a movement. But what is the basis of its alternative vision? In the name of what will it protest? Will it spread its wings and become a movement based on an affirmation of the holiness of the Earth, of the preciousness of all sentient life, of the freedom of the spirit, of the fraternity of humanity, of the sanctity of the imagination? Will it affirm a messianic (i.e., utopian) vision of redemption? Or will Mad Pride lose its way in the miasma of postmodern cultural pluralism and domesticated identity politics?
This book is a contribution to telling the emerging story of the birth of the Mad Pride movement. I tried to convey a sense of what this movement is about through interviewing and describing the heroic triumphs of six mad persons, each of whom can pass as normal today, all but one of whom do not take any psychiatric “medication,” and all of whom far exceeded the low expectations of them conveyed to them by Psychiatry. Four are leaders in the Mad Pride movement and the other two (one a medical researcher and the other a spiritual teacher) speak powerfully and eloquently about how madness was for them an initiation into a higher, more conscious mode of being.
Paul Levy (see the interview with him in chapter 16) eloquently described the initiation process in general terms—but in a manner that clearly reflected his own life journey. “The ordeals, trials, and tribulations that inevitably come our way as part of life and put us ‘through the fire’ are initiations, designed by a higher, divine intelligence, uniquely crafted for and by our soul to burn away our false, egoic personality traits so as to liberate our latent, higher psycho-spiritual potentials.”1
In the past year Mad Pride has become the object of increasing publicity and journalistic interest. Clearly it is a force that is just beginning to grow. As written eloquently in a recent Newsweek article,
Mad Pride [is] a budding grassroots movement, where people who have been defined as mentally ill reframe their conditions and celebrate unusual (some call them “spectacular”) ways of processing information and emotion. Icarus members cast themselves as a dam in the cascade of new diagnoses like bipolar and ADHD. The group [The Icarus Project—which will be discussed in depth in part 3], which now has a membership of 8,000 people across the United States, argues that mental-health conditions can be made into “something beautiful.” They mean that one can transform what are often considered simply horrible diseases into an ecstatic, creative, productive, or broadly “spiritual” condition. As Will Hall puts it, he hopes Icarus will “push the emergence of mental diversity.”2
Insanity and Madness
I have introduced in this book a semantic distinction between the words insane and mad. I use the former in an evaluative (pejorative) sense. I define insanity as a state of spiritual derangement and sanity as a condition in which one is in accord with process of spiritual growth, whereas I use madness to refer nonpejoratively to “altered states of consciousness” (ASC) that are nonrational. (The term “altered state of consciousness” was first used to describe persons under the influence of LSD or other hallucinogens.) A mad person has had or has ASCs. Madness, as I use the term, is not evaluative or normative—it can be either good or bad or neither—but I argue that in many, if not most cases, such altered states, however painful, are “good,” meaning that they are potentially valuable experiences. (I do not necessarily claim this about states induced by LSD or other chemicals.)
Someone who is mad has often had a “breakdown,” but a breakdown can lead to a breakthrough (see chapter 5). Madness is potentially regenerative. To interpret it as “insanity” or “mental illness” is to misunderstand its meaning and possibilities. By my definitions one could thus be both mad and sane. I believe this same distinction between madness and insanity is implied in R. D. Laing’s work, particularly in The Politics of Experience.
The term insane as I use it always includes a “value judgment,” it denotes a negative condition; it’s never seen as positive or neutral (like brown eyes). In this way it is like the term evil. According to the convention I am following in this book and elsewhere, when I state that someone is insane, I do not mean that the person is insane by psychiatric (“psychotic”) or legal criteria. She may or may not be.
When I use the term insane, for example, I could be using it to refer to the well-known murderer Charles Manson (who is “psychotic” by psychiatric criteria) or to the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who is “normal”), who is responsible for initiation of the widespread torture of prisoners of war—because I regard both of them as insane.
The persons I call “insane” are most likely to be very well-adjusted, normal people. Often they appear stable and are emotionally content since they have the ability, as David Oaks states, to deny “inconvenient truths.” On the other hand, in society the term insane is almost always used to refer to those deemed “psychotic” by psychiatry. Somewhat less often it is used by social critics in the way I am using it, to refer to a person (or society) who is spiritually deranged. Critics infer that a person is insane or spiritually deranged from the fact that they committed acts that are both evil and unintelligible or absurd. An evil act is not necessarily insane. It has to include an element of absurdity or what I call objective unintelligibility. That is, an insane act is both evil and “objectively” unintelligible or absurd.
I frequently use the term insane to apply to society. If certain practices are routine in a society then I believe they are a product of that society. To pick an example I use frequently, the United States is a society in which our political and business leaders either deny or ignore ecological threats and promote practices that unless stopped could lead, according to our best climate scientists, to the annihilation of life on Earth. At best it will lead to the death of millions of people and nonhuman animals.
Our ecologically destructive policies are not accidental. They occur systematically. Thus I say they are a feature of our society. But to destroy the conditions for human survival is insane. Thus I am led to conclude, “American society or the American social system is insane.” It is evil, but not merely evil. It defies explanation. It is intrinsically, “objectively” unintelligible. It is deranged, absurd, insane.
Many people have adjusted to our insane society because they do not have the spiritual maturity and courage to fight against it. Or because they—understandably—feel hopeless. The antonym of insane is not sanity, which is a neutral term, but wisdom, which is a higher sanity that transcends the condition of the average person. Wisdom is highly intelligible, it possesses a plenitude of meaningfulness. Our great prophets are always men or women of wisdom—of a higher sanity—who are invariably critics of our insane society.
From Mental Patients’ Liberation to Mad Pride
Mad Pride was officially launched in England in 1999 with the foundation of the organization Mad Pride, which soon spread to the United States. The movement found institutional embodiment with the formation of The Icarus Project. It subsists alongside of the psychiatric survivors’ movement. How does the Mad Pride movement differ from the psychiatric survivors’ movement? The major difference stems from the fact that the primary goal of the latter is opposing human rights violations (whether legal or illegal) that are endemic in the mental health system, including involuntary psychiatric drugging, electroshock, and inpatient and outpatient commitment laws. It seeks to change, to reform the “mental health system.” Thus its philosophical emphasis has been on the fundamental similarity between “ex-mental patients” (psychiatric survivors) and “normal” people, and the rights of the former to equal treatment under the law. Mad Pride’s goals, as will be shown, are empowering the mad and, more broadly speaking, effecting profound changes in society. Its philosophical emphasis is on the distinctiveness of the mad, the ways in which they are different from normal people; at the same time it acknowledges the interconnectedness and the existential equality of all persons.
The philosophical foundation of the psychiatric survivors’ movement was established by psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, who argued that mental illness was a myth and that those labeled “mentally ill” were suffering—as all persons do at times—from “problems in living.” Szasz asserted that the so-called mentally ill were similar to normal people in all important respects: above all, they are moral agents, just as normal people are, and are thus entitled to the same constitutional and legal rights—particularly liberty—and conversely should be held to the same standards of legal responsibility. (Szasz opposed the insanity defense.) These goals do not conflict with those of Mad Pride, although Szasz himself has rejected the existence of madness and thus of Mad Pride.
The mental patients’ liberation movement paralleled the emergence in the public arena in the 1960s and 1970s of a variety of outspoken nonconformist mental health professionals, including the three most prominent dissident psychiatrists in the country: Thomas Szasz, the late R. D. Laing (he died in 1989, unexpectedly at age sixty-one), and Peter Breggin. Despite the dissidents’ diversity of views, they were and are united in their rejection of the dominant medical model of psychology and its root metaphor, mental illness. They all rejected the central premise of the medical model—that the categorization of behaviors and experiences as “mental illness” by psychiatrists is based on objective medical (scientific) criteria.
To the contrary, the dissidents claimed that the diagnosis of mental illnesses was based on psychiatrists’ subjective values and biases, usually reflecting the biases of the culture. (The most salient example in support of this claim was the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to recategorize homosexuality from a mental illness to a normative sexual orientation in the 1970s.)3 The dissidents also agreed that diagnosing clients as “mentally ill” is the sine qua non of a process that leads to their transformation from persons and citizens—and moral agents—to patients. Once defined as mental patients, persons are deemed incompetent and deprived of their constitutional rights, above all, of their right to liberty—including their liberty to refuse specific medical “treatments,” such as the forcible administration sanctioned by the courts, the state, of psychiatric drugs or (less commonly) of electroshock. Szasz’s writings repeatedly attacked the violation of the principle of the separation of church and state; the psychiatric religion counts on the power of the state to force citizens to submit to its dictates.
But in one respect the approach of R. D. Laing was singular and profound. Unlike most of the critics of the psychiatric system, Laing focused on some of the ways in which “schizophrenics” (and other “psychotics”) were genuinely different from—not inferior to—normal people. Laing’s most important book, The Politics of Experience (published in 1967), prefigured the ideas of the Mad Pride movement that first arose three decades later. His radicalism consisted of his belief that far from being mentally defective, the mad were superior in certain important respects to normal people: many schizophrenics, Laing said—he meant “most”—were more sensitive and more spiritually aware than “normal” persons, who tended to be oblivious to the “inner world” of their psyches.4 Although in its early stages the mental patients’ liberation movement had embraced some Laingian themes, as its battle to attain equal rights for mental patients increasingly became its main focus, it turned its back on Laing’s spiritual model of madness. (Laing also distanced himself for his own reasons from the ex-patients’ movement.)
It is the contention of this book that the recent emergence of Mad Pride represents a new, more mature, and “higher” stage of the development of the psychiatric survivors’/ex-patients’ movement. Mad Pride is based on an emphasis on the Laingian theme (although Laing is rarely mentioned or even read) of the distinctiveness of the mad. In this regard it parallels the trajectory of the movements of other minorities, which at first sought to establish their members’ similarities to the majority and to end the discrimination to which they had been subjected and later went on to affirm the distinctiveness of their group and discover in its differences from the norm, the source of new values.
The founders of Mad Pride both in England and in America often drew an analogy between Gay Pride or Black Pride and Mad Pride. They stated or implied that there is something distinctive and positive about being mad—about having experienced altered states of consciousness, so-called “psychotic episodes.” The Icarus Project collective wrote, “We are a website community, a support network of local and campus Groups . . . created by and for people living with dangerous gifts that are commonly diagnosed and labeled as ‘mental illnesses.’ 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, creativity, and collaboration can inspire hope and transformation in an oppressive and damaged world.” The term dangerous gifts—coined by Sascha DuBrul, the cofounder of The Icarus Project who associated these gifts with the wings of wax in the myth of Icarus—became a shibboleth for the perspective of The Icarus Project (see chapter 8).
Szasz had been the first to demonstrate that diagnoses were based on social and psychiatric biases, but Szasz was not specific in regard to the nature of these biases. Laing was, and Mad Pride is today—sometimes. Mad Pride activists often argue that since our society is individualistic, competitive, materialistic, and rationalistic, the conformist bias of mental health professionals manifests itself in an inability to appreciate the communal, the cooperative, the nonrational, and the spiritual or religious dimensions of existence. Thus the mental health experts tend to interpret altered states of consciousness—which one might term “varieties of religious experiences” (borrowing William James’s phrase)—as psychopathological syndromes such as “schizophrenia” or “bipolar disorder.”
Repudiation of the Psychiatric Narrative
The interviews contained herein are with Mad Pride activists or sympathizers of the movement who are or had been mad. (I use the term mad to refer to anyone who experienced altered states of consciousness or “psychotic episodes”—as labeled by psychiatric “authorities”—who still regard these experiences as constitutive of their identity.) They are the protagonists and heroes or heroines of this book. All but one (Caty Simon, see chapter 7) believed that there was something valuable in their “psychotic episodes,” which gave them access to transcendent, mystical, and/or supernatural dimensions of life. Each one of them is a witness for Mad Pride and against the mental health system. For each subject there was a moment (or a period) of decision: Would she accept and affirm the psychiatric view of her altered states of consciousness as psychopathology and of herself as “chronically mentally ill”? Would she accept her “incorporation into the psychiatric narrative,” or would she develop a “resistant identity and an alternative narrative”?5
Each protagonist repudiated the mentally ill identity and affirmed “a positive identity of the self.”6 Her new identity after her mad experience and her disentanglement from the mental health system was based (Caty Simon excepted) on the reinterpretation of her “psychotic episodes” as revelatory or initiatory experiences. All the protagonists went on to lead active and creative lives (all but one without psychiatric drugs), thus refuting the psychiatric contention that they suffer from chronic mental illnesses. But they did not become well-adjusted, rather they became creatively maladjusted. Five of the six interviewees (six out of seven if we include the psychiatrist) are involved in an ongoing effort to change society, and their views are in accord with my theory that the mad constitute a vanguard in the effort to bring change to an insane world.
Revealingly, all of the protagonists affirmed several or (infrequently) all of the following contentions that I believe are at the root of the Mad Pride movement. One, there is a distinctive mad sensibility different from that of “normal” persons. Two, this sensibility is an asset, not a defect—and thus provides a basis for “Mad Pride.” Three, madness—the “psychotic episode”—has value, it has the potential to shed light on the human situation, to promote spiritual growth; it is not a mental illness or a symptom of a brain defect. (The idea that madness has value goes back, of course, to Socrates and Plato.*2) Four, since the mad experience has value, society ought to provide supportive sanctuaries where people can undergo this experience without the adverse consequences of standard psychiatric treatment. Five, society as it exists today is insane; in the words of Laing, it is existentially or “ontologically off course.” (Every person I interviewed agreed on this point!) Six, the purpose of the mental health system is social control—helping or forcing people to adjust to society as is, to the status quo. Finally, if society is insane, adjustment to society is not a sign of mental health, of spiritual well-being.
Many of these contentions provide the basis for an agenda different from—though not in conflict with—that of (other) radical organizations such as Mind Freedom, which still identifies itself not as Mad Pride but as an advocacy organization for the psychiatric survivors’ movement. (Mind Freedom also has a Mad Pride division, which sponsors Mad Pride events.) Mind Freedom founder David Oaks calls for “a nonviolent revolution in the mental health system” (see chapter 3). (Mind Freedom also operates a clearing house, a referral service, and a self-empowerment website.) However, if the purpose of the mental health system as it exists is to help persons adjust to society, then how could there be a revolution in the mental health system without changing society? It is inconceivable that one could have a progressive or humanitarian mental health system in an insane society—a society programmed for self-destruction. And if society were to radically change, what need would there be to have a mental health system at all?
Oaks seems to be aware of this conundrum but since the mandate of Mind Freedom as a nongovernmental organization (NGO) is to act—as it does, often very effectively—as a pressure group to oppose human rights violations within the mental health system, Oaks tends to dwell on (at least in his public talks) revolutionizing the mental health system rather than revolutionizing society (although, it should be noted that Oaks has also promoted the idea of creative maladjustment, as discussed below). Also, Oaks must realize that since the adversary of Mind Freedom is the multibillion-dollar psychiatric-pharmaceutical complex—and the government that supports it—a successful “revolution” in the mental health system is more unlikely today than it was when he first became active. (When Oaks first became an activist in the late 1970s, psychiatry was a shaky force, which had not yet decided to sacrifice its independence by wedding its fortune to the pharmaceutical companies.)7
In contrast to the survivors’ movement, which focuses on changing the mental health system, the implicit if not explicit goal of the Mad Pride movement is a transformation of society as a whole. (Let me emphasize again that most persons in the survivors’ movement support Mad Pride.) Yet there is a catch-22: it is impossible for society to change radically as long as mad people are suppressed because mad people constitute a large proportion of society’s visionaries and prophets, and visionaries and prophets are the catalysts of social change. Thus, the mental health system is critical to maintaining the status quo.
Many, if not most, of the great prophets in the past (Isaiah, St. Paul, George Fox) had experienced madness in a prototypical form. They experienced a breakdown followed by a breakthrough, spiritual death followed by rebirth. (This is termed the “metanoia” theory of madness.) These prophets lived in eras before psychiatry had established itself as the dominant social control agency in a society based on total surveillance (as Michel Foucault has argued in his many books) and the weeding out of those who deviate from the norm. The budding prophets of today are captured, “cured,” and transformed into chronic mental patients by the psychiatric system before they have the opportunity to complete the death and rebirth process, to flower into prophets.
Mad Pride is beginning to reverse this process by creating collective self-help alternatives outside the system by providing the mad with myriad forms of social support, from the development of alternative communities like that based in Freedom Center (see chapter 6) to ad hoc groups on college campuses based on the Icarus model, to Internet forums as well as publicizing alternative “maps” of madness. Unlike Mind Freedom, the Mad Pride movement does not define its goal as the transformation of the mental health system; rather it seeks to constitute an alternative to this system. (Many of the mad still rely partially on the psychiatric system for services.) By providing these alternatives, Mad Pride is helping many mad people to complete the death and rebirth process and to accept being creatively maladjusted to an insane society.
For many mad people, adjustment to the status quo may not be feasible—as illustrated by the subjects in this book. Laing has written, “We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. We seem to seek death and destruction as much as life and happiness. . . . Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.”8 It may well be that many of the mad (like other unusual persons) lack the capacity to live in relative adjustment to such an insane society and that paradoxically the only way they can achieve a state of emotional stability is to become creatively maladjusted—to become the prophets, activists, and spiritual leaders who will endeavor to bring the world closer to the visions they have had, to attempt to help humanity make the transition to a higher stage of consciousness, far beyond the status quo. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it long before there was a mental patients’ liberation movement, “So let us be maladjusted, as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ Let us be as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. Let us be maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look into the eyes of the men and women of his generation and cry out, ‘Love your enemies.’”9
The Sociobiological Function of Madness: The Spiritual Evolution Narrative
The fact that the mad are “maladjusted” to society does not mean they are maladjusted to nature, to the underlying basis of the cosmos. As Laing presciently wrote, “Our society may itself have become biologically dysfunctional, and some forms of schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of our society may have a sociobiological function that we have not recognized.”10 This stunning insight of Laing’s has not been fully appreciated by psychiatric survivors. It is beginning to come to consciousness in Mad Pride, although few Mad Pride activists are familiar with the Laingian paradigm.
Let me put Laing’s assertion about the sociobiological function of madness into the kind of narrative context that makes it more fully intelligible—and was only hinted at by Laing. The context—the premise of my own theory of Mad Pride (which is consistent with Laing’s statements)—is this: the entire species, the entire Earth is involved in an evolutionary crisis that must be resolved if we are to survive. This assertion implies, of course, that “there is a purpose striving in creation.”11
This idea is the basis of the vision of the eminent Indian philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo. Though we are presently mired in Ignorance, human beings sooner or later must ascend to a more enlightened state, we must realize the divine life, the eternal life, on Earth.*3 This will involve a profound change of society, of humanity, and of the cosmos itself: society will be based on a realization of the unity of humanity, not on, as at present, the division of humanity and the struggle for survival of the fittest (in reality, the most ruthless). The current “laws of nature” themselves will be transcended by “newer ones” more conducive to human happiness.12 As Sri Aurobindo wrote, “The ascent of man into heaven is not the key, but rather his ascent here into the spirit and the descent also of the spirit into his normal humanity and the transformation of this earthly nature.” This, and not “some post-mortem salvation,” Aurobindo tells us, is “the new birth” for which humanity waits as “the crowning movement” of its “long, obscure and painful history.”13 The dream of heaven on Earth—the recovery of paradise that has haunted the collective imagination for millennia14—will be realized.
The human being must transform herself so that she can be the instrument of this planetary transformation. “Man is at highest a half-god who has risen out of the animal nature, and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which man has started off to be, the whole God,” wrote Aurobindo, “is something so much greater than what he is, that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labor of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory.”15 This new being would indeed be abnormal by the standards of society, of the mental health system. The process by which she would evolve spiritually might take unexpected turns, it might—and clearly often does—lead through madness. It might indeed be madness by our currents standards.
If we take into account this kind of evolutionary “utopian” vision, what then might we imagine Laing had in mind (consciously or unconsciously) by his reference to the “sociobiological function” of madness? Its function is to resolve the evolutionary crisis we are in, thus enabling the process of evolution to move to a higher level of spiritual evolution, a level beyond what humanity has yet attained in history as we know it. How exactly madness would effect this collective transformation was a question Laing did not address.
Dissident psychiatrist John Weir Perry had a theory. He believed that visionaries, prophets, and mad persons are able to descend into the deepest level of the unconscious and access new myths that guide societies in making transitions in times of crisis. Those who are leaders may “deliver the new myth” that is going to be accepted for the next phase of that culture’s evolution. He explained the dynamic in The Heart of History, “The poetic and prophetic souls possessing the great vision of the new way would become the mouthpieces of the psyche in its dynamic upheaval of renewal. Their effect upon the culture would be to stir a momentous rush of enthusiasm into new concerns.”16
Richard Gosden, in his discussion of Perry’s work, writes that people in modern societies “who manifest schizophrenic symptoms are struggling to fulfill the same function” as visionaries in times of crises—to transmit new “myth-forms” that they have glimpsed in their moments of madness to society at large so that people can act to foster and adapt to social change. As will be discussed in chapter 5 Perry did not quite go as far as Gosden implies: he believed that schizophrenics are visionaries, but not prophets; only the latter seek to influence society at large. More specifically, Gosden has a prescient formulation: he writes that in modern society those who are “diagnosed with schizophrenia” are making “an evolutionary bid” for the transformation of consciousness.17
Paul Levy (interviewed in chapter 16), a mad person (that is, a former mental patient) and spiritual teacher, makes this bid quite explicit. As he wrote in a recent book (all emphases are mine), “Jung pointed out the ‘world-creating significance of the consciousness manifested in man.’ Because of its ability to help to create the universe, Jung called the consciousness manifesting in humanity ‘a divine instrument.’ We are being invited to consciously realize ourselves as apertures through which the divine imagination is able to materialize itself into, as, and through our universe. In an evolutionary leap in consciousness, we realize that instead of fighting with each other, we can co-operate with each other and literally and lucidly change the dream we are having. What a novel idea.”18 I will clarify: Levy claims that “reality” is but a collective dream that can be changed—by first changing our consciousness.
This bid to collectively change consciousness—to change the dream we are having—has rarely been made explicitly by the mad in the past, as it is by Levy and Whitney (interviewed in chapter 14). It is implicit in the visions and the accompanying communications of the mad. Perry wrote that “almost universally” within “acute psychosis” lies a messianic vision of a new world order based on “equality and harmony, tolerance and love.”19 This is invariably coupled with visions (often terrifying) of apocalyptic conflict; the visionary experience constellates the opposites in the psyche: paradise and hell. And hell on Earth is the likely consequence of our failure to address the developing ecological catastrophe. Perry found in the “messianic ideation” of his psychotic clients, in their “vision of oneness” a prefiguration of the new society that was “waiting to come about in the collective society of our time”20—the next phase, if we choose it, of our spiritual evolution.
Laing’s views on this topic were similar, though not as fully developed as Perry’s. In The Politics of Experience Laing presciently wrote, “If the human race survives, future men will look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness. The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break in the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”21 On the one hand, Laing refers to “the schizophrenic alienation from the alienation of our society”;22 on the other hand, he refers frequently in The Politics of Experience to the illumination experienced in madness (see chapter 4).
They are two sides of the same coin; together they constitute the traits that make the mad so different. It is as if a new mode of consciousness is seeking to manifest itself through the mad. Because the world needs to be changed, because we need to dream a new dream, because we need to break the trance of consensus reality if the human species is to survive, it makes sense to posit, as Laing did, that madness as an altered state of consciousness—teleologically considered—may have a “sociobiological function.” I contend that this sociobiological function is often experienced by the mad as a “calling” to act as catalysts of spiritual evolution, of a messianic transformation. It is the basis of Mad Pride.
One can find support for these metaphysical ideas in a more secular source—the writings of the utopian socialist and neo-Marxist theoretician Ernst Bloch. From a Blochian perspective it is not surprising that messianic fantasies are expressed by the mad: Bloch found them throughout the interfacing realms of religion, literature, and personal fantasy. Unlike most Marxists, Bloch had a high estimate of religion; he believed that religious messianism in general expresses “the eternal human yearning for utopia on Earth.” For Bloch religion is “the unconscious of utopia.”23 Utopia is “the preconscious of what is to come”; it is “the birthplace of the New.”24 The reformer should look for traces of utopia everywhere: it is the “anticipatory illuminations” of these utopian traces (undertaken by the philosopher or activist) that will enable them to become a reality; these illuminations are the link between hope and reality, dream and future.25
Of course, living in the age when the unfashionable mad—the “mentally ill”—were silenced, confined, and lobotomized, it would not have occurred to Bloch to look for utopian traces in the “hallucinations” of “schizophrenics.” But today, as we have seen, the psychiatrists with the most sympathy for the mad are keenly aware of the profound messianic visions that haunt them. Mad Pride could provide a forum where these messianic traces (disparaged as symptoms of deep pathology by the benighted psychiatrist) could be revealed and illuminated—thus forging the link between hope and reality.
The first ex-mental patient I met and befriended (when I was a college student in the 1970s) used to whisper to me, “I am the mother of the new messianic age.” Ed Whitney (see chapter 14) was absolutely convinced in the 1990s that the long-awaited day of peace and happiness for all was being inaugurated by the new messiah, the Lubavitcher rebbe. (Whitney was not a member of the Lubavitcher’s group). Could it not be said of madness, as Bloch said of Christianity fifty years ago, that madness is now the new unconscious of utopia, the preconscious of the messianic age? In Christian terms one would say that the traces of utopia are signs that the kingdom of God is seeking to break into the world—in this case through the psyches of the mad. It is the calling of the Mad Pride movement to cooperate with this process, to facilitate it, to be the midwife—or at least one of the midwives—of the new age.
Mad Pride in Transition
I am speaking in a higher octave, in more messianic-utopian terms than most activists in the Mad Pride movement. (Although most of them have experienced the messianic visions of which I wrote, they have not consistently affirmed the relevance of these visions for the Mad Pride movement as explained throughout this book.) Sascha DuBrul spoke in terms very similar to my own soon after he formed The Icarus Project—before he reversed himself in 2008. So does Jacks Ashley McNamara, the cofounder of The Icarus Project. So does Paul Levy in the interview—although Levy does not speak as a representative of Mad Pride.
The mission statement of The Icarus Project has an unmistakably messianic tone. It reads like something written by Laing circa 1967 but that was then—in 2004. Despite the more somber pitch of the tone of Mad Pride today, the fact is that many mad people still report (as will be discussed in the next section, What Is to Be Done? Adopting a High Messianic Perspective), as Perry had observed, that they have been in contact with God and have been given a messianic mission to fulfill. I contend that the mad do have a redemptive-messianic mission to fulfill (we all do, in a sense)—to act as the midwives of the new order that exists within the womb of the old society, to use one of Karl Marx’s phrases.
Let me be clear that I do not mean messianism in any fundamentalist sense of the term. In the first part of the twentieth century Martin Buber wrote, “Messianism is Judaism’s most profoundly original idea.”26 One could say that along with “the prophetic,” the messianic was Judaism’s gift to humanity. Buber explains messianism meant the coming of a “world of unity” in which sin would be forever destroyed.27 Buber advocated an “active messianism” that did not wait passively for the Messiah, but “sought to prepare the world to be God’s kingdom.”28 Buber wrote that according to the Jewish prophets, including Jesus, the future kingdom of God meant “the true community,” “the perfection of men’s life together.” “The Kingdom of God is the community to come in which all those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied.”29 The modern Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel shows how Buber’s “distribution of the messianic function” among many persons, although more pronounced among “modern Jewish philosophies,”*4, 30 is prefigured in fifteenth-century Hasidism.31
The Mad Pride movement can help mad people fulfill their mission by encouraging them to affirm their madness, to resist the pressure to adjust to society—and above all, to take seriously the “delusional” idea that they have a messianic mission. My hope is to encourage the Mad Pride movement to be explicitly messianic or utopian. (Different people have strong preferences for one or the other term, although I think Bloch showed they pointed to the same phenomenon.) This may require of course that the mad subject their messianic visions to discussion and interpretation—and that they not repudiate messianism altogether out of fear of “ego inflation” (as Jung termed it), as discussed by Levy and DuBrul.
DuBrul, citing the influence of Eastern spirituality, repudiated in 2008 the Dionysian-messianic vision he had developed over the previous years; he feared it encouraged egotism. Levy, on the other hand, himself a Buddhist and a Jungian, considered “ego inflation” (as Jung called it) to be a nascent phase of spiritual awakening that initially helps one to break out of the “trance of consensus-reality” and then “falls away” as it becomes integrated into a broader perspective.
For the most part the psychiatric survivors’ movement (see chapter 3), as opposed to Mad Pride (e.g., The Icarus Project), has embraced a secularist ideology in its effort to unite former mental patients and others who identify with the term survivors of psychiatry around the least common denominator—to emphasize their commonality with each other and with “normal” people—and thus to mobilize as many persons as possible to oppose the oppressiveness of the psychiatric system. In accord with this, it has treated the visions of the mad as private issues with no relevance to society or to the survivors’ movement itself.
It is largely because of the failure of the psychiatric survivors’ movement to treat madness as a socially significant phenomenon that the Mad Pride movement emerged in the first place. It arose spontaneously around ten years ago (started by a new generation), thirty years after the first mental patients’ liberation organization was formed, as if in compensation finally for the one-sided secularism of the psychiatric survivors’ movement—its public silence about mad people’s most prominent trait (their spirituality)—which mirrored the secularism of society. The spontaneous character of Mad Pride was evidenced by the fact that Sascha DuBrul and Ashley McNamara, the founders of The Icarus Project—which became the largest Mad Pride organization in the United States—had not themselves even read the diverse intellectual theorists who had an influence on the mental patients’ liberation movement from the time of its emergence in the 1970s. They had not even read Laing—whose ideas were strikingly similar to DuBrul’s and McNamara’s in their most radical phase. Neither DuBrul’s nor McNamara’s positive valuation of madness was a result of any kind of discernible intellectual influence, except for their readings on shamanism.
McNamara, a highly gifted writer, was expressing in essays she wrote between 2002 and 2006 (and posted on The Icarus Project’s website) themes similar to Laing’s writings on madness as spiritual revelation. However, when I communicated with her in 2007 she told me she knew nothing about Laing. In 2002 DuBrul had written a dramatic account about his breakdown, published in a large alternative magazine (see chapter 9). As DuBrul’s piece was a conflicted apology for psychiatry, there was no reason to expect that within two years he would become an exponent and champion of Mad Pride. However, DuBrul is an artist and a mad person and, as such, an intuitive who is unusually sensitive to the needs of the time, which in this instance required compensating for the secularism of the psychiatric survivors’ movement.
Levy has lucidly explicated this process of “compensation” as first described by Carl Jung. Levy writes,
When our universe is viewed as a whole system composed of multiple dimensions . . . when something is out of balance in the system, whether it be on the level of the individual, family, community, nation or planet, the greater underlying field self-regulates and invariably manifests so as to compensate the one-sidedness in the system. . . . When there is an unconscious imbalance or disturbance in the field, a co-responding and reflexive compensatory process becomes activated . . . invariably resulting in an archetypal, healing figure incarnating in human form—whether we call this figure artist, shaman, healer, seer, or poet. The intuitive human beings who become channels for this process are tuned into and sensitive to the underlying unified field in a way that helps the field to unify. To quote Jung, “Whenever conscious life becomes one-sided or adopts a false attitude, these images ‘instinctively’ rise to the surface in dreams and in the vision of artists and seers to restore the psychic balance, whether of the individual or of the epoch.”32
Mad Pride, in the form of The Icarus Project—at least at the time of its birth—was an instance of this: its founders were the intuitive human beings who were the channels for this process.
The hallmark of Mad Pride, the affirmation of the distinctiveness of the mad—first emphasized by DuBrul, with his idea of madness as composed of “dangerous gifts”—was a major step toward fostering the autonomy of the mad, toward discovering and affirming an identity for the Mad Pride movement in which the mad person’s differences from the normal man or woman were highlighted rather than marginalized, suppressed, or treated as incidental. DuBrul’s strength as a leader was his ability to impart to mad persons a sense of their uniqueness and to convey to them his conviction that they had the opportunity to make a distinctive contribution to saving the world. The Icarus Project collective*5 wrote:
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. . . . [Y]ou 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.33
For the first few years of The Icarus Project this was a leitmotif of DuBrul and McNamara: the mad “have visions about how things could be different, why they need to be different, and it’s painful to keep them silent.” Furthermore, the mad were “a vital part of making the planet whole.” Whereas the psychiatric survivors’ movement focused on fighting to revolutionize the mental health system, The Icarus Project set its sights on the world, as expressed in their mission statement, “We believe we have mad gifts to be cultivated and taken care of. . . . 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. . . .”34 The name Icarus was chosen to indicate that these gifts could be dangerous if not treated with care.
Unfortunately by the time I interviewed him for this book in September 2009 (see chapter 9) DuBrul had undergone a major transformation and had repudiated many of his previous ideas and retreated to a more conservative stance; this was a year after he had an unexpected breakdown. Although he still anticipated rejoining the movement in the future, he no longer thought mad people would play a “vanguard” role in transforming society. He still believed that the world was in a process of spiritual transformation, as evidenced (he said) by the people inspired by Eckhart Tolle, but he felt that the Mad Pride movement should be very modest about the contribution it can make to the process. “We have a role to play but . . . I don’t have the audacity to think that we’re that important,” he said.
As of 2011, DuBrul has become active in Mad Pride again—though not with The Icarus Project. The question arises: What next? It seems The Icarus Project will continue to emphasize their spiritual differences from normal people. Will they evolve to the point—which DuBrul had ephemerally reached—where they come to define their identity in terms of a “calling” to act as catalysts of utopian/messianic transformation and spiritual evolution? This was clearly where DuBrul had seemed to be moving with his “dangerous gifts” idea, before he changed his mind in 2009. Furthermore he had written in 2008 that the mad are “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” (see chapter 9).
McNamara espoused beliefs similar to DuBrul. She wrote that a few weeks of mania could give one access to a sense of understanding that it could take “years of meditation” to achieve, access to visions of “the wholeness” of the universe and “the interconnected nature of love, access to a sense of time and space that allows one to discern what is and what is not important.”35 Like several of the subjects interviewed she was aware that one often has these revelations “before you are ready to hold them in your head.”36 Yet she suspects that madness may be a key to “opening doors” in a society that is “rapidly constructing walls around possibility at every bend.”37 She writes in a more poetic and allusive manner than DuBrul, but she seemed to agree in the most general sense with the point stated—that the visions of the mad are key to the spiritual transformation of the planet. She wrote, “We need to imagine a globe without limits. . . . We are like seeds and we create words like millennia and madness that grow a world around us. . . . We need to imagine a place for visions like that, we need to imagine an atlas where the experiences we label ‘psychosis’ and ‘mania’ don’t get written off the map. Or quarantined to hospitals and penitentiaries.”38 Like DuBrul she also became less radical—or at least less outspoken—after she had an unexpected breakdown in 2007, a year before DuBrul’s so-called psychotic episode.
Some of the activists in Mad Pride tend to distrust the very idea of leadership. Madigan Shive wrote me in 2009 to warn me against making a hero of DuBrul. At that time she had read a brief summary of my book but not my profile of DuBrul, which might have surprised her since I frequently expressed disagreement with DuBrul’s views. She warned me that “individual narratives” reflect and foster the individualistic ethos of capitalism, and she asserted that “collective liberation narratives” are the basis of Mad Pride. But I do not agree with this premise. I believe that individual narratives inspire and empower other individuals—of which the “masses” are composed—to break from psychiatry and join Mad Pride; individuals can be role models for other individuals.
I know that one person’s life can be changed by reading or hearing the story of another person who “beat the odds.” It is our nature to be influenced by “role models”; this is not pernicious. There is a dialectic between the individual and the mass. The denigration of individual narratives often derives from a collectivist ideology, which I consider repressive (but a discussion of this is beyond the scope of this book). Suffice it to state that creative and responsible individual leaders and new “collective” or organizational formations are both necessary if Mad Pride as a collective entity, a movement, is to grow and become (as stated in their mission statement) a transformative force “in an oppressive and damaged world. . . .”
New leaders—or whatever they want to call themselves—will inevitably emerge who will provide a theoretical orientation for Mad Pride, just as David Oaks (and Judi Chamberlin before him) provided a theoretical orientation (derived primarily from Thomas Szasz and Peter Breggin) for the psychiatric survivors’ movement.39 I wrote this book partly with the hope of influencing the development of this orientation and prompting a belated consideration of the 1960s Laingian paradigm that, as noted, had only an ephemeral effect on the mental patients’ liberation movement. Of course Laing had become famous before the worldview of postmodern pluralism had eclipsed the Romantic messianic perspective that was popular in the countercultural 1960s.
As philosopher Richard Tarnas aptly wrote, “The underlying intellectual ethos [of our age] is one of disassembling established structures, deflating pretensions, exploding beliefs, unmaking appearances—a hermeneutics of suspicion in the spirit of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.”40 Radical deconstruction is salutary but, I submit, only if it is complemented by the commitment to an overall vision of redemption, a vision of the unification of spirit and nature, of conscious and unconscious, male and female, sanity and madness, body and soul, the sacred and the profane—as envisioned, for example, by the Western Romantic philosophical tradition or by Sri Aurobindo or Christianity at its best. But such a vision or narrative is viewed from the postmodern perspective (which is dominant now even on the intellectual left, which was once a natural home for the “utopian” redemptive perspective in secular form) as “intellectual authoritarianism”—or religious superstition.
The hallmark of postmodernism is the valorization of difference and diversity and a rejection of “the tyranny of wholes” in favor of pluralism or relativism. Tarnas brilliantly captures the spirit of the postmodernist vantage point: “Grand theories and universal overviews cannot be sustained without producing empirical falsification and intellectual authoritarianism. To assert general truths is to impose a spurious dogma on the chaos of phenomena. Respect for contingency and discontinuity limits knowledge to the local and specific. Any alleged comprehensive, coherent outlook is at best no more than a temporary useful fiction masking chaos, at worst an oppressive fiction masking relationships of power, domination and subordination.”41 The virtual obliteration of any kind of unifying Romantic narrative—and of the redemptive-messianic vision in general—is a product of the postmodern era.
Since the mad are a marginal group, sensitive understandably to the threat of domination due to their experiences at the hands of Psychiatry, and inclined to celebrate diversity, the postmodern perspective (as defined above by Tarnas) has its appeal to Mad Pride activists. This appeal is strengthened by the apparent anachronism of Romantic or other messianic-redemptive narratives in a postmodern age when ironic detachment (as opposed to passionate involvement) is celebrated as one of the premium virtues and Romantic-utopian yearnings or messianic hopes are viewed as naive, or worse—dangerous.42 But I believe its appeal to the mad is superficial—based on an evasion of confronting the metaphysical significance of madness. My own question is this: Will Mad Pride leaders have the courage, the “audacity,” to go beyond post-modern pluralism, to go beyond identity politics and affirm—perhaps based on a sense of loyalty to revelations that came to them in moments of madness*6, 43—a unifying messianic-redemptive vision?
With DuBrul temporarily in retirement from Mad Pride in 2010, Will Hall had often found himself in the spotlight as a leading spokesperson for The Icarus Project or the Mad Pride movement in general. Hall is a skillful and highly motivated organizer and a smart, intellectually inquisitive activist, but judging from his writings and his interviews as the moderator of Madness Radio, my sense is that he does not believe his role as a spokesperson for Mad Pride is to provide intellectual leadership for Mad Pride activists. Nor does he view the Mad Pride movement in neo-Laingian terms as the catalyst of a spiritual-social-ecological transformation or revolution.
He seems more inclined to raise intelligent questions than to provide answers—which he does very well as the moderator of Madness Radio. In fact, like many Mad Pride activists, he probably believes that presenting one narrative (however inspiring) or one perspective (however empowering) as the truth is old-fashioned or “authoritarian.” I suspect he is temperamentally inclined to adopt a postmodern pluralistic approach that invites activists to entertain a variety of different perspectives on reality while at the same time retaining a critical view of the establishment.*7 In 2011 DuBrul wrote his latest views on Mad Pride—he does not agree with the perspective he expressed in the Icarus mission statement (see chapter 11). So the future today is uncertain.
What Is to Be Done? Adopting a High Messianic Perspective
Mad Pride, as noted, emerged spontaneously; its leaders did not evolve out of the psychiatric survivors’ movement. From my perspective what is needed now is a more conscious, historically informed, and theoretically aware leadership to guide the Mad Pride movement, to mount a sustained, intellectually informed attack on the dominant materialist paradigm of modern society—the paradigm that defines madness as pathology and messianism as pathology or anachronistic. As noted below, one of the main weaknesses of DuBrul as a leader (a role he does not necessarily want) is that he had not (at the time of our last interview) familiarized himself with the variety of intellectual influences on the broader movement—of thousands of mental patients and a small group of dissident psychiatrists and other professionals—of which he was an heir. The mad need leaders (however temporary) who will encourage them—as DuBrul had begun to do as a “leader” of The Icarus Project—to make use of their dangerous gifts and creativity to undermine the hegemony of consensus reality and propagate a messianic-redemptive (utopian) vision of possibility, of “reality.” They must encourage them to reach for the moon—a perspective DuBrul shied away from after 2008 (see chapter 9).
Since the moment of its inception Mad Pride has been empowering mad people to affirm their madness. I am arguing in this book for the importance of taking this process one step further: I want to see the Mad Pride movement become a catalyst for an epochal spiritual transformation of humanity. I believe the mad need a vast vision and an imposing sense of their own power in order to motivate them to overcome the obstacles that have been placed in their path by Psychiatry, to give them the courage to believe there can be a resolution to the problems of the world that impinge so acutely on their psyches. For their own sense of well-being, the mad need to be inspired by a confirmation of their own private messianic visions. Without appealing to a larger sense of mission based on a messianic-redemptive vision, the Mad Pride movement will eventually lose its élan and become just another self-help movement based on identity politics.
Looking at one of The Icarus Project forums (“Alternate Dimensions or Psychotic Delusions”) I was struck by an online “conversation” in which several mad persons discussed having a sense of mission. “Serine” (each person used a working name) writes on The Icarus Project Forum on February 7, 2007:
Hi, I am a 31 yr [sic] old single mom, and I have BP [“bipolar disorder”] with psychosis. When I go into mania, I have conversation with God and He has told me how He plans to bring together the plan for the ages. Or how he is going to bring about global awareness. And of course it is something that I have to do. Now every time I go into mania, I am consumed by it, when I come out I am ‘normal’ but still believe it. I mean what better thing is there to believe than God has chosen you to do an earthly mission for Him. Anybody else out there in the same boat? What do they call it . . . Grandious [sic] delusions?
One person responds, “I had a bit of a messiah complex once. I wasn’t talking to god or anything, but I did feel ‘chosen.’” Another forum member, “Hen,” responds “Often times when I am so sick of my life there is something in me that thinks that God picked me to do something special. I have always felt that way and I think I am getting closer and closer to the path to something.”
“Shaman 2012” advises Serine, “I believe I’m on a mission. I believe others know they are on a mission. But we cannot dwell in these thoughts, they can drive us mad.” (Pun intended?) “Ianus” responds to Serine, “I frequently have a feeling of being, somehow divinely chosen. Main difference for me, is I kinda believe all people are in a way divinely chosen. The rational way I put this is everyone has their ability to effect [sic] the world around them in either positive or negative ways. Is there the possibility that there is some external force active and driving the universe to a nebulous end goal? Yes, but there is no way to scientifically prove such a theory.” “Bisco” writes, “I’ve definitely felt I’m on a mission to save the world. Sometimes, I just get this feeling that by being here I am somehow helping to save the world, like I did my work, and now the world can go on.” Forum member “Turbokat” writes philosophically, “I think the problem is that most people don’t think they have a mission to save the world, they think they have a carte blanche to destroy it in little ways every day, and anyone who thinks they have a mission to save it is certifiable and to be pitied. But, God speaks through many religions of something like a mission to at least follow instructions and make the world a better place. One way around it is to simply not believe in God.”44
Psychiatrists believe these sentiments and profound philosophical reflections are delusional, egocentric (“ideas of reference”), and “grandiose.” From the shrunken reductionist Freudian or biopsychiatric view, messianic feelings constitute a psychotic and narcissistic compensation (“grandiose”) for the low self-esteem of an ego that is ostensibly underdeveloped and “damaged” due to inadequate child rearing or, alternatively, an inexplicable product of a chemically imbalanced or defective brain. This disparaging and spiritually myopic view of the messianic feelings and often deeply spiritual and profound insights of the mad is adopted by virtually all mental health professionals today—even most of the transpersonal psychologists, following the lead of the erstwhile New Age spokesman and philosopher Ken Wilber.
But what is striking to me in the comments of the mad are the absence of arrogance (of “narcissism” as the shrinks call it)—in fact, the humility—with which these feelings are shared on The Icarus Project forum and the profound philosophical insights expressed by these mad people. Ianus’s interpretation is astute: he (or she) believes “all people are in a way divinely chosen” and suggests perceptively that this feeling may arise because one is in accord with a “force” that is driving the universe to a goal. Turbokat thinks the problem is that most people do not think they have a mission to save the world! These comments demonstrate that those among the mad who have not yet reached a plateau of self-confidence and maturity (attaining such a state is a task greatly hindered by Psychiatry) need leaders who have reached such a stage of maturity (as have the “leaders” in the Mad Pride movement) and are willing to assure the mad that what they are able to do is of utmost importance—of messianic significance. They need leaders who will encourage their messianic feelings that they can bring “transformation” to an “oppressive and damaged world”—to quote again from the original mission statement of The Icarus Project. They need to be provided by Mad Pride with opportunities to make a contribution.
This kind of messianic perspective was affirmed by two of my interviewees, Ed Whitney and Paul Levy. Whitney believed at certain points that he was the messiah, as did Levy. However—just like the persons on The Icarus Project forum—neither was egocentric or arrogant about his claim. Both were all too eager to yield to others or to get others to share with them the burden and privilege of being the Messiah or a messiah. Levy’s democratic approach was exemplary (and similar to Whitney’s). He says, “When I was having my spiritual awakening . . . I was having the realization of being the messiah too, but I was realizing we all are the messiah. I actually made out these business cards that just said ‘the messiah,’ and I was giving them out to people, and I was saying ‘Look, here’s my card, and if you want some you can have some too, you can give them out to people’” (see Levy’s interview in chapter 14). Society needs as many people as possible who believe that we can change the world: we need as many messiahs as possible—not egocentric but humble messiahs. It is quite possible to be humble and feel a sense of a calling to serve God. And who else but the mad—as DuBrul said—are “crazy enough to think they can change the world and have the outlandish visions and drive to be able to do it”?
Levy, a spiritual teacher today, still believes in a messianic transformation.
If people tell me I am a “dreamer” when I profess these idealistic and seemingly naïve beliefs, I will simply say, to quote the late John Lennon, “I am not the only one.” There are ever-expanding numbers of us—millions? billions?—around the planet who in various ways are being drafted by the Self to be channels for a deeper process of awakening, enabling a vast range of entirely new and previously unimagined possibilities to become available to us. The universe is dreaming itself awake through us. When enough of us simply recognize . . . that the universe is waking itself up through us, we can “come together,” I “imagine,” and help each other to deepen and stabilize our mutually shared awakening, what I call “dreaming ourselves awake.”45
Levy has explained this process from an esoteric-Christian perspective as developed by Carl Jung. This parallels the evolutionary explanation I gave above by Sri Aurobindo, but it also specifically explains why the term messiah may be meaningful to many mad people in the West. Levy writes:
We are being invited to stop limiting who we imagine ourselves to be, to allow our life to become imbued with a deeper sense of meaning. . . . God, is incarnating not just through one man, as it did through Christ over 2000 years ago, but is incarnating through all of humanity. Jung talked about, “. . . a broadening process of incarnation. Christ was the first attempt by God to incarnate and transform itself. Now humanity as a whole will be the subject of the divine incarnation process.” What is happening in our world right now is the Second Coming of Christ, what Jung calls the “Christification of many.”46
As Levy made clear, this means that many people must not only conform to the image of God, they must themselves assume—collectively—the messianic functions of Jesus, of Christ. The mad are among the first to feel God seeking to incarnate through all humanity. In other words, this process may be beginning today with the Christification of the mad, which includes, above all, assuming a “messianic” role—as a group, as Mad Pride.
Cultural transformation occurs when the “crack in the cosmic egg” splits apart and messianic possibilities become visible to the eye of the collective imagination. This is what happened in the 1960s. The crack began to widen again when The Icarus Project was formed and when The Icarus Project Collective became catalysts for an autonomous Mad Pride movement—when DuBrul and McNamara were trusting their mad inspirations and writing that madness was the missing key to resolving the crisis of the modern world, the crisis of civilization.
DuBrul wrote that “because of the success of this incredible mad community of ours” he had found the courage to make spiritual explorations that he had shied away from in the past. DuBrul was clear in 2008: the mad have a leading role (as a vanguard, to use the term derived from Lenin) to play in the process of spiritual transformation. The Christification of the mad (he did not use those terms) was taking place, and The Icarus Project and DuBrul were catalysts. What the future holds is anybody’s guess. When DuBrul had a couple of his breakdowns he thought he was the messiah. As he formulated it on his blog in spring 2008 the messianic function was distributed (Moshe Idel’s phrase) among many of the mad (for further discussion of this point, look under the subheading Mad Pride: The Revolt Against the Monoculture). By 2009, DuBrul had eschewed these messianic ideas.
Of course, I am aware that everything I am saying is insane from the viewpoint of the established order (which, from my point of view, illustrates its insanity). The established order arrogates to itself, to its Scientists of the Mind—as psychiatrists, as psychiatric drug alchemists, as modern society’s secular priesthood—the right and the power to define what is reality, what is sanity, what is normality, and to conceal its normative concepts and values in allegedly value-neutral medical language. But as an intellectual heretic and am not influenced by the psychiatric conception of reality. From my perspective—shared by everyone I interviewed—normality is the state of insanity, of spiritual derangement that society must transcend. As psychiatric heretic Laing wrote, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”47 In Laing’s mind normality is insanity, whereas madness may be a path to “hypersanity.”48
Now is the time for transformation; the “hour of God” cannot be postponed. As the world founders on the verge of the abyss—as ecological disasters and wars become more prevalent—it seems apparent to me that we are approaching a momentous time, a kairos. “A kairos is a moment in history marked by the entry of the Kingdom of God into human affairs,”49 so writes historian Robert Abzug in 1994, inspired by Paul Tillich’s use of the term. The Second Awakening was such a kairos—or rather it was believed to be such by the reformers of the day, (e.g., the abolitionists) (see part 5), many of whom were certain as Christians that when slavery was abolished the kingdom of God would be inaugurated on Earth, ushering in a period of harmony, unity, and eternal life—as described by Isaiah and St. Paul (again, see my discussion in part 5).
The historian David Brion Davis has described a kairos as a period of reform in which an “eschatological leap” becomes possible, one that overcomes “demonic powers and then transcends the limits of previous political, racial and economic history.”50 Davis’s definition enriches the one above since it refers also to a victory over demonic powers and mentions the worldly changes that have to be effected as the precondition for God’s salvific action and ingression into the world. The Christians of this era were Reform activists, not fatalistic like the Christian right.
A kairos entails a crisis of the paradigms, a disenchantment with the old idols, and it presumes the messianic vision has entered into the consciousness of the masses. It is pitted against demonic powers that represent the old order. McLoughlin substitutes the term “cultural revitalization” for kairos—the two are synonymous. Cultural revitalizations constitute “the awakening of a people caught in an outmoded, dysfunctional world view to the necessity of converting their mindset, their behavior, and their institutions to more relevant or more functionally useful ways of understanding and coping with the changes in the world they live in.”51
The outmoded order in the current situation consists of the corporate capitalist mentality and institutions. What the young anticorporate radicals call the 1 percent are the beneficiaries of the present order, but the order is sustained by the allegiance and habits of the masses of Americans who are completely oblivious—unaware if not indifferent—to the harm inflicted on other beings, including humans, and are deluded by cultural myths. The environmentalist Derrick Jensen writes:
Deluded by myths of progress and suffering from the psychosis of technomania complicated by addiction to depleting oil reserves, industrial society leaves a crescendo of atrocities in its wake. A very partial list would include the Bhopal chemical disaster, numerous oil spills, the illegal depleted uranium-spewing occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, mountaintop removal, the nuclear meltdown of Fukushima, the permanent removal of 95 percent of the large fish from the oceans (not to mention full-on systemic collapse of those oceans), indigenous communities replacement by oil wells, the mining of coltan for cell phones and Playstations along the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Rwanda border—resulting in tribal warfare and the near-extinction of the Eastern Lowland gorilla. . . . As though 200 species going extinct each day were not enough, climate change, a direct result of burning fossil fuels, has proved not only to be as unpredictable as it is real, but as destructive as it is unpredictable.52
Even Occupy Wall Street, the most significant populist movement since the 1960s, seems unaware of the gravity of the danger humanity faces. Millions of people around the world have correctly identified the corporate vultures who are destroying society, ravaging the Earth. However there is not yet a sense of life or death urgency, not yet an awareness that the decisive battle is approaching: if the corporations win this battle humanity will be destroyed, all life on Earth may be destroyed. In 2007 James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist, wrote, “Our home planet is now dangerously near a tipping point. . . the planet has been warm enough to keep ice sheets off North America and Europe, but cool enough for ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica to be stable.” Global warming created by human use of fossil fuels has “brought us to the precipice of a great tipping point. If we go over the edge, it will be a transition to a different planet. . . . [T]he trip will exterminate a large fraction of the species on the planet.” Hansen called this a “planetary emergency” and said “we must move onto a new energy direction within a decade to avoid setting in motion unstoppable climate change with irreversible effects.”
Hansen is not alone: as David Orr, professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College pointed out, not only does humanity face the risk of being completely destroyed, by some accounts by the end of the century, but “we have been alerted, warned and warned again by ecologists, geologists, systems analysts, physicists, Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel laureates, . . . but so far without much effect.”53 Obama, who campaigned on saving the environment, has shown complete disregard for it once in power. The corporate capitalist economic system is completely dysfunctional.
Just as the psychiatrists I discuss in this book will sell people poison to make money, so will our corporations and the politicians they own destroy life on the planet and the dreams of their own children if it will boost next year’s profit margins or get them reelected. They care neither about humanity nor the lives of their children, although they assume with enough money they can buy invulnerability for their families.
Two years ago British Petroleum accidentally dumped 180 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, creating a nightmare for marine life and the people in the region. Many Americans watched TV with horror, transfixed by the images of birds too drenched in oil to fly. However, the deep-water oil drilling continues in America, and BP has resumed drilling in the Gulf; even without an accident, carbon emissions that cause global warming increase. The candidate who campaigned against deep-water oil drilling became the president with friends in the industry. Obama, unlike the Republicans, acknowledges the existence and seriousness of climate change. Does that make him more or less guilty?
Many of the mad—the people labeled “schizophrenic,” “schizoaffective,” and “bipolar”—seem to know all about this. They have seen it in their visions. They have felt it. Since the culture values apathy, ignorance, and “self-imposed denial in the face of all this sadistic exploitation and violence,” these traits are considered normal signs of mental health. To lie awake at night worrying about birds drenched in oil is obviously abnormal—“mentally ill.” John Weir Perry said of the visions of the mad, “I’ve been told, by people looking back on the experience, that one thing that stands out most of all, beyond the feeling of isolation, is the perception that everything that comes up is divided into opposites: Good and Bad, God and the Devil, Us and Them, or whatever. . . . It takes the form of experiencing the world as caught in the grip of opposing forces, whether they be political, spiritual, cultural, ideological, or even racial. In recent years I’ve noticed it’s ‘those who might destroy the planet’ versus ‘those who are ecologically minded.’”54
The mad have seen correctly; their visions mirror the deeper reality. Perry noticed this about his patients in 1982, before most people were talking about ecology. Perry points out that their visions unfold sequentially and that after the phase of conflict, the mad typically have seen a “messianic vision.” Haunted by the horrors of the world, they still dream of redemption, of a return to Eden. As Perry wrote in the late 1990s, “This vision of oneness is expressed in the messianic ideation, along with the recognition that the world is going to be marked by a style of living emphasizing equality and tolerance, harmony and love.”55
In the depths of their unconscious the mad have experienced the demons of war and greed and held fast to their vision of paradise. It is for this reason that I believe that from their ranks—once they get off toxic psychiatric drugs and realize that they are clairvoyant, not sick—will come many of the prophets who will help to make the messianic vision a force within history—to create the conditions for a kairos (see discussion in chapters 15 and 17).
As I will argue in later chapters, the Mad Pride movement—if it recovers the vision and sense of mission that provided the basis of its original inspiration—could well provide the spark that will set fire to the messianic tinder that has smoldered for centuries in the depths of the collective imagination of humanity. If this occurs, it will be said in hindsight that the new spiritual awakening was a success. It will be said that it so altered the commonsense conception of what is important, what is real, and what is possible that humanity was saved from self-annihilation—that we found the trust and courage to conquer the ruling demons of our age and to finally make the eschatological leap into a higher phase of our spiritual and historical evolution, and thus to continue on our divine journey.