The Spiritual Gift of Madness by Seth Farber Ph.D

Author:Seth Farber, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Psychiatry
ISBN: 9781594777035
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2012-04-16T16:00:00+00:00

The Revolt against the Monoculture

In 2007 I had first discovered The Icarus Project and was fascinated by what I read on the website—scintillating, highly intelligent, and often brilliantly perceptive online conversations between many psychiatric survivors regarding madness and spirituality, corporate capitalism, and the soullessness of modern society, to name just a few topics. I had been particularly impressed by some of the online articles written by the cofounder of The Icarus Project, McNamara. I wrote DuBrul that I was planning to write a book on the Mad Pride movement and would like to meet him sometime since he was located in New York. Since he had not read my first book, I wanted to give him a copy.

We met a few weeks later at a local coffee shop. I was impressed by his maturity (he was twenty-nine) and his personable manner. He was thin, pleasant looking, casually attired, with an appealing air of self-confidence and enthusiasm. (I should add that he did not conform to the stereotype of the ex-mental patient—displaying a bizarre manner created by high dosages of psychiatric drugs—but in appearance and manner seemed like other social activists I knew in the various antiwar movements over the years.) I told him I was impressed by The Icarus Project’s exploration of the connection between madness and spirituality, but I wondered why he did not more explicitly repudiate the mental illness construct.

He responded that he thought it was irrelevant. I was disappointed when I discovered that DuBrul had not read any of my favorite critics of “the myth of mental illness”: not Szasz, not Laing, not Peter Breggin. At this time I had not read his 2002 article in The San Francisco Chronicle, so I was taken aback when he told me that he was “grateful” to lithium since it had “saved his life.” “But why do you feel a need to take lithium now?” I asked. He responded, ‘‘What if I told you I take it to control my superpowers, which otherwise could overwhelm me?” I was baffled. I asked him if he was aware of the harmful “side effects” of lithium. He was. He said he had been on the radio with David Oaks, and he suspected my ideas were similar to Oaks’s; nonetheless, he had not read Oaks’s mentor, Dr. Breggin, whose writings had steeled Oaks’s resolve to stay off psychiatric drugs. He shrugged when I wondered how it is that one of the leaders in the Mad Pride movement, an intellectual who reads many books, avoids reading the critics of mainstream Psychiatry!

I took out a copy of my book Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels, quickly inscribed it to him as a comrade in the movement, and then gave it to him. (I discovered later that he never read my book either—at least not a couple years after our meeting.) Before we parted he warmly invited me to not just visit the Icarus website but to introduce myself and post on it. I said I would.

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