Crazy, Creative, Visionary, or All of the Above? The Hidden Gifts of Madness and “Mental Illness”

“The only choice once your world has been torn apart is to find your genius and live with that. ‘Normal’ is out of the question. The healing for anyone going through great tragedy is finding your natural spirit and your genius that was waiting to be found. That can now become the cohering principle in your life. The idea of patching someone up and back into normal when they’ve had extremely abnormal experiences is a misunderstanding.”
― Michael Meade

In the years that I worked in traumatized, poverty-driven communities and in my conversations with high school youth who were 5150’d at least once a week for “mental illness,” I’ve witnessed the sheer dysfunctionality of how our institutions deal with social and mental health challenges. I once witnessed a police officer tackle and arrest a student in front of her peers after she was found cutting her wrists with a plastic knife under the table in a school family meeting. The dysfunctionality continued to express itself when two tragic suicides occurred during the few years I worked at this high school. A flurry of school psychologists in clipboards and suits came to the school asking students directly impacted to fill out a survey rating their feelings of suicide, depression, and anxiety every day for the next month to closely "monitor their wellness." Furthermore, the approach to mental health was one of treating and fixing symptoms and working to prevent discomfort at all costs, which didn’t empower youth to step into the growing pains of life, be seen for their struggle, and feel more capable because of their challenges. More layers of dysfunctionality were revealed when youth who questioned authority and school policies were seen as troublemakers. This lead to punitive threats and surveillance efforts by administrators to keep them in line and mitigate liability concerns. Sometimes, if the young person was deemed “worthy” enough, they would be referred to me or their counselors based on “loving concern” for their mental well-being.

I remember one student I worked with had intense anxiety attacks daily, and she would often come in to talk with me. She told me about the times she attempted to end her own life, and the voices in her head that made her feel insane and ashamed to be alive. She expressed deep frustration with how invisible she felt by her psychiatrist and parents, who cared more about the dosage of her antidepressants than the needs of her actual lived experiences.

“Am I… just like, crazy? I just feel like there’s so much more to reality than what we’re taught. I don’t even get it…” she had choked out one day, shaking uncontrollably.

I kneeled next to her and looked her straight in the eye. “Sounds like you’re not fitting into the narrow box that you’ve been given. That’s a good thing. Actually, that’s quite healthy. Your suffering shows me that you’re searching to find who you are in a system that rewards us for conforming rather than thinking for ourselves, and for suppressing our needs to be accepted by authority figures around us. So let’s talk about the real you, underneath all this conditioning. I went through my own experiences of this growing up too. I get it, and I’m here to support you.”

She burst into tears. “I’ve never felt so seen in my life,” she said.

Over the course of time, our weekly conversations organically expanded to exploring controversial social issues that influence how we perceive the world, like long-time educator John Taylor Gatto’s work on schooling vs. education and the history of public school indoctrination. We talked about the real story behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the failure of the War on Drugs, and other challenging social topics. She was so compelled by what we were talking about, she brought in a bunch of other students. We ended up meeting every week to talk openly about relationships, sex, love, psychedelics, death, corporate corruption, suicide, and anything that felt meaningful to learn and grow together about. Word started getting out amongst the students that these dialogues were happening, and I eventually created an open circle where anyone could join these spaces during office hours or afterschool (if you're wondering if I got in trouble for this, I did. The school district wrote me up for violating many protocols, but that's a whole other story.)

At the end of the year, a whole bunch of students wrote me a letter saying how much our conversations changed their lives. They felt that feeling free to be themselves and getting real together was more important than coping skills or breathing strategies.

Receiving their gratitude was one of the highlights of working at this high school.

There are striking parallels between opening up to our inner struggles and the potential for wholeness and depth of character. As the restorative justice coordinator, I witnessed profound expressions of love and courage in the troubled youth I worked with, in spite of their violent actions. Through the darkness of my own past and those I’ve served and supported over the years, I’ve noticed that those who are “acting out”, the ones on the fringes, are ones closest to the liberation from the oppressive mono-culture systems we live in. Therapists who work with family systems recognize that the healthiest child is the one that is presenting symptoms of perceived problematic behavior. In other words, a healthy child’s behavior is one that is willing to react to and resist dysfunctional family dynamics, as opposed to conforming to the dysfunction.

However, many of the youth “acting out” are not given a safe space to help them process and understand their own needs and motivations. Instead of safety and acceptance, they are punished and separated from the community, which exacerbates their struggles. I once heard that feeling safe is the freedom to cultivate your authentic existence, amidst limiting social norms. When we feel safe to be ourselves, our own personal awakening can serve as a gateway to transcending systems that no longer serve the whole. How might this help awaken the collective transformation we so desperately need in the face of overt and covert efforts to keep us divided and socially managed?

Freedom Sculpture by artist Zenos Frudakis

The Work of John Weir Perry

“At critical junctures, outer trouble and the inner need to grow conspire to set each of us on a path of awakening and initiation.”
― Michael Meade, The Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul

John Weir Perry was a Jungian psychiatrist who founded an experimental residential facility called Diabasis in San Francisco during the 70s for young adults who were experiencing the initial days of their first "acute schizophrenic break.”

The results were incredible. Without any medication, electro-shock or locked doors, "schizophrenics" were able to go through their inner upheaval and emerge on the other side, as Perry put it, "weller than well." Instead of being sent to a mental hospital or expected to take medication for the rest of their lives, people would live at Diabasis for the first three months, spend three more months in a half-way home, and then return to the outside world with few if any relapses of their "schizophrenia.”

How did this happen?

Over the course of those months, people in this program would engage in painting, martial arts, dance, massage, meditation, sculpture art, meaningful conversation, and other ways of giving creative expression to the imagery inside their head. There were rage rooms where people could release their anger, yet they were never locked against their will and always had the opportunity to talk about their process openly with trusted staff members. Throughout the program, nothing was scheduled or mandatory. The only house rule was “no violence to property or persons.” They could even dash out naked into the streets if they wanted to. The most important thing was that they felt a sense of belonging and were of their own free will in the house.

In his book The Far Side of Madness, Perry asserted that instead of therapy operating as a process of imposing order through strict management, therapy could also embody as “fluid process of sensitively following the Individual’s concerns as they evolve through the process in order to catalyze it.”

This whole approach is essentially one of releasing, rather than suppression. We allowed everything and encouraged its expression – not toward chaos, but toward communication! Communication tends to order. This is a most important point in psychiatry, but the common opinion is that it is very dangerous. When you actually do it, however, you find exactly the opposite is true: people get over their preoccupations very quickly. The whole point here is to deliver the visionary content to somebody and to be able to appreciate its symbolic relevance to the inner process of personal and social renewal.Once it's delivered, the process keeps moving by itself. – Perry, The Far Side of Madness

Unlike society’s negative response to behaviors that deviate from social norms, Perry saw their behavior as a healthy process of transformation for the individual and society at large. In his book, he quotes a worker at Diabasis who stated:

We feel that what is called madness can best be understood as a journey of exploration and discovery, regulated by the psyche, in which the various elements of the personality can be reorganized in a more fruitful and self-fulfilling way. This process can only occur, however, in an environment in which these altered states of consciousness are respected as valid ways of being, rather than being derided as ‘crazy’ and of no value.’

Building upon Jung’s ideas, Perry’s work at the core was to nurture the relationship between personal growth and human evolution. When the psychotic episode is allowed to run free, a “re-alignment” of a person’s self-image and self-awareness takes place. “It sometimes happens that gifted persons come through a schizophrenic episode with profoundly significant insights or powerful new codes of morals for their culture, and actually become prophets and leaders of social reform.”

Creativity, Chaos, and Madness

Some of the great creative change-makers, thinkers, and artists of our times had tendencies towards madness and mental struggle, from Carl Jung’s The Red Book which reveals accounts of his deepest and at-times disturbing fantasies, van Gogh cutting his ear off, to Nicola Tesla’s intense hallucinations and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Since the time of the Greek philosophers, those who wrote about the creative process emphasized the willingness to cross and recross lines between rational and irrational thought. This often creates a sense of chaos to the linear mind that seeks to control and manage. Yet from a systems perspective, what looks chaotic to the linear mind is not chaotic to the creative and relational mind, which fundamentally understands we’re always interacting with our environment.

Creative systems theorist Charles Johnston describes this dynamic in his book, The Creative Imperative: Human Growth & Planetary Evolution, using the metaphor of an interpersonal relationship:

While we may talk about relationship in deterministic terms, what takes place is quite obviously neither just mechanical (I do this to you; you do this to me) nor just spiritual/fated (“it was meant to be”). If we look closely, we see that is clearly a creative process—a generative, evolving, and ultimately indeterminate process…It is through taking the risk to give shape to, and be shaped by, this fundamental formative dynamic that our being together takes on the qualities we call relationship.

Gareth Morgan in Images of Organizations further discusses the creativity in how systems interact with each other. He noticed that interactions within ecologies, organizations, and individuals are both ordered and chaotic, which creates an internal complexity. This complexity can create random disturbances and unpredictable events and relationships that reverberate throughout a system—creating novel patterns of change. By embracing rather than simplifying the chaos and complexity that exist in ourselves and the world, instability can become a creative resource for change.

Morgan gave the example of observing a colony of termites building their nest, as Earth is moved randomly by the termites’ movements. Variations in the terrain begin to emerge, which becomes the focus of the termites’ attention as they add to the emerging mounds. Random movements and disturbance of the terrain eventually create coherent columns, arches, and tunnels. Despite the unpredictability, chaos and randomness produce order and structure.

Termite mound at the village of Derby in Western Australia. Photographer: W. Bulach

Creative thinkers are often looking for what is emerging from systems interacting with each other. Thus, they will often be the ones that see through dysfunctional social norms that the masses have been habitually conditioned to believe in. Yet in a culture that rewards us for fitting in, their behaviors are tragically perceived as a pathology or illness.

There is an interesting study that examined 1.2 million Swedish patients from the country’s national registry and compared this sample against the entire Swedish population. What they found was that creative professionals were about 8% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. The study found this to be true for artists and scientists of all kinds. The most startling results were that writers were a whopping 121% more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the general population. Doesn’t this make sense? Writers often have the responsibility of holding the creative tension of life’s complexity, and integrating the full range of the human experience into form.

Shelley Carson, a Harvard psychologist and author of the book Your Creative Brain, suggests that genes contributing to mental problems have persisted across humanity in part because they also contribute to superior creativity. “Even though we know mental illness in and of itself is not conducive to survival of the individual, there may be aspects of mental illness that promote survival in the overall species.”

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves." Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman

Perry believed that our culture needs the psychic input of those on the fringes: the artists, mystics, “crazies”, and outliers of our society. He called them “visionaries” and not, for example, schizophrenics. However, it’s essential to provide a safe space for them to consciously go through their “Hero’s Journey” which often comes with incredible challenges. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell defines “The Hero’s Journey” as the process of an individual bringing forth in one’s life something that was never brought forth before.

The hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some [deep insight]. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning. – Campbell

My mentor in grad school would often say, “how do you stay in the soup but not get lost in it?” By staying grounded within our own hero’s journey, we might discover the hidden gifts and insights of our experiences.

Perry was particularly worried about what to do with our visionaries. The conventional response is to shut them up in hospitals or clinics, medicate them, or recommend they go into therapy and get over this state.

I think this is where the visionary experience becomes relevant in politics right today - that the inordinate fear that we have of world destruction is an image that you see in people's dreams; you see it in people's psychotic states, visionary states. And fundamentally, according to the history of it, it has to do with culture change – that the end of the world is the end of the culture form, not the actual globe, and that then the regeneration of the world is the regeneration of the culture with a whole lot of new outlook, new values, new world view.
And this is what I think we're really afraid of.

Cultural historian Anthony Wallace studied periods of turmoil in various cultures, and discovered patterns of how culture change occurs. It goes like this: first, under the new conditions, the old answers don't work, the old methods no longer hold, and the old values are no longer exclusively relevant. This leads to demoralization, which results very quickly in psychosomatic distress, and the abuse of alcohol or other drugs. From out of all this, shifts may occur through the activation of visionary states within certain people in the society. The gifted ones are those whose visions reach beyond what is known into the realm of the collective unconscious. Out of this, the new myth comes forth.

Therefore, Perry’s intentions were not to “diagnose” or denigrate outliers and those on the fringes, but to reexamine such rich transformation processes and to value the whole spectrum of the human experience. “Rather than what is pathological in mysticism, we ask: what is mystical in its intent in psychosis?”

Society’s rebirth is dependent upon continual psychic upheaval: a renewal of the social archetype rooted in each individual psyche. It is there that we find the true matrix of history. And when social institutions become too rigid, it is there that we uncover a creative means of transforming them. – Perry

With our diminishing trust in authority and limiting norms that protect us from the complexity of life, where do we find our real governance and ways of making meaning of our times? The modern problem of the psyche wrestles with this in order to produce a convincing new story, or myth, that will satisfy the need of the times.

The Power of Myth

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is. ― Joseph Campbell

Mythicist and storyteller Michael Meade says that there are always two stories going on in the world. One is the story of the ongoing drama of the world, and the other is the individual drama of human life. These two stories are connected. The more connected they are, the more the human understands the world.

The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.' – Joseph Campbell

Yet inside the dynamic of those two stories emerges a key question: what story or myth are you in? And story are we in when we know we're in trouble together?

Meade explores the myth of apocalypse, which is another old Greek word, which doesn't mean the end of everything. One meaning of apocalypse is a lifting of the veil, which means things that are usually hidden are now seen. Yet the greater meaning and mythic theme of apocalypse is that it symbolizes collapse and renewal, in which renewal/rebirth happens at the same time as collapse/death. What needs to die for new systems to be born? What story of renewal and initiation do we want to be connected to?

Meade felt that myths remind us of the larger patterns and stories of change across time and context. Myths invite us to trust the chaos of what’s emerging in society and take responsibility for our unique purpose during turbulent times, instead of being caught in fear and blind trust in authorities who benefit from our sense of separation and simultaneous cultural sameness with one another.

So what does this all mean for the future of humanity and larger world?

Psychologist Abraham Maslow initially proposed that self-actualization was at the top of the hierarchy of needs for personal development. However, shortly before Maslow passed away, he identified a tier above self-actualization: self-transcendence. Maslow described self-transcendence as the motivation to seek beyond the self. While a healthy personality includes individual success and mastery, he proposed that a fully developed person entails identifying with something greater and larger than the self. This includes transcending the practice of categorizing, judging and stereotyping based on the rules of society, and instead living through the inner guidance of their own character… in service to something outside of one’s own individual needs.

Maslow felt that we must free ourselves from the ways that environment and cultural ideas inhibit personal growth. While Maslow saw culture as important to maintain a sense of identity and belonging, the lack of independence or transcendence of one’s culture (enculturation) could lead to distortion of the way one sees the world, such that a person only identifies oneself with their prescribed cultural ideas. This frequently leads to perceiving the world and people from other cultures with different value systems, experiences, and beliefs only through the prism of one’s own views.

Maslow discussed the importance of self-transcended citizens and leaders as world problems and crises cannot be solved in isolation any longer. Isolation and polarization that comes with sticking to what we know become a disadvantage in being able to solve our own increasingly complex and diverse problems. Holding on to views isolated in one’s culture is often the foundation of global world conflicts, as we become increasingly unable to perceive the world on a wider plane, and we become increasingly not willing to understand or empathize with the plights of others, blinded by our own narratives. Thus, conflict, war, exclusion, and violence occur in order to convince or conquer groups that do not perceive the world as we do.

“Without self-transcendence, leaders will remain stuck in dichotomous thinking, and due to their isolation, will trigger a need to force attributes of security, familiarity and sameness unto others, to create a sort of manageability to alleviate their growing insecurity, trying to find their solace in an artificially created, simplistic universe, in stereotypes and in a static, polarized world.”
– Henry Venter, “Self-Transcendence: Maslow’s Answer to Cultural Closeness"

From my perspective, the next step is to name this emerging culture that wants to be born. How do we honor the whole range of the human experience, the stories that bring us together across time and space, and the lessons they teach us about ourselves and the world?

If we want to help new systems emerge, we must respect and support the outliers and fringe players of our society struggling in their own lives to help co-create a new story of what it means to be human.

“What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth.”― Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation

"Paintbrush Warrior", Artwork by Mark Henson