The Spiritual Gift of Madness Quotes

“Original Statement by Hunger Strikers to Psychiatric Association, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the U.S. Office of the Surgeon General 1. A Hunger Strike to Challenge International Domination by Biopsychiatry. This fast is about human rights in mental health. The psychiatric pharmaceutical complex is heedless of its oath to “first do no harm.” Psychiatrists are able with impunity to: Incarcerate citizens who have committed crimes against neither persons nor property. Impose diagnostic labels on people that stigmatize and defame them. Induce proven neurological damage by force and coercion with powerful psychotropic drugs. Stimulate violence and suicide with drugs promoted as able to control these activities. Destroy brain cells and memories with an increasing use of electroshock (also known as electro-convulsive therapy). Employ restraint and solitary confinement—which frequently cause severe emotional trauma, humiliation, physical harm, and even death—in preference to patience and understanding. Humiliate individuals already damaged by traumatizing assaults to their self-esteem. These human rights violations and crimes against human decency must end. While the history of psychiatry offers little hope that change will arrive quickly, initial steps can and must be taken. At the very least, the public has the right to know IMMEDIATELY the evidence upon which psychiatry bases its spurious claims and treatments, and upon which it has gained and betrayed the trust and confidence of the courts, the media, and the public.21”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“In fact, in the early twentieth century it became popular for psychiatrists to write books on Jesus’s psychological condition: the majority opinion among these writers was that he was a paranoid schizophrenic.”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“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 the 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 of the world would be to stir a momentous rush of enthusiasm into new concerns.”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“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 sociobiological function that we have not recognized.' This stunning insight of Laing's has not been fully appreciated by psychiatric survivors.

This idea is the basis of the vision of the eminent Indian Philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo. Though we are presently mired by ignorance, human beings sooner or later must ascend to a more enlightened state, we must realize the divine life, the eternal life, on Earth. This will involve a profound change of society, 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' will be transcended by 'newer ones' more conducive to human happiness. 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.' The dream of heaven on Earth – the recovery of paradise that has haunted the collective imagination for millennia – 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. 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.”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“In the culture of The Icarus Project some years ago we developed a rough prototype of a document we call a Wellness Map (or affectionately a “Mad Map”). It’s a very practical document to be written in good health and shared with friends and loved ones and it starts with the simple (yet not always easy to answer) question: How are you when you’re well? What does wellness look like to you? This question is followed by: What are the signs that you’re not so well? and eventually: What are the steps that you and your community need to take to get you back to wellness?”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“While we respect whatever treatment decisions people make, we do not define ourselves as essentially diseased, disordered, broken, faulty, and existing within the bounds of DSM-IV diagnosis. We are exploring unknown territory and don’t steer by the default maps outlined by docs and pharma companies. We’re making new maps.” This affirmation that the so-called mentally”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“True sanity entails the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self completely adjusted to our alienated social reality . . . and through this death a rebirth . . . and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.”16”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement

“At this point in history, in my view, psychiatry has been almost completely bought out by the drug companies. . . . Psychiatrists have become the minions of drug”
― Seth Farber, The Spiritual Gift of Madness: The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement