Crazywise:  Revisioning Narratives of Psychosis

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As someone who was told as an 18 year old that I had a biological brain disease and that my visions and behavior meant I needed to be held down and shot up with antipsychotic drugs for months in a locked mental hospital, I take very personally how our current psychiatric system treats young people who’ve been diagnosed with psychotic disorders. While I was fortunate enough to make my transformative journey from breakdown to breakthrough, there are a lot of people just like me who end up trapped in a narrative of disease with programs and treatments that keep them stuck in a cycle of dependency and chronicity.

I so badly want all the young people who are going through the kinds of experiences I went through to have more guidance, more mentorship, more role models, more community support from people who have struggled in similar ways. I want there to be places for young people to go where they can heal, people who’ve been trained to see those young people as solutions and not as problems. I see the potential for this type of support and camaraderie in the modern day Peer Specialist workforce and some of the First Episode Psychosis programs that are emerging around the country, but in order to create a mental health system that works for people we need to be able to shift our perspectives and truly adopt narratives of liberation rather than narratives of sickness.

So with that thought I highly, highly recommend you watch this 3 minute trailer, it’s mad thought provoking and beautiful:

I’m deeply impressed with the people who made this documentary—I’ve never seen such a creative and well constructed piece of film about non-Western views of psychosis. I feel like it very skillfully turns the biomedical model of mental illness on its head and shows so many different ways of looking at what we call madness. I would like everyone who works in the mental health field to watch it. And then maybe we can all have a nice long collective conversation about the things that need to change in the way we treat our young people who are struggling with what we call psychotic disorders.

I myself was lucky enough to watch Crazywise this past Friday evening in a theater in the basement of Bellevue Hospital. There were about 100 of us packed in there and I know I wasn’t the only one who was a former inpatient of their psychiatric unit on the 6th floor. There were actually a whole bunch of folks in the crowd with schizophrenia and bipolar diagnoses, connected to the progressive mental health agency Community Access, as well as a bunch of folks affiliated with the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) — both peers and clinicians. There were people affiliated with the Reelabilities Film Festival which financially sponsored the event, there were members of the Bellevue OnTrackNY team who work directly with young people struggling with psychosis, there was a gaggle of people representing the local Hearing Voices Group, a crew of us weirdos from the NYC Icarus Project chapter and a couple of characters from the recently formed Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA). It was a super interesting crowd.

After the film we had a lively community discussion, with a panel made up of the film co-director Kevin Tomlinson, Peri Zarrella from the Hearing Voices Network NYC, and then Issa Ibrahim and I who, in our own ways, are part of the creative mad underground resistance in this crazy city and doing our parts to make the world a little less cold and a little more interesting.

I will admit I was skeptical before watching the film. I lived in California for a long time and over the years I grew to be wary of some of the people who use the language of “Spiritual Emergency” and “Spiritual Emergence” because I often found them eager to put all experiences of mental distress into a flattening framework while ignoring the diversity of causes that bring people into crisis. There’s also a particular kind of cultural appropriation I associate with the New Age community which fetishizes indigenous cultures and takes ideas and practices without giving proper context or respect. But it turns out I had these folks pegged wrong: one of the film makers literally spent 25 years of his life documenting indigenous communities all over the world, from Siberia to Kenya to Tibet to Brazil. And while they use the language of Shamanism in the way western people often do to refer to tribal medicine people all over the world (it’s a word that has its origins in Siberia), it is done from a place of educated reverence and social context. So Crazywise ends up being this very thought provoking film that cleverly weaves the stories of two people in our Western culture with narratives of revered medicine people in other cultures who would be considered crazy by Western standards.

After the film ended the crowd came to life as we asked everyone to turn to a neighbor and talk for five minutes about the pieces of the film that resonated with them the most. Then we spent the good part of an hour fielding questions and sending those questions back to the audience for an epic conversation.

My favorite moment might have been when a woman raised her hand and, with a quivering voice, talked about how her 23 year old nephew was in a psych hospital up the street and he was hearing voices and she didn’t know what to do for him. She was planning to spent the next day at the hospital with him playing the card game Uno. That woman got so much heartfelt advice and love from people: “Be curious” one voice hearer told her, “Ask him about the voices and see if he wants to tell you about them.” Someone else said: “Sometimes even the angriest voices are really just trying to protect us. Sometimes they just want to be heard.” Another said: “Just show up and be present with him. Just listen to him.” Peri Zarrella told her of the meeting place of the local Hearing Voices group that welcomes both voice hearers and family members and love ones of voice hearers. By the end this woman was crying and thanking the crowd for making her feel welcome, and giving her some hope.

I think one of the critical lessons of Crazywise is that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we see ourselves as social beings. Our cultural environments have an enormous impact on our mental health. The fact that people in the developing world have a way higher chance of recovering from a schizophrenia diagnosis is an indictment of our modern society. It was clear from the film that both main protagonists were extremely sensitive people who were picking so much negativity up from the world around them and at critical points in their journies they didn’t get the support they needed.

What would it look like of we could see young people struggling with psychosis as having something to teach us?

What if we had the resources in place to be able to hold people through crisis — from breakdown to breakthrough?

What if antipsychotic medicine was seen as a potential short term tool rather than a long term means of holding together a fragmented psyche?

What if we saw psychological crisis can be an opportunity for growth and potentially transformational, not a disease with no cure?

There is so obviously a battle for control of the psychosis narrative right now. Despite the fact that Trump just appointed a very business friendly representative of the medical model to, among other things, attempt to dismantle the National peer infrastructure we’ve been building for decades, the future is still unwritten. We all know the inspiration for the change is not going to come from inside the system. It’s going to come from grassroots movements like this Crazywise film, and how they can capture the popular imagination, and shift language and culture for young people.

If the Peer Specialist workforce is going to have any power in the coming years it will be in direct relationship to how connected we are to creative grassroots movements and vibrant youth culture. There is clearly going to be a strong push to medicalize peer movements into a cheap labor for low skill clinical work. We need to resist it and articulate a different vision, a way more compelling and interesting vision. Lets keep pushing the envelop and embracing narratives of liberation like Crazywise. We have a long road ahead and it’s surely going to be intense.

Learn more about Crazywise here: https://crazywisefilm.com/

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

12 COMMENTS

  1. This sounds like a great movie, Sasha, but as for your question: What if we had the resources in place to be able to hold people through crisis — from breakdown to breakthrough?

    I’m not sure it’s a matter of resources, but a matter of time and commitment. I’ve literally sat with my wife for much of the last 9 years and held the various girls who have joined our family and my marriage. I revamped my life to make time and space for my wife’s healing. Some years we were almost housebound because one of the ‘alters’ was so terrified. Now she(all of them) and I ride a tandem bike as many days a week as possible because it helps the different girls in her system connect. I wish I had had help and an expert to teach me the things my wife needed to heal (though I’m honestly not sure most of them know what I’ve learned), but it was the time needed, and not the ‘resources’ that were the biggest requirements. Was I willing to make my wife’s healing a priority in light of our hedonistic culture that says self actualization is primary?

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    • Hi Sam – thanks so much for your reply. What if we had the resources in place to be able to hold people through crisis ? That’s a very political question because those resources I’m referring to aren’t just personal resources (like it sounds like you’ve given to your family many times over.) I’m talking about society’s resources: public funding for programs like Soteria Houses and Iwards from the 70s (which were crushed with the rise of biopsychaitry) and now in the 21st century, Peer Respites. The chances of that funding coming from the current administrations are getting slimmer and slimmer, but that’s what I’m talking about. There’s so much funding that goes to things that make us crazy, we could at least have some things that push us in the direction of doing CrazyWise.

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      • yes, it is political but it is also personal. Having grown up on the Right I tend to see things more as a personal responsibility, though helping my wife has definitely moved me toward the middle and trying to find that middle ground between personal responsibility and corporate responsibility, I guess, is the question. I do wish our culture would facilitate a greater corporate sense of compassion and help for those needing it…it would have helped me as I helped my wife…our support network was VERY thin most of the time except when our son was living at home during his undergrad years. Those 4 years he was awesome…fortunately when he moved out to pursue his grad studies, my wife(the girls in her system) were much more stable and I was able to continue without his support…but it’s still a lonely journey because of our society’s attitude…

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    • In my humble opinion I believe that it’s you who can teach the professionals many things. You seem to have a humility and a willingness to admit that you don’t know everything but you’re willing to sit there with all the girls, no matter what. I’ve not seen many professionals with these attitudes and abilities. I wish that, with all the girls’ approval you would write here on MIA about what you’ve learned in the Journey that you have all walked together over these past years. I believe that you’ve achieved something pretty phenomenal here that’s seen very little in the world of “mental health”.

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      • Thanks, Stephen, I wouldn’t mind writing here and I have my wife’s approval IF MIA allowed me to continue using the pen name I use on my blog, Sam Ruck.

        At the risk of sounding arrogant, I do believe I have learned some phenomenal things using attachment theory to literally help build my wife’s personality from the ground up. It’s not that I think I’m great or special, but I was shoved into a situation that was pretty unique, and the only way to stay true to myself and to the woman I love was to tough it out with her, by her side. She and I have disproven so many things that the experts say without evidence, like, the ‘fact’ that these early childhood trauma victims can ‘never’ overcome the effects of that trauma. And ISSTD mostly focuses on ‘coping’ skills. My wife is LIVING life, not just coping with the fallout from her trauma. I learned out how to completely move her past her PTSD issues using attachment theory, and so many other things.

        Again, it’s not me. I’m nothing special. Really. I wish I would have quit many times, most days, as the pain is so hard for both of us, but since I refused to quit, I’ve had the awesome privilege of watching her flower and blossom and bloom in so many ways that the experts say is impossible…they are wrong…
        Sam

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        • Yes, they are absolutely wrong. Trauma can be transcended if people care enough to value your story with honor and dignity, as you do for your wife. The experts never see people transcend trauma because they are not willing to invest the time, effort, and pain in people. This is damned difficult work and few experts know much about difficult work at all.

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    • There’s a major epidemic of selfishness and coldness now, Sam. Few spouses are as lucky as your wife. Most women with her challenges have their husbands coerce them into taking drugs. When these drugs make them weirder and even mean sometimes–mind-altering drugs can do that–they leave the spouse far behind.

      Often they troll sites–anything from anti-psychiatry blogs to support forums for grateful “compliant consumers.” There they will rant about their eeeeevull ex and how all “bipolars” or “schizos” are evil as well! These stupid comments should always be deleted so the readers aren’t triggered.

      Anyhow you’re not like that. Thank goodness for your wife!

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      • Thanks feelingdiscouraged, I’m just trying to find a win/win solution for us. She didn’t ask for this; no one would. Even if I had left my wife, I just don’t understand the ‘need’ people have to turn and attack the ones they used to claim to love…sigh…
        Sam

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