Rethinking madness

I was thrilled to see that Rethinking Madness, the book by Paris Williams, got a very positive review at PsychCentral. It’s exciting to see that even if it’s happening very slowly, some mainstream psych sources are taking such information seriously and presenting it to their readers. Things are changing, yes.

I’m sharing the post I did last year about Paris’s book and below the post is a video with Paris sharing his personal experience on video. Enjoy.

I just received my copy of Rethinking Madness, which Paris Williams, the author, mailed to me. It’s truly an essential text for anyone who wants to understand the psyche, particularly such phenomena that is considered psychotic and mad.

One of the many things he explores which is critically important, is that even within the field of transpersonal psychology there is a bias against people who have “genuine” psychosis as opposed to “spiritual emergence.”

Paris points out that this distinction is a dangerous one to make and is often not at all clear.

I for example contacted Stan Grof as a young woman having recognized my issues were not mental illness and was engaged with interest until I told him I’d been labeled bipolar and hospitalized briefly. At that point he couldn’t wait to get off the phone. His energy and interest radically shifted away from me. It was devastating. I was struck with the hypocrisy of that, him having married the wife he met as a patient in the psych ward. Her book, The Stormy Search for the Self, about her own spiritual emergence and crisis was at one time very helpful to me.

Anyway, the fact is many people are lost to psychiatry and neurotoxic drugs for life because too few people who might be in a position to help want to really delve into the dark and difficult content that the psyche sometimes presents and then those people experiencing such difficulties are all too often tossed away and drugged for life…a few of us escape to tell the tale of neglect. We too have stories of transformation albeit with some additional struggles that had there been people around to recognize our process and support us we might have been spared some suffering.

This book, Rethinking Madness and many of us who have these experiences hope to democratize the opportunity to heal. Right now only the lucky few are able to find their way.

Many stories about med-free recovery from psychosis here: Psychosis Recovery

See also: Spiritual emergency: one way of interpreting activity of the psyche that is often labeled psychotic