Crazywise: Is There Wisdom in Madness?

Can we say that a person who is considered “crazy” can also be wise in certain traditions? A person who has suffered immense trauma in their life and, because of it, has become detached from reality or has become disabled—could they also be wise?

My sense is that they certainly can have gifts: a deeper sensitivity to life, creativity, spirituality, a feeling of oneness with all beings, and a greater capacity for moment-to-moment, “here and now” presence. These gifts, however, can perhaps only be nurtured when a person is grounded and is able to move through their trauma, painful struggles, and difficulties, and gradually grow through them.

I find the intimacy and attunement with which Phil speaks to Adam is filled with warmth and affection. I feel that this relationship really impacts Adam, who seems able to develop a more open and respectful relationship with his father after the turmoil and detachment. Adam's journey is remarkable. He appears to have had a happy childhood, with no obvious issues, and then suddenly begins having panic attacks, hearing voices, feeling disturbed, and experiencing unusual beliefs that we call delusions. He is then put on psychiatric medication, which he experiences as overmedicating him and making him feel really numb and dead. Then he stops believing that what he is experiencing is a disorder. Instead, he goes to Vipassana, where he feels really good and lighter, and he begins to continue with the practice. Through this process, he realises that his parents sexually abused him, and he begins to distance himself from them. His traumatic memories resurface. Then, during one Vipassana course, he has another breakdown and is barred from entering the meditation programme.

I came away from this part of the documentary with the impression that Vipassana programmes can, in some circumstances, bypass severe trauma. It made me think about whether meditation can become a practice through which feelings are suppressed, numbed, or superficially calmed through a meditation technique. I think of my own experience with 10 day Buddhism retread in Dharakot that leftme in light and maniac state, but it was only for short while, and gradually it felt like a dissociated state.

If trauma opens up, there may not always be a holding space for what emerges. Instead, a person can experience retraumatisation through being abandoned, rejected, or not being allowed to remain part of the meditation community. The message can become: seek psychiatric help—we cannot help you. What kind of support—human, personal, or spiritual development— are these Vipassana programmes offering when they cannot see the whole person? When they cannot hold the whole person with their traumas, breakdowns, disabilities and painful experiences? This makes me question whether this kind of spiritual development can sometimes bypass the psychological and emotional realm of being human. It can reinforce a certain kind of positive psychology attitude in which a person is expected to move towards an idealised state of compassion, empathy, and kindness.

A person can develop a persona of niceness and kindness, while underneath there may be deeper negative feelings, anger, grief, fear, or other difficult emotions that remain hidden. It does not necessarily try to work through the defences of the person that come in the way of the pain being seen. It does not meet the person where they are. So, for me, Vipassana may need to be combined with a psychological approach that can address the psychological and emotional needs of a person—perhaps relational psychoanalysis or Jungian-oriented depth psychotherapy. Or perhaps there needs to be any kind of holding and container space that can remain with breakdown and extreme states. A space that does not fear or distance itself from a person. A space that does not reject them, but allows them to be authentic.

This is what Adam and ekhaya's narratives tell me: that both of them can, in some way, choose not to restrict themselves and instead seek a way of life that allows them to be themselves, without forcing anything upon them.

If they are sick, it allows them to be sick. If they are having a breakdown, then it allows them to have a breakdown. If they are feeling hopeful, then it allows them to be hopeful. There are a few moments when Adam is hopeful. One is when he comes back from a meditation experience and realises that he has somehow sorted something out. Another is when he shares his desire to learn to become a music therapist. There is something beautiful about the gifts he has to express himself through music and, slowly and gradually, to facilitate another person's deep feelings and learn how to hold them. This made me think about how, often in psychosis or schizophrenia, there can be a fragile self. A person can struggle to feel collected and grounded. It is as if the soul has been punctured so heavily that it has deep holes in it and is hanging together by just a thread. And yet, within this vulnerable fragility, there can also be a particular sensitivity.

A person may not be able to carry too much. They may not be able to hold a nine-to-five, full-time job, a marriage, or parenthood. The conventional, socially accepted way of life may simply not be possible for them. But perhaps there can be a different kind of life. A different route that a person can take in this life. Does our society allow for spaces or communities where people with disabilities can live in the way they are, with their fragility? Something like what R. D. Laing developed and built at Kingsley Hall, where people could live with their disability and be respected for who they are, with affection and kindness. I am sure there are not many spaces where a person going through breakdowns and the resurfacing of painful traumatic experiences can truly be themselves as they are.

Adam finds something like this in a community with friends, including sharing a room with his schoolmate. ekhaya finds this community within her shamanic tradition, which gives her a new identity: an identity of a wise person, a person with gifts that bring hope, respect, and connection. Someone who has something to offer the world. Someone who can contribute to the world. Someone who is not a waste or a useless piece of shit to be discarded and thrown away. This is such a different identity from the one that can sometimes be given to a person through psychiatric systems.

The psychiatric system does not always give hope when it objectively and with detachment announces that you have a mental illness and then tries to find a way to fix you, sometimes through overmedication. It can create more fear and despair than respect, autonomy, and choice. So the question becomes: How can people with disabilities live their lives? Of course, there is scope for healing. But to what extent can a person really heal? Can they undo their disability? Is it possible? Can one undo a pathological structure of personality that has been built because of traumatic past experiences? Can it break? And then can a person slowly move into the here and now, find themselves again, feel as if they have been born again, and build a new life?

Gandhiji wrote about his life through books that were published by Navjivan Trust. Navjivan means “new life.” I find something meaningful in this idea of entering into a new life. It is our journey to enter into this new life. I believe that the writings Gandhiji shared were written with the hope that they could guide us towards seeing life with newness, moving away from our conditioning and our old ways of seeing life.

In a recent podcast conversation that I had with Sripriya Chari, a clinical psychologist who works with people with psychosis, she shared a technique of bringing clients back to the here and now from the alternate reality in which they live. This can be an alternate reality of hearing voices and experiencing other kinds of hallucinations, feeling paranoid, and experiencing delusions—for example, believing that somebody is going to kill them in the present. At one point in a person's life, all of this may have been a reality. It was truth. Somebody was actually coming to kill them. But this dynamic can sometimes outlive what it was originally meant to respond to. Sometimes the impressions that an experience leaves on us can be incredibly deep and long-lasting. The painful experience has stopped taking place, but its effect is still continuing. The danger is no longer there, but something inside the person is still living as though it is. Upon knowing this, all of us have a choice about whether to continue living like this or to leave it behind and let go of the delusion.

Bret Femini writes in his book Psychosis and Extreme States about this choice—whether to let go of the delusion or not. Letting go of it can enable a person to live more freely and deeply, with greater authenticity and choice. And perhaps this is also where the question of healing becomes more complicated.

Healing does not necessarily mean that everything that has happened to a person disappears. It may mean that the person develops a different relationship with what happened to them. Perhaps the traumatic experience remains part of their history, but it does not have to determine every aspect of their present. Perhaps a person can slowly come back to the here and now. Perhaps they can find a way of living that is not based entirely on the expectations of what a “normal” life should look like. Perhaps they can find another way. I am thankful to Phil Borges for this documentary and for how he opens up a conversation about looking at more possibilities than psychiatric treatment alone. It is a search, and also a journey, of these two characters who are finding hope, value, and respect, and believing in their capacity to contribute to the world. They are not nobody. They are somebody who can live a life with dignity. It is a search for that. It is about choice. It is about finding one's own path. Whether that path is successful or unsuccessful, it does not necessarily lend itself to judgement.

The documentary does not simply say that “crazy people are wise.” Rather, it presents this as a hypothesis that is open to exploration. And I think this is important. The hypothesis that madness can contain wisdom can create hope and open up a meaning-making process. A person in the midst of disability and suffering, without denying their difficulties, can discover that they can still care deeply for people, create, contribute, and have something meaningful to offer the world.

At the same time, such a hypothesis can also lead to denial and further dissociation. If we romanticise madness and assume that every psychotic experience is automatically a form of spiritual wisdom, we may fail to see the suffering, trauma, disability, and need for support that can accompany it.

So perhaps the question is not simply whether crazy people are wise. Perhaps the more important question is whether we can create spaces in which a person does not have to choose between being “sick” and being “wise.” Can they be both vulnerable and gifted? Can they be disabled and still have something to contribute? Can they experience breakdown and still be treated with dignity? Can they be in pain and still have a meaningful life? For me, this is what Crazywise opens up. It explores possibilities without necessarily requiring us to arrive at a single answer. It asks us to look beyond the conventional categories of illness and wellness and to consider the human being as a whole—with their trauma, breakdowns, spirituality, creativity, relationships, disability, sensitivity, and capacity for growth.

What I value most is that it brings the values of respect, choice, dignity, autonomy, and hope into the conversation. Perhaps a person does not need to become completely “normal” in order to have a life worth living. Perhaps healing can also mean finding a way of living that is one's own. And perhaps, sometimes, what society calls “crazy” may contain something that deserves to be listened to. Not necessarily because every experience of madness is wise. But because there may be wisdom worth discovering within a person's struggle, suffering, survival, creativity, spirituality, and search for a new life.