The Failure of Psychiatry and the Rise of the Mad Pride Movement
This revolutionary book tells how the Mad Pride movement developed in the last ten years as the successor to the mental patients’ liberation movement. It includes interviews with leaders in the movement as well as an interview with Paul Levy author of Wetiko, spiritual educator and ex-mental patient. Dr Farber believes the most important innovation to emerge from this movement is the proposition that madness is a dangerous gift.
To explain this movement Farber has developed a new paradigm of madness and cultural transformation that builds upon the work of leading theorists in the existentialist, Jungian, Christian and Hindu traditions—including R.D. Laing, John Weir Perry and Sri Aurobindo. This paradigm helps to explain why this movement of “schizophrenics” and “bipolars” could change the world.
Seth Farber has dedicated his decades of professional life to not merely destigmatizing “mental illness,” but to giving us an all-inclusive, spiritual perspective on the evolution of consciousness that will, hopefully, end the iatrogenic suffering caused to so many in “the doctor’s (iatro’s) efforts to heal.” The existence of this book is, in itself, uplifting; its many cogent insights will surely inspire similarly dedicated readers to further this great humanitarian work. Stuart Sovatsky, PhD, Words From the Soul:Time, East/West Spirituality and the Psychotherapeutic Narrative.
Seth Farber, makes a powerful case for the Mad Pride movement, based on a challenge to the normative humanism of modernity. He draws on a number of thinkers, prominently the redemptive-messianic vision of Sri Aurobindo, who saw the human as a “transitional being”and earth as the habitation for a divine life. This is a valuable addition to the expanding library of handbooks for charting a new passage to the future through what Michel Foucault has called “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.”
Debashish Banerji, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco
Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo
Seth Farber is one of the most provocative and original thinkers in America. Farber bring us to the threshold of the only questions that really matter: the demarcation lines between imagination and objective reality and between “madness” and “sanity.”The Spiritual Gift of Madness is an important book which could revolutionize the way progressive religious people regard what is called mental health. Frank Schaeffer ,author of “Crazy For God:How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back
An articulate, informed, and lucid exploration of the nature of madness, the Mad Pride movement, and ultimately what it is like to be deemed “mad” by society. Seth Farber’s extensive interviews with leaders of the Mad Pride movement are particularly engaging and memorable. Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic:Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America
Those who are concerned with the gospel of Christ…would do well to read [the work of] Seth Farber. James G Williams, Emeritus Professor of Religion, Syracuse University, author of The Bible,Violence and the Sacred and editor of The Girard Reader..