Rethinking Madness

By Phil Borges, Producer and Director of CRAZYWISE

The just released documentary film, CRAZYWISE, actually began 24 years ago in Dharamsala, India while I was working on a human rights story about Tibet.

By coincidence I was invited to watch a young monk, known as a Kuten, go into trance and “channel” the protector spirit of the Tibetan people. It was unlike anything I had ever witnessed. As he entered the trance the monk’s eyes rolled back and he began speaking in an unusual voice. This continued for three or four minutes until he collapsed and had to be carried from the room.

	The Medium (known in Tibet as the Kuten) preparing to go into trance in order to “channel” the protector spirit of the Tibetan people known as the Nechung Oracle.

Two days later I was invited to interview the Kuten. His name was Thupten Ngodrup and he was 30 years old. When I asked him how he became a Kuten, he described what sounded to me like a mental-emotional breakdown — huge mood swings, personality changes, hearing voices and intense dreams. It all happened in his early twenties.

The older monks in his monastery decided that his symptoms indicated he had the sensitivities to become a Kuten. They began mentoring him and eventually sent him to the Dalai Lama to see if he should continue his training. Today he is well known as the Dalai Lama’s Oracle and is consulted when important decisions have to be made while the Tibetan leader is living in exile.

Over the years while doing human rights stories in tribal and indigenous communities, I began meeting individuals who go into trance-like states to act as healers or visionaries for their communities. I have visited countless communities in Africa, Asia, Indonesia, South and North America and the Arctic Circle and have found these individuals, whom we refer to as shamans, to be in every one of those cultures.

In the course of interviewing them, I was surprised to learn that most had experienced a severe crisis in their youth. Sometimes it was a physical sickness but more often it was a psychological crisis — hearing voices, seeing visions, experiencing extreme anxiety and often thinking they were dying.

Thupten Ngodrup, the current Kuten of the Nechung Oracle, photographed in Dharamsala, India in 1994 near the Dalai Lama’s residence.

Typically, they were taken aside by an elder, often a haman, and told they had a unique quality that they needed to learn to manage and control by beginning an initiation process. Most often the older shaman would serve as a mentor or guide. The shamans I met were highly respected healers and visionaries in their communities.

Two years ago, I met Adam Gentry, a sensitive and bright 26-year-old employee of the Whole Foods grocery store in Redmond, Washington. He, like many young men his age, had experienced a psychological crisis in his early twenties and was hospitalized and put on medication.

	Sukulen, a respected “predictor” and healer in the Samburu tribe of Northern Kenya, began having dizzy spells and hearing voices as a young girl. Her grandmother mentored her through her crisis and introduced her to her spirit guides.

After four years of severe side effects, Adam quit his medication and decided to attend a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat. It helped him so much that he did two more retreats. He started working at Whole Foods and began to settle into a more normal existence. At that time, I was doing a film on meditation, and my producer sent Adam to me for an interview. When Adam told me his story, I couldn’t help but think of the shaman’s “calling” and how differently Adam’s crisis had been defined and treated in our culture.

I began interviewing Adam every three to four weeks. In his third interview, Adam told us he had gone to do another meditation retreat, but when the retreat center learned of his previous mental health diagnosis, they turned him away. Shortly afterwards, he found it difficult to do his work and quit his job. He soon became homeless and moved into his car. When winter set in, he sold his car and bought a ticket to Maui. While living on the beach, he was beaten by a gang, lost many of his teeth, had his jaw broken in three places and was almost killed.

Phil Borges and Adam Gentry: Adam attended several meditation retreats and found relief until it was discovered he had been diagnosed as bipolar. Because of liability issues, Adam was turned away from further retreats.

Adam is not alone. While documenting his story, I became increasingly aware of the severity of the mental health crisis in America. Today, 25 percent of the homeless and 56 percent of those in prison have been diagnosed with a mental disorder. In the last 20 years, the number of individuals on mental disability insurance (SSDI) has almost quadrupled. Paradoxically, in this same period of time, the amount Americans spend on medications to treat their mental conditions has increased 80-fold. Clearly, our mental health system is not functioning effectively.

We’ve been following Adam for the past five years; during that time we have conducted over seventy interviews with mental health professionals and people who have successfully navigated a mental health crisis, I have come to believe that the narrative (or paradigm) that governs the way we define and treat a psychological crisis does more harm than good.

Having an authority figure like a doctor tell a young person experiencing a psychological crisis that they have a disease or a chemical imbalance in their brain that has no known cure creates a bubble of fear that can frighten the individual, their family, friends, and employers.

The diagnostic labels used to define their experience carry such stigma that the individual often ends up embarrassed and isolated. The message delivered to the person suffering, by its very nature, is disempowering. So we have a paradigm that creates fear, isolation and disempowerment.

	Will Hall, “a person with lived experience,” is just one of the leaders of the “recovery” movement who are advocating for a change in the way mental illness is defined and treated.

In contrast, the young shaman is told a very different story to explain their challenging experience, leading to a very different outcome.

What I heard over and over again from people who have been able to successfully manage their severe mental emotional distress is what they needed most during their crisis was a supportive person or community that gave them hope for recovery and guidance to find meaning and purpose in their suffering.

My main hope for our film is that it will add a voice to the growing chorus of professionals and people with lived experience asking that we “Rethink Madness” and improve the current paradigm that drives the mainstream mental health care system. It’s time to ask if a psychological crisis might be a transformative process with potential for growth when supported correctly, instead of a “diseased brain” waiting for science to find a cure.

For over 25 years, Phil Borges has been documenting Indigenous and tribal cultures, striving to create an understanding of the challenges they face. Phil’s documentary, CRAZYWISE, reveals the need for a paradigm shift that changes the way Western culture defines and treats “mental illness.” The film highlights a survivor-led movement that’s demanding more choices from a mental health care system in crisis.

Phil has hosted television documentaries on Indigenous cultures for Discovery and National Geographic channels. He regularly presents at universities, teaches workshops, and has spoken at multiple TED events (click here to watch his TED talk, “Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening.”)

Click here to watch the trailer for CRAZYWISE.