When Sensitives Go Crazy
From SMI's to ADD
A beautiful boy died last week.
I will not name him out of respect for his family, but my heart breaks for them, and for him. I can imagine the questions they must be asking themselves. I sense the pain they are feeling. I understand how impossible is the loss of a child, even one grown into adulthood, as he was.
I remember him from toddlerhood. Sweetness radiated from his eyes. Running in a pack of kids, he was the one who stood out. Pure of heart, too sensitive for this Earth. Had I known then what I know now, perhaps I would have reached out to him more and held him closer, in the recognition of one outsider to another.
Life can be an existential struggle for Sensitives. So often, they lack words for the pain they feel, the distress of their days, and the suffering of their souls.
For this boy, first came the diagnosis. Then the treatments. Things seemed manageable for a time. One day during a hospitalization, shock therapy was given. Then a call came that he had jumped from the fourth floor of the hospital. He survived, paralyzed from the waist down. The pain continued, now physical as well as spiritual. Last week, angels took him in the fulfillment of his desire. His time in this incarnation is done.
Imagine you are a curious and courageous space traveler, arriving upon a strange planet. You discover beings living there, but they are primitive, sleepwalking through their lives and governed by unconscious principles, driven by base emotions and awash in fear.
Even though you have come as a messenger of love and consciousness, these beings are defensive and threatened by you, keeping you in captivity, rejecting and tormenting you, refusing to believe who you are and naming you as deficient and broken. You are given drugs to numb you, and an education to suppress your individuality and creativity so you can be more easily controlled. You live out your life in mindless occupations to deny your voice, your reason for being. You try to remember the place you came from. You dream of suicide, of going home…
This is the journey of so many Sensitives, the awakening ones who have embodied here on planet Earth, stepping into form to contribute their high frequency to the collective, yet often with insufficient protection. They live an immersive rite of passage in a foreign dimension. These are the ones the world loves to label: ADD, bipolar, schizophrenic, autistic, Asperger’s, addict, artist, irresponsible, fuck-up, crazy, dangerous and weird.
They are the ones who never fit in, even in their own skin, but they come with brilliance, spiritual activation, passionate directives, and great, great heart. They are vibrating, naked babies, feeling, experiencing everything at exponential magnification, seeing and knowing what others cannot. Their gifts may lead to great suffering, making them look and seem mad.
(Matthew Silver, a slightly mad performance artist.)
For some, it is the powerful thrust of a spiritual explosion which sends them reeling into altered realities, only to be scorned and feared by loved ones and professionals alike. These courageous souls often walk for a time with one foot in body, and the other stepping up into the etheric realms. They may speak profound wisdom one moment and seeming nonsense the next, yet their process parallels the mystic’s journey into new ways of seeing in the wake of personal deconstruction and alienation from everyday life. Anyone who has looked deeply into their eyes, sat with them, and listened with respect and openness, cannot deny their astonishing gifts. We know they have traveled from a vastly different dimension, daring to join us, to wade in the muck of our base material realm.
What if mental illness can at times be a spiritual awakening misunderstood, or derailed by a climate of fear? What if we are filling special education programs, hospitals, institutions, prisons and morgues with beautiful beings who need healing, expansion, connection and love, not alienation, imprisonment, and soul death?
What if, by denying the multi-dimensional truths of our existence we are forcing a narrow paradigm which keeps the masses unconscious, lowers their vibration and lulls them into thinking they are safe? What if these crazy, highly sensitive rebels have come to shake loose the old belief systems, and as such, are our angels, our teachers and beloved brothers and sisters of Spirit? What if changing this way of thinking would utterly change the world?
The lost boy I mention today makes my heart ache, not just for his brief life and years of suffering, but for the many, many others I know just like him. Some better, some worse.
I have spent time visiting in the psych wards of hospitals, shocked and amazed by what saw. Once a beautiful young woman danced toward me. She was dancing every time I saw her. Her eyes widened as she noticed the chakra stones on the necklace I was wearing. “Oh I know you” she whispered to me. “I see you, and I am so happy to be with you.” Then she danced away.
Once in the elevator on my way up to the ward, I stood beside a young man with his father. He had glowing red hair and smiled openly at me. On another visit he was walking about and we chatted. He was full of wonderment and worry about the world. How to help, how to make things better, how to heal. He kindly opened the door for me and smiled his shining smile.
On my next visit I walked past the open door of his room as he sat inside on the edge of his bed. At first I didn’t recognize him, and then, with shock, I knew it was the same bright boy. But now he was collapsed, hunched over like an old man, staring into nothingness. His beautiful red hair was tousled to one side, uncombed. His mouth was open, his lower lip protruding as he drooled onto the floor. His body was absolutely motionless and hollow, as if his soul no longer found it to be home.
I asked one of the doctors about him, expressing my concern. He said oh yes, he's on a new medication and sometimes it takes a while to adjust. The doctor walked away, onto the next round.
Once I entered an empty room where the walls were covered with writing. Phrases and sentences were scribbled as if written in panic, and yet the words were full of poetry, rich with spiritual intelligence, and pain. They spoke of profound darkness, of fear and control, and the suffering of those who embody a threatening light.
These hospital wards are not pretty places. Sometimes patients are beaten by police when they are taken to hospital against their will. Sometimes they are locked up in windowless, smelly rooms stripped of any beauty, with fluorescent lighting, dirty corners, and damaged walls. Sometimes they are shackled to gurneys, or shut away behind locked doors, within other locked doors. But the alternative is also not pretty. Life on the streets, life in prison, or like that beautiful boy, no life at all. In the West, we think we have come a long way from the days of mental institutions, but we have not. We have simply moved the players around on the board.
The story of Australian author Jane Frame is an interesting example of the medieval nature of mental health treatment. In her autobiography, An Angel At My Table, she speaks of her days hospitalized with an incorrect diagnosis of schizophrenia. Frame endured countless rounds of shock therapy, and was scheduled for a lobotomy that was cancelled days before the procedure when her debut publication of short stories was unexpectedly awarded a national literary prize.
It is said that some of these souls, if born in Indigenous cultures, would become shamans. It is said that the outcomes of what we consider serious mental illness are much better in Eastern or African countries, where an entire village may provide the embrace that is needed to bring the spirit back to a more grounded safety.
There are so many unknowns, but one certainty: Sensitives suffer, and too often they suffer alone.
Today I mourn that sweet child, so pure of heart, and all the others like him. I offer prayers in acknowledgment of the truth of him, and the perfection of his soul.
In my life I have often been blessed to work with the Sensitives of our time. They are my people, my spiritual family. I remember the otherworldly beauty of our shared history, and honour the courage it takes to be here at all.
I would love to hear your thoughts about this post. Please leave a comment below or write to me.
Remember, you cannot learn what is in your heart; it must instead be found.
much love, Adi
This post leaves me breathless with heartache. When I was growing up my father worked in a state psychiatric hospital. I was highly sensitive and it took decades to process what came home with him from that place. I grew up in terror, but I knew that I didn’t wanna end up in one of those places. Decades later I went through in voluntary reenactments of some of the things my father was a part of in treatment plans at the hospital that he never ever spoke about. a decade after that my best friend decided to voluntarily enter one of these institutions. I told her on the day she was heading in that she wanted to change her mind she could and she could come stay with me. She did get in, and she got out and when she got out she said to me… That place was full of people just like us! And she gosh about how amazing it was to be surrounded by sensitive spiritual people. I have long been in condemnation about these places. Some of my most viral work talks about some of these practices, both culturally and so-called Treatments which is nothing more than an adaptation of barbaric torture from medieval times. I think this is a very important piece of work, written with so much heart and soul. So many of us die after enduring decades of terror and agony without support, without anyone to teach us or validate us or to hold us… And I deeply appreciate the description of being here to do something specific and selfless only to be tortured to death, abandoned, or left to starve because our medicine though unique and masterful is not valued as much as a concert ticket or sometimes even a cup ofgourmet coffee. If we cannot survive, we cannot fulfill our purpose. Thank you for this deeply compassionate article… I hope it goes viral
Adi, thank you. You speak for an entire collective with these words. I feel this plea for a different perspective, a paradigm shift. Forever being labeled as this or that, I have researched the gifts that accompany the different kind of existence sensitives have. I, too, imagine a world where there are embraced rather than snuffed out. I sometimes feel as though I have spent more time fighting for my life than actually living, because of the constant effort and courage it takes to make it in a world so clearly guarded against difference. It’s a beautiful thing that we can find one another in small pockets of time space and feel, if only for a moment, that we are not alone and can muster the strength to keep going. I feel the weight of the world losing yet another beautiful sensitive soul, and I send vibrations of comfort to you and those connected to his spirit. 🙏🤍