This time of year, exiting my house, the first thing I see is brilliant autumn leaves. Walking through my neighborhood, there are random plantings of colorful flowers that are still somehow in bloom.
Today was quiet. It was a day off of work and there was nothing going on at the coffee shop. Returning home from my regular walk, I came across this post by 
The big idea is that mental illness has an important role to play in society and individual lives. By focusing exclusively on eliminating the symptoms of mental illness, we might be silencing important messages and missing opportunities for positive transformation. I agree with this to a point, but feel like it's an idea that should come with a warning label.
Living with bipolar disorder, there have been a few times in my life when important insights have arisen from my illness. Yet the medical community has never treated me like my perspective was valid. And socially, my experience has been that the main drawback to exhibiting bipolar symptoms is that other people find it annoying, to a degree that corresponds with their need to police the thoughts and behavior of others.
Society's wholesale discounting of the extraordinary states of consciousness that naturally evolved in our species is a massive mistake. We would surely all be better off if we were integrating the unconscious material that comes from these states instead of suppressing it. Whether in medicine or in our everyday lives, allowing this information to come to light so it can be processed makes a lot more sense than trying to silence it. This information is important, or it wouldn't be coming up.
While it's mistaken to ignore the insights that come from extraordinary states of consciousness, it's equally mistaken to assign unwarranted weight to these insights. In my own life, I think of it like giving such insights an advisory role rather than decision-making power. If an extraordinary state begins impinging upon executive function, that's a problem.
In the US today, in politics and elsewhere, we see various forms of madness impinging upon decisions being made at all levels. This is not the idiosyncratic madness of individual illness, but the collective lunacy of a culture flailing around in a futile attempt to hold on to crumbling realities. We're embracing the madness of tyrants, and stifling the insights of visionaries. This seems unwise.
A better approach might begin with simple acceptance of extraordinary consciousness. Within ourselves and communities, sure, but also in broader culture. The nascent rise of psychedelic medicine seems related to increasing this acceptance. As more people have non-ordinary experiences and find them valuable, these experiences may increasingly become viewed as legitimate.
While mental illness may have a role to play in positive transformations, it can also be a destructive force best treated with medication. For me, I can't sleep or digest food properly when I'm manic, which becomes hugely problematic after a couple of days. This only happens rarely, but it hasn't happened at all since I started taking meds to help me sleep a few years ago. A good friend with schizoaffective disorder completely sabotages his own life whenever he goes off his meds. I could go on and on with examples like this. So mental illness does have valuable lessons to teach, and industrial medicine is the devil, but we don't really have a society that's safe for many mentally ill people to experience their symptoms unless those symptoms are suppressed with medication.
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