What If Psychosis Is Meaningful?

What if madness is not an illness, but a message?

I’m working on finish a draft of my new book, Dangerous Gifts, for my publisher Microcosm (who I love), and the process is clarifying. Here’s the current version of the introduction. Please let me know what you think! Writing, through gratifying, is lonely! I want to know if this touches you somehow, if it would reach you in a dark space, if it’s the kind of writing you would share with a friend who was going through a hard time. And if not, why? I have a few months to get this done, please keep me company with your eyes.

Sascha

Introduction: What If Psychosis Is Meaningful?

What if madness is not an illness, but a message?

This book begins with a dangerous question. Dangerous not because it incites harm, but because it challenges the foundations of how we’ve been taught to think about reality, illness, identity, and power. If you’ve ever been called psychotic, delusional, disordered, or “too much”—if you’ve lived under the weight of acronyms like ADHD, BPD, PTSD, OCD, or MDD—you know that the language we use to describe minds in crisis can cut deep. It separates us from others. It tells us who we are. And sometimes, it lies.

In these pages, I want to invite you to imagine something different. Not a rejection of medicine or science, but a reframing. A reclaiming. A remembering that our experiences—especially the most intense, frightening, and beautiful ones—are not just signs of dysfunction, but potential portals to meaning.

Challenging Dominant Narratives

For over a century, the dominant story about mental illness has centered around the brain: its chemistry, its wiring, its alleged defects. The “chemical imbalance” theory, though widely discredited, still lingers like a ghost. It offers a comforting simplicity—your suffering is a glitch, a misfire, a problem to be medicated.

But for many of us, that story doesn’t ring true. Or at least, it doesn’t tell the whole truth.

What if your psychosis wasn’t a random malfunction, but a meaningful reaction to something unbearable? What if the voices you heard were trying to protect you from pain no one else could see? What if your delusions held clues about your deepest wounds—and your deepest wisdom?

The dominant narrative medicalizes what might otherwise be understood as spiritual crisis, political resistance, or ancestral grief. It tells us to quiet our visions, dull our edges, and return to normalcy, even when “normal” is killing us.

The Double Bind of Medical vs. Spiritual Interpretations

Here lies one of the most painful traps: the double bind between medical and spiritual interpretations of madness.

On one side, the clinical model insists you are sick, and if you don’t accept that, you are in denial—a classic symptom of your illness. On the other, many spiritual communities romanticize your experience, calling it an awakening or initiation, even when you’re suffering profoundly.

Neither frame is wrong—but neither is enough.

In my own life, I’ve been locked in psych wards and I’ve stood in sweat lodges. I’ve taken antipsychotics and I’ve journeyed with sacred mushrooms. I’ve prayed, protested, raged, and wept. Each of these paths taught me something. But it wasn’t until I found the language of Internal Family Systems—until I learned to talk to the parts of myself that others wanted to silence—that I began to stitch the pieces together.

Carl Jung once said that individuation—the process of becoming whole—requires us to encounter our shadow: the parts of ourselves we’ve been taught to reject, repress, or exile. Madness, in this light, isn’t just breakdown—it’s breakthrough. It’s the psyche’s urgent attempt to reveal what has been buried, to integrate what’s been split off. When we turn toward these parts with curiosity and compassion, we begin the sacred work of becoming fully ourselves. Not in spite of our madness, but through it.

Psychosis can be spiritual. It can be trauma. It can be both. Or neither. What matters is that we have the freedom and the tools to make meaning of our own experiences.

Lived Experience as a Source of Insight

This book is not just a theory. It’s a map drawn in blood and ink and memory.

It’s for the visionaries, the sensitives, the ones who’ve been called broken but know there’s something sacred in their fracture. It’s for those who’ve survived diagnoses and hospitals and well-meaning professionals who couldn’t see their wholeness. It’s for the clinicians and healers who are ready to listen differently. It’s for anyone who knows, deep in their bones, that madness carries messages we cannot afford to ignore.

This is a book about dangerous gifts—the kind that don’t fit neatly into categories, the kind that ask you to change your life to receive them. I won’t promise answers, but I’ll offer you stories, tools, and frameworks that have helped me and many others walk through fire and come out changed.

Because when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with you?” and start asking, “What happened to you? What’s trying to emerge? What if this pain has a purpose?”—everything begins to shift.

---

Find me in my public/private practice: