in our society have really broken hearts. a lot of the behaviors and the attitudes that i had before i got locked up in a psych ward and given a diagnosis, had a lot more to do with trying to escape from my sadness, than i think they necessarily had to do with a mental illness. if i was determined to live my life in a city and to work a really intensive steady job in an office, i think i would have to take medication to do that. but i don't think that fact means that i have a disease. it means that it would take a pharmaceutical substance to override my instincts, to make me capable of fitting into a system that was not designed for someone with a spirit like mine.

i'm just really sensitive and my moods shift in ways that i don't really keep a rhythm that fits with the clock of capitalist society. i'm learning more to listen to my own rhythms, particularly as they pertain to things like seasons, and light. and it's unreasonable to think that you should be able to be performing the same every day... in a world that's constantly changing. there would be a lot less "mental illness" in our society if people were given spaces to work through emotions like anger and grief, instead of denying them and suppressing them, if we had a language of compassion.

if you can listen to people when they're going through crisis, not tell them what to do, but actually listen. it's not necessarily the moment right then to untangle "why" and to put a label on it and to fix it. it's more a space to hold someone so that they can go through the process and come out the other side. we need to stop saying, "you are crazy, stop being crazy." we need to stop putting all the focus in treatment on how can we make you stop being the person you are? how can we stop telling you that you are wrong if you experience these things? and how can we instead, help you to learn how to handle your sensitivities? that you might make the transition from having these sensitivities overwhelming you, to having these sensitivities be giving you information you can use.

we have been given a sensitivity, a temperament, a disposition, which can grant us access to a lot of beautiful things, and can also be extremely painful and destructive. it's our responsibility as individuals to try to learn how to take care of our dangerous gift. i don't feel like there's this foreign evil thing operating in me and my goal is to eliminate it, and tame it into submission. i think something that happens for a lot of us who get labeled

as bipolar, is we have these really kaleidoscopic tendencies in our brains, where we can't filter out as much of the world as a lot of people do. and it's like we have 500 antennas out in every direction all at once and we're bringing in tons and tons of information on all these different channels. the dead flower over there, and the shadow over here, and this person over there, and the love letter over there, and the map over here, and the apocalypse over there, and walmart down there, and the ocean, and children, and... and in my mind, they're all connected, and they're not separable. when you open up your radio transmitters and you are taking in all this information about the world, it ain't all good. when i open up in that way, i don't just see beauty and light, and god and grass, i see suffering and bodies rotting in the streets and injustice and a lot of pain and terror and fear also comes in.

because the dark side of humanity is very, very, very real and we don't want to think about that. there's moments when people have glimpses of what is luminous and transcendent, and that's fantastic, but no one stays there. god knows, there have been more times in my life than i could ever count when i have been like "please take this fucking thing away from me. i don't want it! it is too painful. it is too much pain and suffering. you can have it back. just let me close down and be like a normal person walking around the world. i don't want access to these frequencies. can i please just shut the dial off?" so much of my creative output in the world is driven by trying to reconcile those patterns and those swings. it's one of those ironies where definitely when

i'm at my most stable, i don't tend to create very much. and when i'm swinging back and forth and moving between different states of consciousness, it's more painful and there's more friction, and i create a lot more, and it drives me crazy, you know, 'cause part of me just wishes that this whole dangerous gift thing didn't have to be like that. by going into the fire directly, we become more and more pure. we develop more and more of our personal integrity.

traditionally, in certain indigenous cultures, a shaman was someone who had access to the spirit world, and was able to help heal people. but that access was not necessarily just granted as like a divine gift that fell out of the sky. most shamans had to go through a period of initiation, when, to some degree, their system broke down. and in some cultures, it seemed really literally like shamans have visions of their bones being disassembled and boiled. and sometimes it seemed people who tend, as children, to be singled out to become shamans are the ones who were more sensitive, maybe more sickly, often had epileptic tendencies, but there was something in those beings that people could recognize that they could have access to those other worlds. and going through the darkness was part of finding your strength.

one of the most distressing things about the disease model of mental illness in our culture, to have any periods of darkness or suffering is wrong, it means you're off the track. it means you need to be fixed, and i think there is a lot we can learn from spiritual paradigms that see that someone who is truly trying to be awake in their life will go through suffering, because life is sad and difficult and hard.

and as you get closer to knowing your heart, you find a lot of pain there and it doesn't mean you're messing up. it just means that you're really committed. this person fell out of the sky with a really similar life story to mine. i met sascha, because i had responded to a version of his life story that he had written and got published. and it was about his experiences with "madness," and wanting to live an authentic, adventurous life, and not crash and burn over and over, because of the fragile fire in his brain. i ended up sending him my whole life story and he showed me all these e-mails he had been getting from people all over the country. we were so curious about, what would happen if all these people learned how to use their wings, so we didn't crash all the time?

what would happen if we could somehow harness these powers and this vision, and make use of it in a sustainable way? how do they personally navigate the space between brilliance and madness? and so, he and i decided that there had to be a place for these people to read each other's stories and to know that they existed. and so, we thought we would start up a website. it became the icarus project and it had way more than just a few stories, it became an interactive forum for people to talk to each other, and just grew and mushroomed into this whole network of people all over the country. icarus was an ancient greek boy, mythologically, who was given the gift of wings made out of wax and feathers, so that he could escape from a labyrinth. and despite multiple warnings, he overestimated his powers

and flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted and he crashed into the ocean and drowned. and we saw this as a really powerful archetype for the way that many people who get labeled with mental illness in our society, have this dangerous gift of heightened sensitivity and vision, and creativity, and fragility. we had some vague idea that a key piece of recovering mental health had to do with building community. i was a kid who was a real survivor and thought i didn't need anybody else's help to get by. and letting go of that notion, letting go of that identity, and actually becoming interdependent with other human beings, is both one of the hardest things i've ever tried to do, but one of the most essential. it's been so key to my mental health returning, becoming willing to trust other people on the planet.

when my mood shifts, it's like the wind cut out and the rug falls down and you're not flying on the magic carpet anymore. it takes a lot of faith to stay on the path of believing

that harnessing it is in some way possible. it takes a lot of faith and perseverance to go through this path of loss and reclamation, and loss and reclamation, and loss and reclamation, and not give up. it seemed like the pieces of my life were completely irreconcilable. there were so many things i wanted to hold on to, and so many pieces of my existence that i wanted to give. there's a piece of art i made called, "training for the surface of the moon," it's a series of collages. i wanted to take every fragment of anything that was beautiful in my life and not forget it. and the act of sewing them together was a very literal way of trying to make things meet that didn't meet; the beauty in them and the pain in them.

something about the possibility for wholeness and the reality of destruction, and that these coexist at the same time. and this feeling that there is something more transcendent, something that smacks of grace. and most of my work has a real tension in it between forms and images that remind me of the grace of existence, whether it's seeds that are sprouting or roots that are going into the ground, or light, or circles, or sacred geometry. but things that, for me, involve small glimpses of hope and regeneration.

there are stages in the formation of our identity where it's extremely empowering to own the part of us that society marginalizes, and say there's nothing wrong with this part. and then i think there are also times when we can move beyond those definitions. i'm less and less identified as a mad person, or a liberated mad person. and i'm identified more as a person who is traumatized by her life experience, just like so many other people. i don't want to think that i carry around this thing, this madness... i think that i go through extreme states of consciousness. sometimes that journey can look to people like it is descent in and out of madness... but fundamentally, i don't see myself as a person

who is carrying around my madness. i see myself as a person who is in a process of change.

when a resident of san francisco is looking for health care, you look in your neighborhood first. what is closest to you? if you come to a neighborhood health center or a clinic, you then have access it a system of care in the community health network. we are a system of care that was probably based on the family practice model, but it was really clear that there are special populations with special needs. the cole street clinic is a youth clinic in the heart of the haight ashbury and they target youth. tom woodell takes care of many of the central city residents and they have great expertise in providing services for many of the homeless. potrero hill and southeast

health centers are health centers in those particular communities that are family health centers, so they provide health care to patients across the age span. . >> many of our clients are working poor. they pay their taxes. they may run into a rough patch now and then and what we're able to provide is a bridge towards getting them back on their feet. the center averages about 14,000 visits a year in the health clinic alone. one of the areas that we specialize in is family medicine, but the additional focus of that is is to provide care to women and children. women find out they're pregnant, we talk to them about the importance of getting good prenatal care which takes many visits. we initially will see them for their full physical to determine their base line health, and then enroll them in prenatal care which occurs over

the next 9 months. group prenatal care is designed to give women the opportunity to bond during their pregnancy with other women that have similar due dates. our doctors here are family doctors. they are able to help these women deliver their babies at the hospital, at general hospital. we also have the wic program, which is a program that provides food vouchers for our families after they have their children, up to age 5 they are able to receive food vouchers to get milk and cereal for their children. >> it's for the city, not only our clinic, but the city. we have all our children in san francisco should have insurance now because if they are low income enough, they get medical. if they actually have a little more assets, a little more income, they can get happy family. we do have family who come outside of our neighborhood to

come on our clinic. one thing i learn from our clients, no matter how old they are, no matter how little english they know, they know how to get to chinatown, meaning they know how to get to our clinic. 85 percent of our staff is bilingual because we are serving many monolingual chinese patients. they can be child care providers so our clients can go out and work. >> we found more and more women of child bearing age come down with cancer and they have kids and the kids were having a horrible time and parents were having a horrible time. how do parents tell their kids they may not be here? what we do is provide a place and the material and support and then they figure out their own truth, what it means to them.

i see the behavior change in front of my eyes. maybe they have never been able to go out of boundaries, their lives have been so rigid to sort of expressing that makes tremendous changes. because we did what we did, it is now sort of a nationwide model. >> i think you would be surprised if you come to these clinics. many of them i think would be your neighbors if you knew that. often times we just don't discuss that. we treat husband and wife and they bring in their kids or we treat the grandparents and then the next generation. there are people who come in who need treatment for their heart disease or for their diabetes or their high blood pressure or their cholesterol or their hepatitis b. we actually provide group medical visits and group education classes and meeting people who have similar chronic illnesses as you do really helps you understand that you

are not alone in dealing with this. and it validates the experiences that you have and so you learn from each other. >> i think it's very important to try to be in tune with the needs of the community and a lot of our patients have -- a lot of our patients are actually immigrants who have a lot of competing priorities, family issues, child care issues, maybe not being able to find work or finding work and not being insured and health care sometimes isn't the top priority for them. we need to understand that so that we can help them take care of themselves physically and emotionally to deal with all these other things. they also have to be working through with people living longer and living with more chronic conditions i think we're going to see more patients coming through. >> starting next year, every day 10,000 people will hit the

age of 60 until 2020. . >> the needs of the patients that we see at kerr senior center often have to do with the consequences of long standing substance abuse and mental illness, linked to their chronic diseases. heart failure, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, stroke, those kinds of chronic illnesses. when you get them in your 30's and 40's and you have them into your aging process, you are not going to have a comfortable old age. you are also seeing in terms of epidemics, an increase in alzheimer's and it is going to increase as the population increases. there are quite a few seniors who have mental health problems but they are also, the majority of seniors, who are hard-working, who had minimum

wage jobs their whole lives, who paid social security. think about living on $889 a month in the city of san francisco needing to buy medication, one meal a day, hopefully, and health care. if we could provide health care early on we might prevent (inaudible) and people would be less likely to end up in the emergency room with a drastic outcome. we could actually provide prevention and health care to people who had no other way of getting health care, those without insurance, it might be more cost effectiti