Corporate culture puts the authority to heal in the hands of professionals. People are either experts or consumers, service providers or clients. Psychiatrists are trained to view the seriously mentally ill as Them, not Us, and to study "illnesses" and "disorders" as if they were dissecting, classifying, and diagnosing bugs under a microscope. Acting like superior and distant observers, health authorities can feel uncontaminated by the people they are paid to heal, clinging to safety in the role of the professional. "I've been there too" is the last thing a traditional doctor is likely to tell their mad patient.

Outside this corporate medical culture, there is another way, an ancient way found in all societies across history. Tribal societies put the authority to heal in the hands of people who've struggled through illness and survived it. You become qualified to help others because you've been mad or sick yourself. Illness is a painful initiation into your calling as a wounded healer.

These healers or shamans have suffered. A Soyot tribesperson from Siberia is in bed for a year or more, wracked with pain and fear. Korean Mu dang spirit healers hear voices, speak in tongues, starve themselves and become deathly sick. A Peruvian curandero can hit bottom as an alcoholic, plagued by nightmares and depression. Zulu Inyanga suffer severe pain and sleeplessness that drive them into wild manic states. Still others go through accidents, are attacked by animals, or are shattered by traumatic violence. Each healer's story is unique, but the same pattern of initiation and calling is repeated all over the world. Wounded healers pass through a life-threatening ordeal and discover skills and wisdom through the personal experience of healing themselves.

Sustainable tribal cultures have elders and traditions that recognize the meaning in breakdown and the potential for the emergence of wisdom. They identify wounded healers and help train them for their new role by guiding them through the process. By contrast, mad individuals in the West are set adrift, cast aside as broken and useless. To navigate ourselves through our initiation, we have to create ourselves and a new culture as we go along. The key is overcoming isolation and connecting with others who have been through it too, as we explore our lives and chart new maps of return from the abyss.

In the eyes of corporate medicine, mental illness is like an insect pest invading a carefully sprayed field of identical plants. The invader must be destroyed and the monocrop must be defended. As tribal people know, in wild nature everything is about balance and everything serves a purpose, even illness. Just as agricultural pests are a way of bringing down unsustainable monocrops to let wildness and diversity return, illness and madness are often ways for nature to restore balance in human culture.

What if your madness is your wild self trying to upset the unsustainable monocropping of your mind and bring change to your life? What if madness in society is an ecological response to the stifling uniformity of our culture? What if breaking down is also breaking through -- pushing the sensitive, creative, spiritual people at the fringes to become healers and leaders and turn the whole system upside down? What if some of us have to go crazy by corporate culture's standards in order to figure out how to be balanced and healthy by wild nature's standards?

What if the purpose of your crazy, chaotic suffering is to make you into something you never dreamed you could be - a wounded healer?