Interesting Quotes, Vol. 6

Kazimierz Dąbrowski, Stigma Fighter

After publishing the first Overcoming the Self-Stigma of Mental Illness post, I remembered there are quotes from Dr. Dąbrowski that show how well he understood stigma and its consequences, as well as ways to mitigate it.

The following quote is from an undated, unpublished manuscript by Dąbrowski called “Thoughts on Positive Disintegration,” produced with the help of Dr. Dexter Amend in the 1970s.

“Although this may be only vaguely understood or intuitively apprehended, nearly all indications of nervousness, inability to adapt or adjust, psychoneurosis and mental illness in general, are related in some way to the experience of a broader, deeper, more distinctly human reality. Those who have realized in their own experience the relationships of maladjustment and other symptoms of mental illness to higher realities are morally obligated to dispel the ignorance of the general public regarding the “mentally ill.” (Dąbrowski, n.d., lines 1023-1028¹)

When I read that, it made sense to me, and I realized I have long felt obligated to dispel the public's ignorance regarding mental illness.

Why do I share my past when I could just as easily pretend it never happened? It’s because I know there are people who are suffering, or have children or loved ones who are struggling with what looks like severe mental illness, and they need hope. They need to know there’s a way out that doesn’t involve death. So, I share the truth about what I went through as a way of helping others.

In the same chapter, KD wrote, “Observation, description and understanding of psychoneurotics is the key to the most essential deep and creative problems of humanity.” (lines 1071-1072)

In the first Interesting Quotes post, I mentioned that Dąbrowski wrote under the pen name Cienin. The following is from his book Fragments from the Diary of a Madman.

“It seems to me that an attempt to bring the mentally ill nearer to the world of the so-called normal persons, and especially the normal creative persons—if such persons exist—would be useful not only for the mentally ill but also for the so-called healthy ones.

Sometimes it is good to take an interest in mentally ill persons, not from the psychiatrically systematic point of view, but in view of their deepest, most authentic experiences; to acquaint ourselves with their observations and their opinions in relation to certain everyday phenomena in the “normal world.”

And even better... there might be a very good reason for accepting the dangerous hypothesis that the world of so-called abnormals is indeed reasonable, and the world of normal is full of absurdity.

This dangerous reversal of present-day opinion would perhaps allow us to think in “another dimension,” and after experiencing this enlarged awareness, the return to the normal world could be beneficial above all the so-called normal world.” (Cienin, 1972, p. 7)

The autobiographical nature of Fragments often brought me to tears when I was first reading it and realizing the depth of KD’s understanding of mental illness beyond his formal education and practice. This excerpt was dated February 2, 1952:

“I am a schizophrenic and I am a psychologist. I do not know what helps what or what damages what.

Sometimes I think that my schizophrenic madness is lessened by the fact that I know something about psychology. Sometimes I think otherwise, and feel that my rather “sick” mind enlightens and deepens my narrow knowledge of psychology. Anyway, my inquiries are not without sense. And perhaps they are important, if not in the present then for some areas of human life in the future.” (Cienin, 1972, p. 12)

It’s too bad we can’t ask Dąbrowski questions about this book and learn more about his own experiences. All we can do is speculate, but Fragments is made up of what appear to be very revealing journal entries, and I love reading this book.

At first, I found it overwhelming because it felt so familiar that it would cause me to start crying, and I’d have to put it down after getting through a few pages.

“For ages, for thousands of years, the stigma of being dangerous, a source of shame, defective—was attached to psychoneurotics. How could these people, who were full [of] complexes, inhibitions, maladjustments to reality; full of existential and unexistential anxieties; full of hindrances and shame, and inferiority feeling, stand the pressure of an organized opinion which treated them as lesser, handicapped, as being on the fringe of life?” (Cienin, 1972, p. 64)

When we think about the conditions in which Dąbrowski worked as a psychiatrist in Poland, we can see how courageous he was to put forth a theory that challenged the status quo. In Fragments, we can see that he understood this issue from the inside out.

Something that shocked me when I investigated psychiatry in Poland during the 1930s-1950s was realizing that KD had worked at a hospital where the Nazis exterminated the patients during World War II. Dąbrowski was imprisoned by the communists in Poland for 18 months in 1950, and when he was released, he was ordered to work at Kobierzyn², where he served as Director of Pediatric Neuropsychiatry.

One of the things that I find beautiful about the theory of positive disintegration is that within this framework, it’s not about recovering from mental illness and reaching the same place you were before you were “sick.”

“A recovery from mental illness—a form of “dissolution” to Jackson—can result not in a return to a previously supposedly “normal” condition but to a higher level of functioning and creative output” (Dąbrowski, 1996, p. 11).

Before I’d read enough of KD’s work to be able to cite that sentence, I wrote about this issue in my paper on the inner experience of giftedness, written in 2016:

“Following the autoethnography, in 2015, I found that I did not relate to the concept of “recovery” from mental illness when the concept is defined as a return to a previously experienced state of functioning or health. I knew that such a belief would be false and not characteristic of my lived experiences. This is yet another way that I’ve found answers in Dąbrowski’s theory. The wellness that I’ve achieved is not a recovery from mental illness but a different, higher level of functioning and development.” (Wells, 2017, p. 106)

For those of us who know what it’s like to be “patients” and feel devalued and stigmatized because of our struggles, there is some urgency to help others avoid this experience.

I know I’m only scratching the surface of the depth of Dąbrowski’s life and work in these early posts, but I hope you’ll bear with me as I keep trying. Trying to pull together the theory, the history of Dąbrowski and his collaborators, the literature from gifted education, and my work on giftedness and mental illness is a significant task, and I’m doing my best.

I realize some subscribers are here from the gifted community, and others have come from the mental health community, but there’s plenty of overlap between these spaces.

Thank you for supporting this work and allowing me to find a rhythm with written posts. Over the weekend, I was in Florida, visiting with family under challenging circumstances. This continues to be a heavier, more difficult year than I expected, but it’s also been full of lovely surprises and supportive people.

References

Cienin, P. (1972). Fragments from the diary of a madman. Gryf Publications.

Dabrowski, K. (with Amend, D.). (n.d.). Thoughts on positive disintegration. Unpublished manuscript. Department of Psychology, University of Alberta.

Dąbrowski, K. (1996). Multilevelness of emotional and instinctive functions. Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego.

Wells, C. (2017). The primary importance of the inner experience of giftedness. Advanced Development, 16, 95-113.

1. This manuscript has no page numbers, only line numbers.

2. Click here to download the PDF of a paper by Dr. Tadeusz Nasierowski called “In the Abyss of Death: The Extermination of the Mentally Ill in Poland During World War II.”