Underground Transmissions

“Social media hacked the dopamine reward system. AI hacks the attachment system. If you’re lonely, you can talk to something that feels like it’s there and it witnesses you. And if you’re someone whose mind goes all over the place, who has what clinicians call thought disorder, the AI can follow you.

The semester before I dropped out of college I wrote this paper for an urban anthropology class and then it ended up buried in a pile of folders for more than 30 years. The world went and changed around us but I think this is a useful and interesting document that deserves not to just sit in a box for another 30 years. At the time I started taking photos of my friends, a practice I continued for a long time. So I included some of those old photos.

Hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since we were cooking up the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA). Many of the characters are still around, some have passed, some of us are on the other side of the country and sending out kids to kindergarten. It’s good to keep track and to move forward.

This is not an essay about psychosis in general, or what anyone else should do about theirs. It's one story, mine, told as honestly as I can manage after decades of turning it over. I take medication and it's helped me stay alive; I also know that the locked ward kept me safe, but that if I had followed its logic it would have killed my soul. The psychosis world is still drowning in disease model thinking, and I want to make more room to imagine something else.

spectacular art by drooker.com What makes you feel comfortable when you’re talking to a stranger? How about when the stranger is a potential new therapist? I think of myself as a friendly and open person, but when I’m sizing up someone I might work with as a therapist, my sharp protectors show up at my side, carrying reminders of old trauma, and I find myself speaking for them. What I’m listening for in those first encounters is the person’s realness, which I assess with the tuning fork of my own.

We are meaning-making creatures. It’s the thing we do with our minds whether we choose to or not, the way we turn a hard year into a story we can carry, the way a song on the radio at the right moment feels like it was sent from some mysterious higher power. For people like me, who have lived through extreme states, meaning-making runs hot. Sometimes it’s a gift and sometimes it’s a flood. Either way, it’s the water I swim in, and it’s what I’ve spent twenty-five years building community around.

This is an adaptation of a longer article recently published in the Ideas Letter. It's not an argument against AI in mental health. It's an argument about who builds it and what it's built from. Not everyone needs to read it. But some people really do. Are you one of them? Joseph Campbell put it plainly: the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. What determines drowning or swimming is almost never the experience itself. It’s the container.

I have so much respect for the people who try to actualize their creative dreams and invite us into them. It’s too easy to just let the status quo roll over us and accept what we’re handed. But in the realm of public mental health the status quo is often so absurdly lacking and sometimes dystopic that we have to do our best to build our dreams or risk ending up living in someone else’s nightmare. A few weeks ago I got to participate in a collective dream.

I’m writing this from a train somewhere between London and Paris. I’ve been in the UK for two weeks with Alice and the kids, leading T-MAPs groups at a gathering in rural Wales, watching people light up as IFS clicked into place for them, some hearing the “parts” framework for the first time and recognizing themselves immediately.

Reflections on a Month of T-MAPs Work, May 2026 There is a particular quality of attention that happens in a room -- or a Zoom room -- where people have agreed to stop performing wellness. I have been part of a lot of groups over the years, and I know the difference. Most support spaces ask you, implicitly or explicitly, to be on your way to something: recovery, stability, healing, a final coherent version of yourself. This group asked for something different. It asked people to show up unfinished.