Is Sinead O’Connor Mentally Ill, or Just Awake?

I saw the motel room video that Sinead O’Connor made recently. What a sad thing to watch. I remember her as a talented, beautiful, incandescent person with an amazing gift of a voice. She was fearless, articulate, and a truth-seeker. Her music was wonderful.

Now I see her, forlorn and alone in a motel room – abandoned, pleading, speaking of the anguish of mental illness, and alluding to suicide. Her suffering is palpable. I cringed when I watched it.

There are people close to me, whom I love deeply, who have been deemed 'mentally ill'. And there’s a common thread that runs through them. They are all sensitive and intuitive. They’re intelligent, insightful, and compassionate. And they feel deeply disconnected from everything around them, and conflicted within.

But how could you not feel disconnected and conflicted in this world? There are so many conflicting messages, so much counterintuitive information all around us every single day. There is a constant commodification of this things we value – love, spirituality, compassion, family – to the point that everything we value is something that has been patented, processed, exploited, and given a value of currency.

You’re a Buddhist? Your home’s interior design can reflect that, if you can afford it. You’re a Christian? You’ll need to tithe 10 percent of your gross income to your church. You do yoga? These trendy yoga pants will make your ass look amazing, and they cost just $129. You love your child? Good, because to prove that, he’s going to need you to buy him a $900 cell phone that no child needs. Through constant commodification, the things we value - love, spirit, acceptance, compassion, and happiness - are continually marginalized, packaged, imported, cheapened, and sold back to us.

The mentally ill feel no connection to their culture. They experience a level of terror and alienation and purposelessness that paralyzes them. But wait – don’t we all? Do you feel deeply connected to the culture that’s been created? Do we, the inhabitants of this culture, have any real connections to the body politic or to each other intimately?

Mentally ill systems create mentally ill people. Disconnected systems create disconnected people. I witness the global ecological meltdown and the economic, gender, and racial inequality that continues to exist and divide us. I watch scenes from places like Charlottesville, Virginia, and wonder if we’re evolving in any way, if we’ll ever pull together and create a future free from mindless rage and hopeless desperation. I, like many others, wonder how we found ourselves in such a broken system.

Those who have been deemed 'mentally ill' feel what we feel, except, I imagine, without our learned ability to numb our sensibilities and compartmentalize it all. Like us, they feel strangled and unappreciated. Like us, they feel disconnected from the world around them. But as acutely sensitive, intuitive, intelligent, and compassionate as they are, they feel it so severely that it stops them dead in their tracks.

This intuitive intelligence is a raw, hard thing to carry. I’ve seen it again and again in the highly intelligent and thoughtful people I know who have been deemed mentally ill. None of the people I love who are called ‘mentally ill’ believe that they are Napoleon: they simply feel strangled and unappreciated.

Sinead O'Connor is the strangled and unappreciated female who possesses the kind of goddess energy that is choked and cloaked and unexpressed in our culture. She’s the aging woman who’s been discarded by a civilization that attaches value to the lives of people like the Kardashians. She’s the onetime symbol of youth, beauty, talent, fame, and fortune that, in her middle age, has become useless to our society.

Like anyone suffering with mental health issues, what she needs is connection, meaning, purpose, and love. It seems to me that rather than trying to fix Sinead O’Connor, we should get busy with the business of fixing our society, which, for certain, is a lot sicker than she is.

We must do the ongoing and inward work of discovering why we settle for a culture of defective values. We have mediocre jobs that define us. We work for others’ ideas and privilege in exchange for inadequate paychecks. We consider ourselves valuable only if we’re useful to society. We stifle our spirits in order to marginally survive. We don’t allow others to be what they’re meant to be: we marginalize homosexuality, abandon the aging, and punish the artists, writers, and dreamers. These are all the bad things that disconnection brings.

People like Sinead O’Connor don’t have to feel this way forever. Neither do we. This world needs a different way of looking at culture and its inhabitants. I hope that someday, Sinead O’Connor heals. It’s going to take a monumental change, but I also hope that one day, the world heals from its own burden of disconnection and mental illness.

Much love,

Barbie xo