Dangerous Gifts: Using Internal Family Systems to Channel Your Madness and Transform Your Life

What makes you different might be the key to your deepest power.

What if what we call “mental illness” isn’t just a personal defect—but a sign of something larger trying to break through? Dangerous Gifts explores how madness, visionary states, and emotional intensity can be pathways to personal transformation and cultural change. Drawing on Internal Family Systems (IFS), systems family therapy, and two decades of organizing within radical mental health movements, Sascha Altman DuBrul (co-founder of The Icarus Project) invites readers to reframe their struggles not as problems to be fixed, but as messages to be decoded.

Combining practical tools, intimate stories, and a sharp critique of the biopsychiatric model, this book offers a new way of seeing distress—not as a diagnosis to be managed, but as a dangerous gift to be honored. It’s a guide for anyone navigating extreme states, working to heal from trauma, or seeking to change the broken systems that shape our lives.