Reflections on Madness

7/27/2019 Reflections on Madness

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Reflections on Madness

by Yvonne Nahat

[Note: This article is a first-hand account of schizophrenia. The sometimes-esoteric, somewhat-tangential nature of the writing is characteristic of schizophrenia. The author not only describes

the poignant nature of her illness, but shows us through her writing how intelligent and aware

she is. - ed. ck]

The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely

aware - Henry Miller

Madness is contact with other dimensions. There are patterns, clinical categories and the baffled

look from the viewers of the outside. Madness itself though has its own internal logic like atheatre play or work of art. The mad occupy a world that is very real to them. I believe that we

all harbour archetypes in our subconscious and that these surface in madness. It is a collectiveunconsciousness relived on individual terms. Madness is a larger than life experience and it breaks all barriers and boundaries we are accustomed to.

It is not yet proven that madness is a brain disease, although this is how it is treated by today'smedical community and society. There are disputes not only within the psychiatric field that

madness is part of an individuation process and not always an illness parse. The latter view

strongly alters the perception of madness. If there are forms of madness which belong to the areaof self-growth and individuation rather than just to illness, then, what does this say about our

current treatment of madness?

Madness gets locked away, it is relegated to the fringes of society, the mad are medicated,supervised, picked up by the police, kept in confinement by lawyers, judges, doctors and

families. The world of the mad is shunned away, neither doctors, nor nurses, nor lawyers or judges, often also not the afflicted families, actually enter the mindset of madness. It is kept

abreast by being ignored and medicated. All this whilst madness can be amazingly creative,

nurturing and insightful. Madness in my experience is an amazing poetic and oeneric production

and it should not be relegated to the fringes of society or consciousness. The mad conjure upentirely new worlds, new systems of organization and communication, the mad invent languages

and have often a very special relationship to the arts. The creative aspects of madness should be

allowed to live and to have a space in which to unfold. They should not be repressed.

The upside of madness is often accompanied by a down side. Here too, therapy should enter thisdark side of consciousness and the soul in order to allow these other worlds to have room to

breath. What happens today in regard to madness is that it is silenced. It is robbed of its voice.There were times and cultures where the mad had a special status. In Shakespeare's world for

example, or among the many shamanistic cultures of American Indians, South American Indians,

the Celts and others. It is only in modern times that the voice of the mad has been muted. It is leftto the world of the insane without any interest from the so called healthy and normal world. The

mad are often visionaries who in other cultures might achieve the status of a magician, doctor,



artist or oracle and I wonder whether we as a culture by silencing the voice of the mad are not

doing tremendous harm to our culture at large. Leaving untapped resources of the mind and soul

go to waste. What does this say about us?

Films like the One who flew over the Cuckoo's Nest still ring very close to home especially

where closed psychiatric institutions are concerned. Closed psychiatric institutions are notfriendly places. They are places of alienation and pain. There is a tremendous amount of

suffering and all involved are hard pressed in coping with the strength and fervour with which

mad people inhabit their own seemingly "isolated" space and time. For patients it isunfathomable to suffer the degradation and humiliation of being robbed of one's usual freedoms.

Locked wards are like prisons. Hopefully there will be a time in the future when locked wards

will be looked at with disbelief. I am certain there will come a time when this form of

incarceration will be seen as what it is, a violation of human rights and dignity.

The mad are sentient beings often even more sensitive to infringements of basic freedoms than

the normal because for the mad often the very social order and way of human beings relating to

one another has become a primary question and focus of their attention. Often the very rules andregulations that make up a psychiatric ward are a mirror of regulatory mechanisms present in

society under which the so called mad already suffer more than others. The mad are often themore sensitive in a culture.

I am convinced that psychiatry is in need of tremendous reform into areas hitherto thoughtunthinkable. The actual content of a psychosis needs to be integrated and a part of therapy from

very early on. Psychoses need to be seen as part of an individuation process and the patient

should be viewed anew under this light. The patient role of the passive person who is treated

should be activated to become a full fledged human being undergoing tremendous labour of the psyche and the soul. Psychiatric institutions should aid such people on their journey in talk-

therapy, art, dance, music therapies and so on, the actual content of the psychosis should become part of the content of therapy. The mind of the "patient" should be engaged with even duringacute phases of a psychosis. Experiments of this kind have existed.

John Wier Perry ran a house in San Francisco in the 1970`s called diabase, where first timeschizophrenic patients could go and live out their madness without medical sedation. The house

was open and the staff and doctors accompanied the "patient" on their journeys into the

subconscious. The experience made at diabase showed that most people undergoing a first psychosis would remain in a state of madness for about 40 days after which period the "patient"

would out of her or his own accord gradually move back into "normality" again.

Now I am not advocating that mental patients stop taking their medicine. I am on medication and

would not dream of discontinuing it for obvious reasons. I have unfortunately had relapses when

going off the medication. So I urge anyone reading this to not stop taking their medication and to

make changes in your medication only with the advice of your doctor, family and friends. Nevertheless, I am of the opinion that medication is all too rapidly conceded to when it comes to

mental health. John Weir Perry argues even that patients who were treated with medication

during a first time psychosis, repressing the symptoms, had a much higher relapse rate than first



time psychosis patients. So the question of medication should always be considered very

carefully.

Next to the pain psychiatric institutions are also places where great creativity and fragility can be

found. The human condition in all its most multifaceted forms. They are places of imagination,

poetry and strength above and beyond the paths and orbits of misery which are drawn in these places. The mad speak and think in tongues. There are the languages of depression, of mania, of

schizophrenia, but then these are terms the psychotic don't know or use. This is the language of

the normal. To a mad person such categories do not exist. What exists is an endless boundlessuniverse of connections, threads, lightning rods mental and linguistic bursting stars or burnt out

amber. The mad have an energy of their own. Their body, mind and soul are like on strings.

Imperceptible to weather and times of the day madness is above all a great wide continuum

boundless and oceanic. It is one of the most dreadful and most beautiful places I have ever beento.

The down side of my psychoses was a severe bout of Satanism with incessant images of sadist,

demonical and cannibalistic images, practices and language running in my brain and eyes, evenmore, afflicting my entire body. This psychosis was really serious and of a magnitude that would

it not have been stopped, I wonder whether I would still be alive today.

In hindsight my illness is called an affective-schizophrenic paranoia. At the time however it was

sheer paradise and hell. Hieronymus Bosch paintings had come alive and were haunting me.Devil Dogs and scenes from Apocalypse Now running in my brain. Monster-like animals

attacking people and this was for real, foresight I was having of what was to come. No surprise, I

was reading a lot of Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, creating a new body myself, a higher

body, a celestial body fit to stand the test of such trials, pain and suffering. I wished to be theyoung woman I had once been unhampered by such images, not knowing that such things could

exist. Having my head up in the clouds, clean fresh mountain air and thoughts unhampered bySatanism, cannibalism and all its myriad forms of torment. I wished to be with Nietzsche's`Daughters of the Desert`, "For with them was there equally good clear oriental air, there was I

furthest from cloudy, damp, melancholy old Europe! Then did I love such oriental maidens and

other blue kingdoms of heaven, over which hung no clouds and no thoughts."

Why I was hit with a psychosis of this particular coloring I don't know. I have never been

interested in Satanism. Cannibalism is a horror to me also in my sane moments and I alwaysthought I knew what evil was and that this could not touch me.

I don't stem from an overly religious background. There were sides to my psychosis with verystrong religious overtones. Yes, my family is religious, yet in a very personal way. We are

neither zealots nor fundamentalists. I myself believe in a higher spirituality and intelligence at

work in the universe. I also believe in reincarnation, however, in a very abstract way, there is a

world spirit which reincarnates in its myriad forms. Paraphrasing Rumi, once I am born as fire,then again as a stone, then again as water and so on.

I do not believe that the mentally ill are possessed by evil spirits as some do. I feel that

psychotics are deeply fragile souls who are in pain at times and then again they are visionaries of



the highest order. I do ask myself why is my illness a psychosis and not another form of illness.

What is my psychosis trying to communicate to me. Why did I choose to leave the world of

women and men to live in some other far of place with imaginary women and men? What doesmy psychosis tell me about myself, after all, I conjured up world wide conspiracy scheme, a very

dualistic world picture with good and evil distinctly marketed? At the same time I feel very

strongly that madness has as much to say about this world as sanity does.

Madness is also a mirror held to our society. What exactly is it that makes up the world of the

insane, their mood swings, their emotional intelligence, their far out imagination? Insanity isoften accompanied by a boundless sense of the imagination and a tremendous capacity of joy

within the utmost structures of pain. The mad conjure up the world a new, invent new languages,

meaning and thought patterns. Madness can be a highly creative process although it not always

is.

I have been fighting madness for the past eight years. While other friends, colleagues and family

members have been living their lives, progressing in their work, having children, entering mature

adulthood, I have battled bouts of madness, lost a marriage, I am out of work, I have lost most of my friends and half of my family. I have hit rock bottom with the danger of ending up on the

street. This is an until recently upper middle class woman writing. Quite a shocking path to havetaken this life of mine.

Madness isolates. It is an illness still relegated to the fringes of our society. Most people areafraid of madness just as they are afraid of anything which will scratch the surface of middle

class success. "My house", "my family", "my career", - all this seems on a fragile balance once

the light of madness shines on such things. Mind you, I am eternally grateful for all those who

have never had to encounter madness. I am happy for them and I am grateful that souls exist whocan experience an unhampered expansion and development in this universe without the set backs

of madness which madness undoubtedly also is. It is at once a great leap forward as well as aregression into regions of the human psyche which are dark, boundless and frightening. A part of this journey is like the Heart of Darkness revisited, not reread. An entirely different matter.

The Sufi poet Ibn Hazm al Andalusi says in one of his forewords to his poetry: "May God protect me from mental confusion and may he not burden us with what exceeds our capabilities!"

I pray for this since my madness for friends and foes alike. I have a collection of Sufi music from

the 12th and 13th centuries, music which was played at mental hospitals for patients at the time,and music has been a great companion and savior throughout this paradox time of kissing

heaven's seams while plunging into the deluge of the human psyche.

Yes, I believe there is something feminine about madness. It is the other side of life. The great

antipatriarchal machine: all writing, language, sensational and emotional intelligence. It is like

water this endless movement of nocturnal dreams and aspirations. All not lost to the big

utilitarian machine of function and practice. It exists out of its own right and creative energies. Itdoesn't ask may I take place or unfold. It simply happens. Madness dissolves all questions of use

and practicability. It has logic of its own. The willingness to live is as great as the fearlessness of

dying. Like a child again carried simply by existence. Madness is like a great mother it harborsall possibilities. It holds promises and has an unbreakable optimism coupled with a fervent



certitude. It is strongly intuitional like a child that believes that the world can stand still or be in

perpetual motion. This is why mad people don't think about paying their rent, they forget all

functional aspects of life because the catalyst has become a different one. All spirit, allemotional, all mental. I strongly believe that madness is also an attempted escape from the Maya

of this world, it is a plunge into higher realms within life and the universe.

--

About the Author

Yvonne Nahat has experienced 8 years of schizophrenia. This essay is a reflection on madnessvia a first hand account. This essay has been shortened here. For a full length view of the article

please go the her website: wwww.schizophrenia-help-online.com

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Reflections on Madness