A mad insight into madness

 

A MAD INSIGHT INTO MADNESS

God works in mysterious ways… on one hand, he bestowed upon man the most powerful and somewhat splendid gift of all; the human brain. On the other hand, he gave us the power to question the very reason of our existence. Now, if we are to further expand upon this train of thought, and let our minds wander further into this enticing yet treacherous path… we will eventually stumble upon the notion of ‘madness’. What is madness? Is it an emotion? Is it the idea of losing one’s sense of reality around him? Is it the thing which is shown in psychological thrillers? Who knows? But why do we want to know about it? What is it that drives us towards madness, and the most terrifying thing out of all of these... why can’t we treat madness?

Let’s tread back a few steps... and first try to understand why is it that this notion of ‘madness’ is such an intangible concept of today’s world. Is madness connected to emotions? Is madness this amalgamate of unknown emotions, which people like us can’t classify into the generally accepted classification system of all known human emotions? Who knows? But there are people who are trying to decode what exactly goes through the mind of a ‘mad’ person. For the sake of this article, I am going to keep on referring to madness as a phenomenon which can have multiple meanings... or as the big-wigs of English vocabulary like to call it… let’s call madness as ‘multi-faceted’… ‘ambiguous’, to be more precise. So… what are we dealing with? According to the classic dictionary definition, ‘madness’ is the state of mental distress and an ‘unhealthy’ mind. Now here is another catch... what is ‘unhealthy’? But since we value our mental sanity, and I won't wish for the article to get stale by any means, let’s keep that topic aside for another day.

Out of all the questions I have posed in this short amount of time, there are a few certain things which I have come to understand… number one; none of us are comfortable with the motion of madness. Number two, all of us, over the years, have come to accept the unanimous notion that madness is a bad thing, and it is a cause of negative events in one’s life. Number three, madness has in one way or another been associated with some or the other psychological ailment. But one conundrum still persists… what exactly is ‘madness’ is this unknown set of emotions…

The reason I have this belief is because we humans have created around us, an intersubjective reality. Whatever we consider concrete and as a vital part of “our society”, has next to no meaning in the world outside of human civilization. This idea also applies to emotions. What we perceive to be ‘emotions’ is actually some electrical activity inside specific areas of our brain, which we have perceived to be responsible for causing that particular ‘emotion’. Can the same be said for madness? Can we say that there are some areas in our brain which are triggered when we are ‘mad’? To be frank, I don’t know the answers to these questions, mostly because I am not yet qualified enough to be able to provide a plausible explanation for the above.

Madness is a very tangible idea, and a very delicate one as well. Our society isn’t particularly aware of how madness can affect the life of a person and the lives of people around that person. Let’s for a second take madness to be a very dangerous malady of sorts and explore that perception of madness…

Let us imagine a person, Tom, dick or harry, whatever be his name, to suffer from a disorder which renders him to be mentally unsound. What do you think will happen to him? He is bound to have stress-induced hallucinations, right? Well… that is true, but have you ever wondered how the person might be feeling when he is in this mentally torn state? I believe that the person is in pure trauma due to the fact that he loses some amount of control over his actions when he is in this state. And more often than not is fully aware of the state he is in, which furthers adds fuel to his misery. Can we help them in any manner possible? Well, people are trying to discover ways to help such kind of people, but up to date not one such concrete method has been developed. A schizophrenic person, for example, has cases of hallucinations and moments when he disconnects from reality. How can we help a person who sometimes becomes so distressed that he fails to identify himself in this world? We don’t know the full answer to this day…

But when we change the viewing lens, things are quite different… and also a bit similar. Now, if we are looking at the situation from the viewpoint of the people who are dealing with the schizophrenic person, we discover that they too feel a lot of distress, having to deal with an emotionally and mentally distressed person, who is prone to episodes of mental stress and frightful shows of violence. How do they manage to do this on a daily basis? It must take a lot of grit to really hang in there, right? Don’t they feel afraid of the fact that at any moment, the patient under their care can start acting erratically and show signs of breakdown at any point in time, and worse… they are not even aware when it is going to happen? All they can do is be prepared for the best, and hope that things work out in their favour. Granted, it takes a lot of pre-meditated procedures and things to give proper care to the patient in question, but there is also the human factor in the entire equation. How much are they willing to do to provide proper nurturing and care to a patient, who they know might need it for the rest of their lives? I myself don’t know the answer, but if my points have been interesting enough, you are more than welcome to give it a search. All I am aware of is that schizophrenia does not only take a toll on the patient, but also the ones taking care of the patient.

There are many other such kinds of disorders: like bi-polar syndrome, dissociative identity disorder, PTSD, to name just a few. Most of them require for the patient to be in care for a very long time, possibly even for life. Some of them even turn to criminal activities, mostly because they are driven to by their innate circumstances, and the law can’t even help them; it’s forced to work based on substantial evidence, not the metaphysical kind. Who is there to help them? There are psychiatric wards, sure, but are they any help in alleviating the stress these people? Many will say yes, but to me personally… keeping these people isolated and without much human contact goes against the very nature of Homo sapiens. We are extremely social beings, and this nature of ours has been hardwired in us by years of evolution; we can’t simply ignore this fact just because these people pose a high risk to other people around them, can we? Sure enough, safety is also a criterion to be taken into account when dealing with such issues, but I won’t want our evolutionary heritage to be completely disregarded as well.

In all, being mad can have multiple effects and have multiple meanings in our lives; it’s our choice which one we choose to live with and how we choose to accept it in our lives. Madness is something most people are afraid of, and they may be right in being so… but it is up to us how we wish to receive the notion of madness around us… and we can only hope our perception is for the better.