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Reflections on Madness

by Yvonne Nahat [Note: This article is a first-hand account of schizophrenia. The sometimes-esoteric, somewhattangential 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 a theatre 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 collective unconsciousness 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's medical 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 area of 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 up entirely 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 this dark 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 left to 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 not friendly 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 is unfathomable 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 and regulations 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 the more sensitive in a culture. I am convinced that psychiatry is in need of tremendous reform into areas hitherto thought unthinkable. 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 talktherapy, 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 during acute 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 time schizophrenic 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 boundless universe 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 been to. 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, even more, 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 the young 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 by Satanism, 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 always thought 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 very strong 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 does my 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 is often 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 have taken this life of mine. Madness isolates. It is an illness still relegated to the fringes of our society. Most people are afraid 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 who can 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 a regression 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. It doesn'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 harbors all 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, all emotional, 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 madness via 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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