Madness is a theme I was forced to look at due to mental health problems in my teens and early twenties. Although I wanted to run away from it, it continued to haunt me. I never wanted to be one of those crazy people who lost touch with reality or lost control of my life, and I told myself it wouldn’t happen to me. But the fear remained somewhere within me even though on the outside I mostly looked fine.
Art by Andre Koekemoer
When we see
something outside of ourselves as broken, quite often we’re projecting
something we don’t want to look at within ourselves. This was definitely the
case for me and, dare I say it, possibly within society as a whole. To be
clear, I don’t think mental health problems and the idea of madness necessarily
belong together, but in my case, mental health issues forced me to look at my
fears and explore what madness meant to me.
Years of therapy
coupled with studies of ancient healing practices led me to discover that there
is a world of energy beyond physicality. Discover is maybe the wrong term – I
think it had always been part of my awareness, but I lived in a culture where
the invisible realms were located firmly within the confines of religion. The
psyche is connected to the physical body in ways we probably don’t fully
understand. The idea that mental illness can be ascribed to an imbalance in
brain chemicals formed a large part of the story I was told originally, but I
don’t think it’s that simple. My mental health symptoms called me to explore
the depths of my psyche and dive into the invisible world of energy where
archetypes live. Here I had to transform the destructive forces into something
beneficial. I use the word force deliberately, because the psyche can be
immensely powerful, be it in a harmful or a healing capacity. Although these
energies are not physical, we can see their effects in the physical world. When
we experience intense emotion and the effect it has on our lives and actions,
there is no denying that it is real, even though we can’t see it or touch it.
Facing my fear of
madness led me to understand and better relate to the world of energy. In a
sense, madness is crossing the bridge between the physical and the non-physical
realms through the imagination. We can get swept away by the dark currents or
learn to tap into the depths of the psyche for creativity and healing – there
is sometimes a fine line, and it can even be both. Moving outside of the
boundaries of the defined world can bring about creative or intellectual
genius. Those who dare to dream or embrace new ideas ultimately lead the way,
even though many have been told they’re crazy or stupid. But all of our
man-made reality started as a thought or a dream before it took form in the
material world.
I don’t think the
invisible is solely the domain of the dreamers, geniuses and those who are mad.
I think madness is an aspect of the self through which we create meaning and
experience life. I don’t know too many people who would admit to having strange
dreams or experiences that defy reality, but I think most of us have
experienced the madness of love, which can be beautiful, intense and
soul-destroying. Religious thinking lies at the dawn of human civilisation[1]
and I consider this also a kind of madness. The world is simply too mysterious to
know everything or even anything and to make sense of life we have to find a
way of relating to the powers of creation that are beyond our understanding.
An important
question to ask is perhaps who decides what kind of madness is acceptable or
even beneficial and what kind makes someone an outcast. I remember a fable
about madness I read in one of Paulo Coelho’s books, Veronika decides to die.
It was about a place where people lived happily under a just king, but an evil
magician wanted to destroy them. He poisoned all the wells so those who drank
the water would become mad, but he didn’t manage to poison the king’s own
water. The king found it impossible to lead with reason when his subjects were
mad, and he asked his wife for advice. She suggested they should drink some of
the poisoned water too if they couldn’t convert the people to sanity, and that
solved the conflict.
History has shown
that people can accept injustice or even commit atrocities when in the grip of
collective hysteria. In the real world of the present, mental illness is more
or less defined as a clinically significant behaviour or condition that is
considered abnormal within a person’s culture and it causes severe distress.[2]
If there had been a psychiatrist in the story of the poisoned water, he may
have diagnosed the king with mental illness, but the reader would have known
the truth.
I don’t think we can ever get away from madness, and I think we need it for personal growth. When confronted with it, we have some important choices to make. On an individual level, we may need to face our demons or listen to our soul’s calling. When at odds with the world, we can either allow collective madness to steer us away from our internal compass or we can stand strong in our truth and live accordingly. Metaphorically speaking, if a dark magician poisoned the water, we would have the option of drinking of it too just because it would be easier to get by in the world. But the better alternative may be to call in the good kind of madness and imagine a better world based on justice and love.
[1] I
highly recommend Supernatural by Graham Hancock for an in depth analysis
of this topic.
[2]
This is my concise version of the more elaborate technical definition from the
DSM and reflects my understanding of what I learned when I studied psychology
in 2007. I did an internet search when writing this article and found there is
much debate around the concept.
