Image by Frida Aguilar Estrada, from Unsplash
[A note: This article is about a general perception of madness, particularly how madness makes its way into laypeople's perception and language andcontributes to their approach toward "mad" folks, further alienating and distancing those who are already alienated and distanced]
In 1949, Portugese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz was one of the two winners of the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the field of Physiology or Medicine. He was the founding father of lobotomy, a surgical procedure that was used for decades to cure madness. His process of curing madness involved cutting out connections to the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved with things such as planning, decision-making, short-term memory, personality expression, etc. In 1949, lobotomy was seen as a rational, sensible approach to treat madness. Even in contemporary society, well over 60 years later, lobotomy has not been banned as a psychiatric treatment and although rare, it is still in use. Seeing how such measures are resorted to as a means to cure madness, it becomes important to look at what madness is and why its existence has brought about such drastic measures.
Janet Frame was an acclaimed writer from New Zealand. But something strange was happening as she was being awarded one of the highest literary awards by her country; she was awaiting a lobotomy at the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum.
For eight years of her life, Janet Frame was imprisoned for psychiatric treatment in different asylums across New Zealand. The day she won the prize, nothing had changed in her behaviour or in her existence. She was the woman who had been a psychiatric inmate for years, written for most of her life, faced hardships and tragedies, and attempted to take her own life. But on that fateful day, the staff heard that her debut work of short stories had won the prestigious Hubert Church Memorial Award, the highest, national literary prize at that time. Even though Janet Frame did not change in that moment in time, what did change was how she was perceived and this alteration in perception led to her rather immediate release from the asylum.
Looking at this incident, an obvious question arises: if she did not change in the days leading up to her lobotomy and if her release was set off by her winning a prize for her literary achievement, what does that tell us of that society's understanding of madness?
A woman, odd, not fitting in comfortably in all social situations, was diagnosed by a segment of society which had been bestowed with responsibility to diagnose by certain other parts of the society. They became the arbiter of what it meant to be a sane human being. In Janet Frame's example, that arbiter was the Seacliff Mental Asylum. At the same time, there was another segment within the same society which had been given the duty to look at the humans who were actualizing their potential: in Janet Frame's case, the literary society that recognized her work.
Between theories of what makes someone sane and who is a worthy contributing member of society lie the actual human being with experiences, feelings, emotions and potential. They will always be far more than any segment of society can ever be capable of conceptualising. And so of course, between definitions and ideas, the person that Janet was had to fall through the cracks. Her sanity and insanity became a reduction made by two segments of the society she lived in.
It's a matter of Fate, the kind of fate that saved Anna Swir and Dostoevsky their deaths in the faces of guns cocked and aimed at them, that Janet's life was deemed worthy by fellow beings who were no more nor less worthy than her. As simply as she had been declared mad and put up for lobotomy, as simply as that, she was let out of the asylum with no apologies and no reparations for the damages that human beings in the name and guise of systems had done to her.
This is the real-life story of one madwoman. You can read about her life, in her own voice, as she experienced things, in her beautiful autobiography An Angel at My Table.
Let's look at some not-famous mad people I know; I know three. They are mad only in the sense that some medical professional has diagnosed each of them with schizophrenia. One is my aunt, one is an acquaintance, and another a childhood friend. I have normal relationships with each of them so much so that if I had not been informed that someone has labelled them as that and looked at them through a particular lens, I would have never called them schizophrenic. Even when I used to read case-studies that were a part of our A-level "Abnormal Psychology" syllabus, I used to wonder: who decides what is abnormal? And more importantly, even if abnormal, so what? Something disturbed me about the way the categorization was done, how it stripped people down to symptoms and disorders. Wasn't there something odd and sometimes abhorrent about how mad people were and are treated? And what is madness anyway?
The person walking around on the road looking fixedly at something is apparently mad, these 3 schizophrenics I know are mad, I have been called mad, the lady who feeds dogs on the streets is mad, women in the 19th century who expressed their sexual desires were mad, the person who lives with the dead bodies of his parents is mad... the list maybe wide and inconsistent, but something was clear. All of the mad ones cause discomfort. Not every kind of discomfort can be labelled as madness but mad people, the one on the road, my aunt, my friend, women being sexual in the 19th century (how could they the horror oh my God), me in moments, are all sources of discomfort, little voices that unsettle order. In other words, mad people are a problem.
What can be some ways to fix a problem? Well, all the ways that have come to us through medication, surgery, imprisonment, cutting out, cutting out, cutting out until nothing remains of the persons but their bodies as empty shells after their spiritual destruction. It should not be news that psychiatric asylums, much like prisons, are notorious for their treatment of inmates. Human beings cannot help being how they are and God forbid they have authority, which they often do when they work. When they have authority, they often turn into monsters who abuse the living. And they always do it in the name of some system, belief, structure. Never have I till date read an account where a prison warden or an asylum keeper admitted that they did what they did because they felt joy at the suffering of the inmates or because they felt peace when the world was as they structured it to be, even if only within those walls.
The emptiness within human beings begs for company and as a result many of them try and empty others. The more your passion and drive for life, the more your difference from the existing social order, the harder the wrath of the empty ones.
It's clear as day to me that mad people are just abandoned people, people who are unwilling to put up with the muck and just go with the flow that many people give themselves over to.
I remember meeting a lady at an exhibition that was being organized by the Goethe-Institute in Kolkata. She was an inmate of the Pavlov Center in Kolkata, a place where the mentally-ill are rehabilitated. She was one of the few members who had shared her artwork which was being displayed at the exhibition. When I asked her about her time there, she said it's okay and that she paints sometimes. There was a happiness and a glint in her eyes as she spoke. I perceived this as excitement at having company outside of walls, being a part of the larger society that she along with others were kept from. She and two of her friends, who mostly stayed silent, hung around me as I looked at their collaborative painting. From a little away, I could feel the watchful eyes of their accompanying person at the closeness at which they stood near me. I too felt a little uncomfortable and moved away, telling them goodbye. And it made me sad that I was how I was and that I too had been uncomfortable being around some mad people. I asked one of the boys who was from the neighbourhood as to why she had been brought to the center. They said that she was at the station, alone, and she refused to talk, and the police were informed and the police handed her over to the institution. That seemed incredibly strange to me... should admission to a mental rehabilitation center be so simple and seemingly offhand? Of course I did not know the context in which any of her handling transpired but what were the necessary checks in place in India to admit someone to a psychiatric institution, one of the worst kinds of prison?
Turns out that for non-voluntary admissions of the mentally ill, it only requires two human beings to decide the fate of another. Someone needs to say someone is mad and should be admitted. Two mental health professionals then decide if that should be the case or not. Previously, you could pay your way (as is the case with almost everything in the world) to have someone admitted into a psychiatric institution.
In India, the current discourse around mental health that reaches me through my layman existence is one that is still largely centered around the disease-and-cure model. Mental illness is still looked at firstly as illness, as opposed to a natural condition in response to certain life events. Existence is inherently traumatic: each of us is ejected out of a human body into mortality, and must endure suffering of various kinds interspersed with joy and purpose, before we die. Through the course of our lives, we will witness the sufferings of others, lose things and beings precious to us to cruelty, randomness, and death. Anybody who is not traumatized by this at some point in their lives should be the ones being looked at. The prevailing notion seems to be that those who are sensitive and feel deeply and don't adapt quickly to the absurdity of existence should be punished for not adapting at someone else's predetermined pace.
In some parts of the world, self-healing and alternative modes of interacting with people who are not fully present in the world are encouraged. That discourse too runs parallel and needs to become mainstream in this country as well, and eventually everywhere. A person who is suffering is not something to be hammered into correctness. They are to be understood and helped, so that they can heal and live alongside each of us as equals.
I want to end with a story that an acquaintance shared with me. It's from his own readings on his healing journey. He said that there are those in Japan, known as Hikikomori, who have withdrawn from society so much that they have gone completely inward. Their world of existence is mostly internal, though their bodies live in the same plane that we do. Apparently there was some documentary that had shown some people who go and befriend the Hikikomori and provide them companionship as a slow way back into the world. The veracity of the story is unimportant in this context since it highlights a possible way of being with those who struggle to live in this world: by offering them friendship, acceptance, and a place to be who they are. Now think, if you did not think in terms of madness, would that kind of friendship be so hard?
Comments