Madness and Heroism

I just read Marya Hornbacher's NYT bestseller Madness: A Bipolar Life. It strikes me that thinking about madness as "mental illness" enables us--madmen, madwomen, and the medical establishment--to construct heroic narratives about battles with madness. The idea of mental illness--the idea of a lifelong biochemical bogeyman that, like cancer, strikes down innocent people who have to "fight" it--lets us think of ourselves as heroes in a struggle against natural forces that are ruthless and violent. In one way or another, memoirs of madness tend to be constructed as narrative in the same way: here is the monster I had to fight, here's how I fought it, see how I almost died in the battle, see how I won (or am winning) the battle, look at my battle scars, now listen to what I learned from the fighting. Often, these narratives cast medical science in a supporting heroic role: the faithful companion who hands the hero her sword. The idea of mental illness positions the medical and pharmaceutical industries themselves as heroic actors in a mighty struggle. It's very appealing from a narrative standpoint.

The heroic profits from mental illness must be appealing as well, at least to those who pocket them. From the NYT Business section, April 27, 2010: "The newer generation of anti-psychotics has surpassed cholesterol-lowering drugs to become the nation's top-selling category of medications, accounting for $14.6 billion of the nation's $300 billion in drug spending last year. . . . Seroquel, a pill usually taken once or twice a day that sells for more than $4 each, was the fifth-best-selling drug in the United States last year . . . " Now that's big business!

Madness and Trauma

I've been reading Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, and have been thinking that there may be very little real mental illness in the world and a whole lotta normal aftereffects of trauma. Given how riddled with trauma the world is (1 in 3 women sexually abused in their lifetime, 1 in 4 women raped, war, racism, homophobia, child abuse), I cannot imagine how we could ever effectively distinguish between abnormal thinking and normal response to trauma, when NORMAL responses to trauma include dissociation, insomnia, depression, denial, repression, amnesia, relationship problems. Herman claims that complex post-traumatic stress responses mimic the symptoms of any number of so-called mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorder, multiple personality disorder. The problem with misdiagnosis is that the root causes of the symptoms never get addressed. It strikes me as strange that in my own experience with the psychiatry industry, I was never once asked whether I had ever been raped, sexually abused, or otherwise traumatized. Why isn't a patient's trauma history an automatic part of the diagnostic process? It should be.

Judith Shakespeare

I recently re-read Room of One's Own and find there the same claims about women and madness as Olive Schreiner and Phyllis Chesler make decades later--the idea that giftedness that goes against the tide of cultural expectation places a person at risk for madness. Woolf says that "any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half-witch, half-wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty." Woolf herself certainly would have known.

Woolf says something similar about the effects of women enjoying lively sexuality: "Chastity had then, it has even now, a religious importance in a woman's life, and has so wrapped itself round with nerves and instincts that to cut it free and bring it to the light of day demands courage of the rarest. To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her."

We still in the twenty-first century have to consider the connection between giftedness and psychospiritual breakdown--for women and for men. And we have to consider the crazymaking capacity of every social imperative that causes us to live restricted lives. I am not in favor of complete personal anarchy: it didn't seem to help the writer Djuna Barnes or or the artist Elsa Von Freitag-Loringhoven avoid breakdown. But their breakdown was, at least, accompanied by significant creative power. It may be that a certain degree of antisocial behavior is the price of creative potency.

Volcanic Madness

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano features one of the best madmen in all of literature. The Consul, whose stream-of-consciousness occupies a large part of the novel, says, "The act of a madman or a drunkard . . . or of a man laboring under violent excitement seems less free and more inevitable to the one who knows the mental condition of the man who performed the action, and more free and less inevitable to the one who does not know it."

I like this idea of "laboring under a violent excitement." Madness--at least the ecstatic or drunken kind--is a violent excitement of the mind. It reminds me of Avital Ronnel's assertion that intoxication is a form of mental labor. When I read that, it occurred to me that madness is also a form of mental labor, which explains why artists and other kinds of creators are so prone to madness. It takes a violent excitement of the mind to create--but there are occupational hazards. And these hazards are compounded by drunkenness. But the altered perception of intoxication also opens up realms of the extraordinary, and it is perception of the extraordinary that produces epiphany.

The Consul and his companions in the novel court epiphany by getting drunk on mescal, a strong hallucinogen made from cactus: "There were, in fact, rainbows. Though without them the mescal . . . would have already invested the place with magic. The magic was of Niagara Falls itself, not its elemental majesty, the honeymoon town; in a sweet, tawdry, even hoydenish sense of love that haunted this spray-blown spot. But now the mescal struck a discord, then a succession of plaintive discords to which the drifting mists all seemed to be dancing, through the elusive subtleties of ribboned light, among the detached shreds of rainbows floating. It was a phantom dance of souls, baffled by these deceptive blends, yet still seeking permanence in the midst of what was only perpetually evanescent, or eternally lost. Or it was the dance of the seeker and his goal, here pursuing the gay colors he did not know he had assumed, there striving to identify the finer scene of which he might never realize he was already a part . . ."

Drunken revery. Violent excitement. Mad, and beautiful. In vino veritas est, but along with the veritas, for Lowry's characters, as for Lowry himself, comes dissolution and a kind of spiritual suicide. My book manuscript Women, Creativity, and Madness attempts to discover how the violently excited among us can get the veritas of madness without the suicide.

Madness on CAN-TV

Pardon my silence. I have been tracking down permissions for CAN-TV to show some Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington images when they broadcast my Women, Creativity, and Madness lecture this week. Showtimes are

Sunday, March 28, at 5, Channel 19
Monday, March 29, 12pm, Channel 19
Wednesday, March 31, 12pm, Channel 21
Friday, April 9, 12pm, Channel 21

As I've been working on the Women, Creativity, and Madness book, and helping CAN-TV with the broadcast these past two weeks, I have also been reading Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, (1641-1695) a Mexican woman of letters who, to avoid marriage, entered a convent to pursue her passion for reading, writing, and thinking. Sor Juana's literary pursuits angered her superiors in the Church hierarchy, who were not pleased that a woman of such sharp intellect dared to be a public intellectual. At least twice in her letter to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, which is a defense of the right of women to read, write, think, and publish, Sor Juana describes her passion for learning as a madness that she cannot control. "I looked on nothing without reflexion," she writes, "I heard nothing without meditation . . . . Thus . . . I saw and admired all things; so that even the very persons with whom I spoke, and the things they said, were cause for a thousand meditations. . . . This manner of reflection has always been my habit, and is quite beyond my will to control; on the contrary, I am wont to become vexed that my intellect makes me weary; and I believed it was so with everyone, as well as making verses, until experience taught me otherwise; and it is so strong in me this nature, or custom, that I look at nothing without giving it further examination. Once in my presence two young girls were spinning a top and scarcely had I seen the motion and the figure described, when I began, out of this madness of mine, to meditate on the effortless motus of the spherical form, and how the impulse persisted even when free and independent of its cause . . . "

Sor Juana's descriptions of her own thought process, which closely resemble how my thoughts feel, present madness as perpetual thinking, and perpetual thinking as madness. Like Sor Juana, I also thought that all people thought all the time about everything. My brother Jeffrey has informed me on a number of occasions, however, that this tendency to perpetual thought is a disturbance peculiar to me. Because I am surrounded with scholars, poets, philosophers, and artists almost all the time, it is easy for me to feel "normal"--like thinking is what everyone does. But it happens now and again, that when I wander outside my circled, someone points out how odd it is to think all the time. Thinking about things like time and space and being and power and existential purpose--the subjects that seem ordinary for scholars and other writers and artists--are apparently, not what normal people think about.

The NYT loves madness!

In addition to the Ethan Watters article from last month about the cultural variability of what we call mental illness, the New York Times recently ran this piece about the possible evolutionary benefits of major depression. The article draws a connection between depression and creativity: apparently, a disproportionately high percentage of successful creatives have diagnosable "mental illnesses." This observation should no longer surprise people, as philosophers and artists have been meditating on the connection between creativity and mental breakdown for millenia. In our overly scientific/medicalized worldview, however, this connection has come to seem surprising. It didn't surprise Aristotle or Milton.

What is striking about these two recent NYT articles--both of which challenge the view that madness and melancholy are "illnesses" to be treated with drugs--is that they highlight the Faustian seductiveness of the scientific paradigm. Science and medicine, untempered by humanities-based thinking, imagine that knowledge is more discovered than created. The Truth is out there somewhere, and if we just use the right discovery procedures, we will find it. Sometimes, this is indeed true. The earth does revolve around the sun. But not all phenomena lend themselves to such certainty. Mental breakdown can never be fully understood by more extensive experimentation and further knowledge of biochemistry and brain function, because social, cultural, and spiritual factors affect mental breakdown, and physical science contributes rather little to our understanding of society, culture, and the spiritual.

To be continued . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

Madness and Capitalism

One overlooked aspect of madness is its capacity to generate profit. If you are already famous, and are prepared to become a spokesperson for the American/European party-line position regarding madness--that it is a biochemical disease requiring medical treatment--then you can make money off your madness (or off your sister's madness). You can sell your story directly, or you can generate publicity for the public persona you use to make money in other spheres of endeavor. If you are altruistically minded, you can donate your sources to a non-profit organization, and help generate money for them. However you do it, you can use madness to make money.

Of course, this is no surprise. The pharmaceutical, hospital, and therapy industries make a tremendous amount of money using the medical model of madness. In order for a hospital or doctor to get paid for treating someone, a doctor has to diagnose the madperson with a disease that is listed in the DSM-V. Doctors don't get paid if they do not select a qualifying diagnosis. Hospitals do not get paid without appointing a doctor to make a diagnosis. Diagnosis is also what entitles a patient or their insurance company to buy drugs. You can't buy a drug without a diagnosis. It's sort of like paying to join one of those exclusive clubs that serve lunch to suburbanites. So pharmaceutical companies also have a vested interest in the process of diagnosis. This is a sensible system to regulate the money that is made off of madness. And it has the public relations advantage of making all this profit appear to be motivated by the public good, by the sincere desire to help people. No wonder 1 in 4 people are--in the estimate of the National Institute for Mental Health--diagnosed or diagnosable with a mental illness! What a gigantic market!