trapped within our sanity

by Michael Templeton

When I was a kid, I saw this movie called The Fifth Floor in which a woman is mistakenly committed to the psych-ward. Once there, she cannot get anyone to listen to her claims that this is all a mistake. Everything she says is taken as the ravings of a lunatic, and she is subsequently brutalized and tortured in all kinds of nasty ways. The movie scared the shit out of me. The fact that I watched it in one of those old neighborhood second-run theaters that looked a little like something out of a 1970s insane asylum didn’t help. If I remember correctly, the movie claimed to be based on a true story which, in my kid mind, translated into irrefutable Truth and clearly demonstrated that this shit could happen to me. This film came out in 1978. At that time, mental illness still carried a powerful stigma of shame and disgrace—a sense of basic human failure to be hidden away in attics and padded rooms. That mental illness was so deeply stigmatized made it even more horrifying. Growing up amid these kinds of attitudes, I came to fear mental illness. I was terrified of the notion that I could somehow lose touch with who and what I am, and become something altogether foreign. It seems important to note that what was most terrifying to me about the movie The Fifth Floor was not insanity itself, but the idea that anyone could be mistaken for insane and once the mistake is made, there is no way to make it right. Once the diagnosis is made, everything you say is, from then on, merely the ravings of a lunatic. You are trapped within your sanity in a world of insanity. It all still gives me the fucking creeps.  

In our time, attitudes toward mental illness have changed. I do not mean to suggest that the world has come around in our collective view of mental illness. There is still a lot of ignorance toward the mentally ill, who are routinely scapegoated in political discussions about things like gun violence and homelessness. Nevertheless, there has been some massive shifts in attitudes toward mental illness. You can now scroll through any social media app and see one meme after another about individuals joking about their mental illness. Depression and anxiety have become as ubiquitous as the common cold, and people openly talk about their meds without any fear of repercussions. For people who are too young to remember, Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, the former Governor of Massachusetts, lost his presidential bid at least in part due to rumors (started deliberately by Lee Atwater) that he had seen a psychiatrist. No evidence of mental illness, just the fact that he had seen a psychiatrist, this was enough to tank a presidential campaign in the 1980s. Now we have a President who cannot string three words together into a coherent sentence. At any rate, people are able to freely talk about mental health in ways that were unthinkable when I was a child (I am 62, so, a geezer, but not exactly of the Old Testament prophet ilk).

I think at least one downside of the freedom we have with mental illness is that it can become meaningless. Those same social media apps where we find mental health memes will also offer you online quizzes and advice that will help you diagnose yourself. These are great ways to excuse your behavior. Are you lazy, just find the quiz and/or website that offers you the diagnosis of adult ADHD and you are no longer lazy. You suffer from a chronic condition, and your boss is an asshole for getting angry with you for playing on your phone all day. Feel like sitting in bed and watching movies, you probably have clinical depression. These kinds of things present numerous problems. Obviously, people who do this kind of thing are exasperating, and they get away with things that are just stupid. More importantly, this kind of online content and the resulting behavior it fosters tend to minimize and delegitimize the very real struggles of people who live with mental illness.

If you go back in history, mental illness carried different meanings. The tendency toward some level of what we would call depression was long considered the prerequisite for creativity and the contemplative disposition toward philosophy. It was the condition of melancholia that rendered one disposed toward creativity and the capacity for deep thought. Giorgio Agamben explains that the medieval physicians who drew on the work of Aristotle wondered, “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts, are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the disease arising from black bile?” (Agamben, 1993). The disease attributed to black bile is the deep depression that comes about from the humoral infection. This is the disease that also causes the sin of malignant sloth in which the sufferer turns away from God toward what was once called “the noonday Demon” to designate the evil malignancy of the very same propensity that would point people toward artistic creativity and the deep thinking necessary for the philosopher. These kinds of things were bound up in a medieval system of humors, church doctrine, and romantic ideals that are both familiar to us and utterly foreign in that we now medicate everything away as quickly as it rears its melancholy head. Yet, we do still romanticize that quiet and withdrawn figure who resembles the medieval melancholic. The quiet, silent type of romantic movies and tv shows is a holdover from these ideas of old. Indeed, the melancholic lover is a product of the same humoral system in which the most romantic of courtly lovers was always afflicted with the spiritus phantasticus of the loved object that takes on a life beyond its/her earthly form. This gives rise to the flights of the imagination that are at the root of the great Romantic poet and the deep brooding lover we find in books, movies, and tv shows. Nevermind that we now understand that this kind deep brooding is right on the line of what also gives us the modern-day stalker.

It is Michel Foucault, of course, who provides one of the most crucial studies of the ways mental illness historically functions in Western culture. In its early appearance in the “Stultifera Navis,” the literal ship of fools floated downstream to become the problem of some other village or municipality, we see how madness held secrets and terrors, but also a touch of the divine in its unreachable place beyond knowledge. This is why, with the intervention of the church and what would become capitalism, madness was made to succumb to order, to reveal its secrets as the prevailing wisdom came to understand that madness did indeed harbor knowledge, but disordered knowledge in which “madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science” (Foucault, 1988). With the intervention of right thinking and the Christian church, even the melancholic lover was revealed to be taken by a “desperate passion,” his “love disappointed in its excess” rather than the deep romantic melancholy of the poetic and philosophical dreamer. These early interventions lined up perfectly with what would become the great Protestant work ethic, as it were, of capitalism. The melancholic dreamer is not a lover, poet, or philosopher, he is a lazy lay-about who needs to get to work. Even as more devastating forms of mental illness proved intractable, the “humanitarian” interventions found cures that would liberate the insane and take away their restraints, but they would do this only by realigning the guilt of their madness with the mad person’s own sense of themselves. The humane interventions “no longer punished the madman’s guilt, it is true; but it did more, it organized that guilt; it organized it for the madman as a consciousness of himself” (Foucault. 1988).

The period at the end of the Eighteenth Century in which science and medicine are alleged to have discovered the rudiments of psychology is in fact the time in which western culture and economic dominance created rather than revealed the idea of the mentally ill. In transforming the wild madman into the medical patient as a mentally ill person, the discourse of madness and mental illness aligned everything with the nuclear family at the heart of the capitalist social arrangement and the idea that the mentally ill person was caught in some form of regression into infantile stages of development. The mentally ill were alienated from society because of their deep inability to adjust to the forms of life of the modern, rational, and productive individual. As such, the mentally ill became a “subject of law” in which a dominant form of reason, to be administered by doctors, but also by courts of law, made the distinctions between the sane and the insane. On the back of psychoanalysis, of course, but also with the rise of institutional models of mental health care, mental illness became an impediment to productivity and the guilt embodied by the insane would be taken into the family and the body of the insane person themselves. The secret and dangerous kernel of the medieval ship of fools was retained in the modern mental hospital and psychiatric care, while responsibility for this condition of the mentally ill was fully placed onto the sick person.

Since the modern mental patient does not, by definition, know what is good for them, doctors have the responsibility to decide what is good for them and how to readjust them to the “reality” of the world. It is easy to see how this kind of power dynamic led to some monstrous shit. Most of us have seen the powerful moment in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in which McMurphy has been finally lobotomized. The scene in the film in which he is given electroshock therapy is perhaps more horrifying. Seeing Jack Nicholson go into convulsions as they switch on the machine to blast his insane brain into a state of sanity with the help of modern technology is something most of us will never forget. For an example from history, the great “mad poet” Antonin Artaud received 51 treatments of electroshock therapy, or “seismotherapy” as it was labeled by his attending physician. Artaud was institutionalized at a time, prior to any known pharmaceutical therapy or interventions, when mental patients often fell into what was called “asylum rot”: a condition of wasting away in a mental hospital just waiting for death. It is true that Artaud was frequently dangerously mentally ill. He often reached points of being unable to take care of his most basic needs, and he did require some kind of care to keep him from hurting himself. At the same time, Artaud was a brilliant poet. An actor and theorist of the theater, he is famous for The Theater and its Double, a sustained discourse on modern theater and dramaturgy. He wrote numerous poems, essays, theatrical works. He was also an actor and appeared on stage and in film. Because Artaud’s brilliance was so well-recognized, it was the great surrealist poets Robert Desnos and Paul Éluard who intervened on his behalf and had Artaud taken to a hospital where he would find real care rather than winding up in a more common institution where he would certainly have fallen into asylum rot (Lotringer. 2015). Yet, Artaud was always aware of what was being done to him. He begged the doctors to stop shocking him. He showed them the broken ribs and other injuries he suffered from the treatments, and it was Artaud who proved that the shocks only succeeded in blanking out his mind. They did not “cure” anything. They just blasted his mind into oblivion. Hardly a cure by any standard. Still, these were the methods of treatment for a long time, and the figure of Artaud sometimes stands as the image par excellence of the “mad poet,” the genius poet who sacrifices his or her mind to their poetic gifts. Sylvia Plath gets the same treatment as a kind of angelic saint of poetry who had to sacrifice her life in suicide for the gifts she bestowed upon the world. This kind of mythologizing of mental illness never really holds for regular folks who were routinely tortured and abused into asylum rot as families locked away their loved ones for things like homosexuality, being a non-compliant woman, being a communist, or any number of symptoms of being deranged all the way up until the late Twentieth Century. We should also keep in mind that one of Stalin’s methods was to list political dissidents as insane—a great way to lock away political enemies. (Now, our deranged rulers list political dissidents as terrorists. Same trick).

Given this kind of general sketch of things, it should not appear to be problematic that somewhere toward the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, pharmaceuticals took over from electroshock treatment and lobotomies. Certainly, this was a good turn of things, and it was in many respects. The problem is that that same kernel of the age of the ship of fools remained, and remains, firmly in place. The mentally ill are their own problem in that it is the sick who are responsible for being sick. We also need to ask if pharmaceutical interventions are the “cure” they are made to appear. Do serotonin uptake inhibitors cure depression? Or do they simply place depression in abeyance leaving the suffering person tied to a pill for their entirely lives? Even this may not be a bad thing if we did not just leave it at this, if we would keep searching and find a way to cut people free of both depression and drugs that do in fact have troubling side effects. But these are scientific and ethical questions that I am neither able to answer nor even the ability to explore with any real knowledge. The question that remains for mental illness that is worth exploring is where exactly is the precise locus of mental illness? Are we looking in the right place when we place the responsibility for mental illness on the shoulders of the suffering person?

It was the late Gary Indiana who said that he was extremely suspicious of people who claim to be normal. Indiana made the observation that “the only way that you can be normal in a society like this is to be complicit with things that are inhuman.” The world in which we live is so deeply sick, so inherently insane, that what appears to be normal or sane is the real insanity. Only a sick, insane person could exist in a world of such monstrous cruelty. The stultifying lives of the modern person are so fucked up that being well-adjusted to it all is the real symptom of insanity. The sick are not the people on drugs to manage depression, anxiety, and bi-polar disorder; the sick are those people who keep generating a world so absolutely opposed to human life. This problem is never more pronounced than in that age-old form of the melancholic and romantic poet. In our contemporary world, the romantic poet is confronted with a world that has digitally cut them off from their objects of contemplation. We no longer have access to sublime objects of contemplation on which the ancient melancholia can emerge toward poetic and philosophical inspiration. All those sublime images are sliced off with a digital perfection so cruel and evil that the mind recoils into a state of pure, unimaginable panic. Franco Berardi explains that “(w)hen romantic sublimity meets the frigid surface of digital experience, panic and depression ensue. Panic attacks are widespread symptoms in the experience of the connective generation” [the young generation of people who have been raised in a digital world] (Berardi. 2015). The world is sped up beyond human capacities, and consequently our natural drive to make sense of the world is spun out of control; we are sent into “a frigid panic resulting from the contraction of time: a frantic time, an unattainable body, a fragmented experience, and an ever-widening space of possibilities that never become real” (Berardi). In one of the most extreme manifestations of this kind of panic withdrawal, the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori takes over, a condition of extreme withdrawal in which individuals are no longer able to make contact with the external world at all. They become shut in completely because the world beyond is nothing but a complete and horrific threat. These are not victims of an extreme form of paranoia or some kind of extreme phobia, they are thoroughly contemporary subjects of a world that cannot be grasped and consequently they demonstrate a “fully understandable withdrawal from hell” (Berardi).

Perhaps we have finally come to a point at which the medieval demons of melancholia and mental illness can be located precisely where they have always been: outside of us, in a world beyond our control and one which is entirely geared toward taking complete control of us—body and mind. We do not need to take an approach that is anti-science to demand that a world that invades our lives 24-hours a day, seven days a week, a world the requires login information to watch television, a world that focuses a surveillance camera on us while we order a fucking burrito, a world that forces us to move along with invisible mechanisms that move at the speed of light—that all of this is completely insane and we are not. To be depressed, to have panic attacks, even to dissociate are all perfectly reasonable responses to economic, social, and cultural conditions that have no foundation in biological life. Maybe we are approaching the point at which we can admit that we are living in a world in which we are trapped within our sanity in a world of insanity. Maybe here is where we find a way beyond mental illness.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Translated by Ronald L.

Martinez. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” And: Phenomenology of the End. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e) Foreign

Agents Series, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.

Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

Lotringer, Sylvère. Mad Like Artaud. Translated by Joanna Spinks. Minneapolis: Univocal, 2015.

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