Making Sense of Madness from the Inside

This personal account just came to me today. I enjoyed it immensely and found much there that resonated with my own experience. I've included only excerpts. To read the full story, click on the link at the end of the excerpts.

Making Sense

... Madness has been described again and again by people who have never experienced it. The mad person’s definition of madness has never made it into the dictionary or into conversation, media stories, literature or mental health discourse.

Our version of madness can even elude us. We lack a validating language to make meaning from it. Our madness stands outside in the dark, knocking on the door to meaning, struggling to get in. My own stories of my madness struggled to take shape while other people’s stories of it took instant inspiration from the dictionary, diagnostic manuals and a wider culture that completely shunned it.

Most of the stories of those who look on, seeing only snatches of madness, portray it as all bad. My story of my madness though, is fuller than the stories of those who looked on. As well as being the most intricate story, it is the only unbroken one, the only story that had a witness present from start to finish and every moment in between. That witness was me.


Existential Crisis
The first time I go mad I lie in bed for days with my door shut and the curtains drawn. I struggle to put a thought or a sentence together. I can’t talk. I can barely move. My chest burns with a dark smouldering pain, and I rasp with weak, shallow breathing.

This is the completion of my crumbling into a profound nothingness.

I discover with horror that I live in a black box. I have hidden the blackness all my life in the naïve hope that there is a grand purpose to everything. In my folly I have pasted over the walls of the black box with pleasing and colourful decorations – the false window frames with a painted in view of a grand universe, the fake pictures of a life worth living, the pretend painted-in door that leads into a promising future.

Now all the decorations have been torn down, showing the bare black boards behind them. All I have known and valued in my life is a sham – my belief in goodness, my hopes for the future, my affection for family and friends, my curiosity, my laughter. I have lied to myself and the people and the culture around me have lied with me. There is no reason to live, I say over and over to myself. ...


The Lost Self
I have lost my self. What is my name? I have no name. All I am is shape and weight, rapid shallow breathing, and a black space inside my head.

Later, I write that a sense of self is not an emotion or a thought or a sensation. My self is the solid core of my being. It is like an immutable dark sun that sits at the centre of things while all my fickle feelings, thoughts and sensations orbit around it. But my self goes into hiding during madness. Sometimes it slides into the great nothingness like a setting sun. Sometimes it gets trampled in the dust by all the whizzing in my body and mind.

But my self always comes back as strong as ever after my madness subsides; it reoccupies the core of me with its warm dark aura. Madness does not just extinguish me, it also renews me.

I discover this one day when I watch my flatmate weed and dig the vegetable garden. It had been lying fallow for a year. She came up to me and said ‘The soil’s good, it’s had a break’. Then I realise my madness is like the soil lying fallow. Sometimes my madness strips me bare but it is also the beginning of renewal; every time I emerge from it I feel fresh and ready to start again.


The Heroic Journey
As a child I read Ladybird books about Boadicea and Joan of Arc, brave kings and fearless missionaries. I watched ‘The Lone Ranger’ and ‘Flash Gordon’ on television and longed to be a hero like them – facing adversity, conquering evil and saving the innocent. In my mind I made up stories about saving my class mates from the burning school, running through the flames, dragging them out into the sun choking, while the nuns cheered me on. I made up other stories of saving people; the kind old priest collapsing on the far side of the school paddock with a heart attack. I ran over to him and breathed air into his mouth until he woke spluttering and full of wonder that I had saved his life. All my heroic dreams, games and stories gave me a template for my fall into madness, my relentless struggle with it and my eventual return from it.

When I went to the mental hospital for the first time I thought the nurses and psychiatrists would regard me with respect and a poetic sensitivity for my desperate crisis of being and my heroic struggle to get through it. Though I appeared schizoid and directionless to them I thought they understood that I was fighting the collapse of my self and everything I valued. I was fighting for my life. There is no shortage of myths and legends about people in my kind of predicament – St George and the dragon, forty days in the wilderness, the despair of Job, survival in the trenches. But the psychiatrist and nurses didn’t see me or anyone else in the hospital, reflected in these stories. All they saw was a sick, deluded, screwed up 21 year old who needed their control and containment....


A Friend in Madness
After several years I began to think I shouldn’t fight my madness any more. I could see that it had won again and again. Living against my madness wasn’t working. So I tried to find ways to live with it. How could I live a good life and still have periods of madness? Could I change the experience of my madness so that it was not so disabling or distressing? Would my madness recede if I tried some new ways to make some good things happen to me? No-one else had any answers to these questions and I struggled with them on my own....


Finding Club Mad
My madness was one of the most profound experiences I’d had. It was as intense as falling in love, a religious revelation or overwhelming grief. I didn’t want to romanticise madness but I knew it deserved the same status and respect as any other powerful human experience.

What did it mean when the world was too beautiful for me to look at? What did it mean to be inside the black box? What did it mean that I lived in such extreme zones of existence? Nobody really knew or cared. Except me. Mostly, it meant terrible suffering and my desperate struggle to find a place in the world.

At first it meant wandering around the crumbling edges of human experience like a lost explorer. But over the years I met many fine people who were mad like me. I learnt that our madness had taken us to a foreign land where only mad people could go to. Some of us stayed in this mad land for a long time while others of us got out and kept returning to it. Mental health professionals stood at the border trying to pull people out of the mad land, even the ones that wanted to stay. They knew the mad land as a bad place where people got lost, sometimes forever. But most of them had never been there.

My peers helped to show me that I was not the lone lost explorer I thought I was. The mad land, for all its perils, had some of the most enchanting scenery in the world. Like a land that has mountains and ravines, rivers and caves, blinding sun and swirling storms, the mad land could be a place of beauty as well as danger. My peers helped me to understand that there was a whole tribe of us who had been there and seen many of the same things. Things other people did not understand.

My own pictures of madness came in the form of words and metaphors. At their most powerful, my words floated in from the blackness and passed through me onto paper. I made meaning, not in spite of my madness, but because of it. It was not the kind of meaning that answered ambitious intellectual questions such as ‘why?’ Like haunting music or poetry, it was a meaning saturated with soul, an intuitive expression of being without the labour of logic.

Read the full story here: http://www.outoftheirminds.co.nz/?p=222


See also: Schizophrenia & The Hero's Journey

That's strange, I too as a teenager/child had fantasies of being heroic. I read nancy drew and wanted to be a detective just like her