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(In)Sanity: Staring starkly at attempts to define Madness (by Aaina Singh)


As I was scrolling through the material put up by Professor Ghosh for this remedial blog post, I stumbled upon a documentary titled “To define Madness”. Intrigued by its name, I decided to watch it. As soon as I hit play the screen came alive with a flurry of people, clearly patients of some mental disorder, talking about themselves.

In no particular order images flashed on the screen. One woman stared grimly at me through the lens and said "I will leave, you know. I won't be staying." Another woman laughed in a way that seemed almost demonic, frightening me to the extent that a shiver ran down my spine. 50 seconds into the documentary and I already found myself feeling both intrigued and frightened by the idea of madness, wondering what it truly means to be mad.

The documentary traced the history of abnormality, passing through all of its milestones ranging from attributions to supernatural powers, to the present day scientific study of it. What intrigued me however, was the questions it raised and the fact that in attempting define to true madness, it taught me that perhaps we will never be able to truly define it.

Halfway through the documentary, I paused the video take a moment to think about all the ideas that pop into my mind when I think of madness. Images much like those I had seen at the beginning of the documentary popped up. People who were hearing voices, seeing things, doing strange things with or to their bodies, making weird or unintelligible noises. Essentially people who were indulging in behaviour that seemed objectionable, frightening, and troublesome were all mad. Yet if they were all picked up and placed in a context that made their behaviour rational or understandable for others, suddenly they didn’t seem mad anymore, thus making the task of defining madness almost impossible and highly context dependent.

What struck me as interesting, however, was that even though we cannot define madness, we all seem to understand each other when we use the term mad. Even in exotic and foreign cultures, madness seems to be recognised in terms that are quite familiar. For instance, the documentary showed a witchdoctor in some tribal region attempting to smell out (literally) the disease of a boy who had become desperately ill. His mother couldn’t understand what the illness was but claimed that her boy had become dreamy, idle, withdrawn, and dirty. She added that sometimes he would hear voices when nobody spoke. Clearly these were symptoms that we would all classify as signals of abnormality.

The documentary made a point that I had not realised before. A person who was classified as mad never seemed to think of him/herself as mad. It was always others who called attention to the deviant behaviour and/or traits. A person seemed to be considered mad only when others could not understand and explain the causes for his/her behaviour. Therefore madness or abnormality in itself was a socially constructed phenomenon, to the extent that at one point it was seen as no more than a manipulative label.

This suggested that not only were there stigmas attached to the idea of abnormality or madness, madness itself could be a result of repeatedly being stigmatised. A clip from the documentary really brought this point home. A woman was asked what the voices in her head said to her, to which she replied “Voices tell me I’ve been doing bad. I’m a bad girl.” The voices in her head sounded dangerously similar to the voices in society who constantly told (and continue to tell) people who have problematic behaviours, or behaviours that are away from normal that they are mad.

It is important to point out here that I am not suggesting that all behaviours that are considered abnormal are socially caused. There are several biological factors as well and it is indeed still important to treat mental disorders as they can be dangerous for both, the people who have them as well as society at large. However, I am suggesting that the very idea of madness is socially constructed and we must keep that in mind when having a discourse about any form of abnormality so that we treat people with mental disorders as precisely that - people with mental disorders, rather than being fearful of them or shunning them as mad people.

The main take-away that I had from this documentary was that even though we have come a long way from attributing the cause of mental illness to witches, there is one thing that hasn’t changed much. We still seem to be unable to divorce the mental illness from the image we have of the person. In talking about schizophrenia or depression as illnesses to be treated, and looking at people as patients or clients to whom services need to be provided, we stop seeing them as people.

As students studying clinical psychology, I think it is important that even as we go through this course, we keep in mind that what we are studying aren’t just disorders or problems to be understood and cured. These are all aspects of people’s lives that they are grappling with. They are all very real phenomena that impact people all around us. Yet they are just aspects of their lives, not who they are. We need to find a way to strike the balance between reading about abnormality as a subject in our classes and remembering that these are not just subjects for the people who have them, they are lived experiences of fellow humans.

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