From Madness to Mental Illness

image: avsar-deeds.blogspot.com

I’ve been revisiting Foucault’s History of Madness and it has started off a thought process within me that, I think, is long overdue and was just waiting for a push.

As I look again at the journey of what I see as alternative states of mental (st)ability, the stagnation of more than a century of rut-thought is offensive. It is, in fact, a great disservice to those of us who are prone to or appreciative of those other realities of the mind.

The history of madness in the Western world begins with the Dionysian orgies that celebrated the irrational and reveled in the amoral energy of the animal frenzy that characterizes the chaos of creation.

In the Middle Ages, the church viewed insanity as a spiritual problem. For the medieval church, madness was a manifestation of sin, demonic possession, or moral defect. The only solution to the problem of madness, therefore, lay within church ritual, rigorous religious instruction, and failing all, exorcism.

Cut to the Renaissance and the “secularization” of the world and the hunger for knowledge. As the Western world became more secular in character, so did its solutions to the problem of madness. So far, the mad had been part of the family and of society—to be hidden, to be reviled, to be ashamed of, but to be kept within the fold, so to speak. Now there was no (un)earthly reason to “keep” and “hold” them. The figure of the wandering, vagabond madman came into being, living off the land and off charity outside the city limits like Poor Tom in King Lear.

In the later Renaissance, a more “global” society found a more efficient way to dispose of unwanted “fools” and the precursor to the toxic-waste dump-yards-of-the-sea, “the Ship of Fools” came into being. Unwanted social garbage was “embarked” and put to sea.

The next paradigm shift takes us to the 18th century and the development of the “rational” and “scientific” study of medicine and for the first time, madness came to be seen as a disease analogous to physical sickness. Physical cures were popularly prescribed to cure mental illness and madmen became objects of pity instead of blame.

Enter the hospital and later, the asylum.

That’s where the journey seems to have ended and Western society seems now only to be interested in finding ever-more “diseases” that afflict the human mind. What this does is entrench the idea of “normal” and “healthy” until every deviation is “unhealthy” and “abnormal.” Guess where this is going!

Odd as this seems given our restrictive, traditional societies, the East still accords more freedom to alternative ways of thinking and living and our lives include an everyday, banal tolerance of the unusual.

This is because we really don’t have a “past” history. We live concurrently in several centuries at once and so are not rooted in any one zeitgeist. Whatever the thought, whatever the lifestyle, whatever the anomaly, it is all valid in some part of some reality in a country of a billion people living in a billion times!