The Redefinition of Madness, From Afflicted Soul to Overtaxed Mind

“ SO long as the mind was regarded as something separated from the body, or only united to it by feeble ties, bodily conditions could have nothing to do with mental phenomena—insanity was a disease of the soul. ”

“ This doctrine is reflected in the sentiment which despised and contemned the human body and discouraged the studies of physiology and pathology. It followed also that bodily diseases were attributed to sin or to possession by evil spirits. Mental disorder especially was considered a disorder of the soul, and moral insanity was thought to demand punishment rather than to excuse from it. It is easy to see how such a belief operated to cause that abuse and neglect of the insane which so long prevailed. ”

“ The old view that every misfortune was the revenge of the offended gods returned new-clothed to fit the times. Just as physical diseases can, in many cases, be regarded as self-inflicted on account of negligence, mental diseases were likewise considered to be due to some moral injury, or sin. Behind this conception the angry godhead also stood. Such views played a great rôle, right up to the beginning of last century, especially in Germany. In France, however, about the same time a new idea was appearing, destined to sway psychiatry for a hundred years. ”

“ In former times, the remark seldom occurred to any one, unless obtruded by some extreme instance, that to work the mind is also to work a number of bodily organs; that not a feeling can arise, not a thought can pass, without a set of concurring bodily processes. At the present day, however, this doctrine is very generally preached by men of science. The improved treatment of the insane has been one consequence of its reception. ”

“ Well, they are more remotely removed from the state which entitles us to the bliss of living in unison with Life-giver, because the condition of the body has prevented them from acquiring the degree of perfection which can be reached by healthy persons. But it is only a question of time and degree. Insanity is a disease of the brain; the brain is essentially material ”

“ Even so to-day our science is changing its foundation stones. Insanity is but just emerging from a complex labyrinth of metaphysical obscurities, and has taken its place in pathology as a physical disease. ”

“ Through the rise of specialism, it is true, psychiatry itself has arisen and the psychiatrist, like the skilled integrating internist, is interested in the synthesis of the findings in all domains, for only through such synthetic studies, such integration of the functional activities of the whole organism, is it possible to gain a global view of the patient as a person, to make a complete somatic, psychic, and social diagnosis, and to plan a regimen for him that will ensure the best adjustment possible of his internal and external relationships. ”

“ Neither one can be accomplished by means of a medically effective treatment that is applied to the patient until a cure occurs.
A few emotional problems fall under the heading of true psychiatric disorders and result from physical causes. They include, for example, epilepsy, drug addiction, and Alzheimer's disease. But these conditions are in the minority; most emotional "disorders" have not been traced to underlying organic causes. There are several currently competing hypotheses relating to possible biochemical bases of schizophrenia, mania, depression, and anxiety disorders. ”

“ One who dreams during the day flies from the first world into the second. If he fails to find his way back again into the first world his dreams become delusions and we say that he is insane. How delicate are the transitions from sanity to insanity! Inasmuch as all of us live in a second world, all of us are insane at least a few seconds every day. What distinguishes us from the insane is the fact that we hold in our hands the Ariadne thread which leads us out of the labyrinth of thoughts back into the world of duties. ”

“ Or to discover, and beat your brains into discord with the knowledge, that being sane, you are the inmate of a lunatic asylum; that, having reason, you are classed with idiots; and that every explanation you can offer will be treated with a mocking laugh?
The borderland between sanity and insanity is slighter than many believe or would care to own. If ever man's brain had been tested to its utmost limits of tension, that brain beat and throbbed in the head of the wretched Frank Onslow. ”

“ INSANITY IS a retreat from reality, an escape within the mind from the reality outside the mind. But what if there is no detectable reality outside the mind? What is there to escape from? Suicide—death in any form—is an escape from life. ”

“ Your private world is filled with figures of fear you have invited into it, and all the love your brothers offer you, you do not see.
As you look with open eyes upon your world, it must occur to you that you have withdrawn into insanity. You see what is not there, and you hear what makes no sound. Your manifestations of emotions are the opposite of what the emotions are. You communicate with no one, and you are as isolated from reality as if you were alone in all the universe. In your madness you overlook reality completely, and you see only your own split mind everywhere you look. ”

“ The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see ​when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception. ”

“ There is something painfully disheartening in coming back to Nature and finding one's self thus unwelcomed and uncared for, and in the first moment of disappointment an unspoken accusation of change and coldness lies in the heart. The change is not in Nature, however; it is in ourselves. "The world is too much with us." Not until its strife and tumult fade into distance and memory will those finer senses, dulled by contact with a meaner life, restore that which we have lost. ”

“ No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone. ”

“ I cried out.
"In the eyes of society it will truly be insanity," he replied. "What honest man, who is not insane, would take lost women and thieves into his house to dwell with him sisterly and brotherly? True, Christ died between two thieves, but that is another story. Insanity? The mental processes of the man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Therefore the mind of the man is wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and insane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions. ”

“ In Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil there is an apophthegm to the effect that, "Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." And whilst, on the one hand mental specialists have been extending the boundaries of insanity to the point of justifying the popular adage that everyone is a bit mad, they have, on the other hand, tended to narrow down the difference between sanity and its reverse until it has become almost entirely a question of mental inhibition, or self-control. ”

“ May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We’ll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!
—Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad. ”

“ Incipient insanity has hovered, and hovers continually over mankind as its greatest danger: that is precisely the breaking out of inclination in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoyment of the unruliness of the mind; the delight in human unreason. It is not truth and certainty that is the antithesis of the world of the insane, but the universality and all-obligatoriness of a belief, in short, non-voluntariness in forming opinions. ”

“ Our poor little plans of children are put into horrible forcing-beds, called schools, and the young idea is there forced to shoot. It shoots, poor thing, like a potato in a warm cellar. One mass of pallid sickly ideas and ideals. And no root, no life. The ideas shoot, hard enough, in our sad offspring, but they shoot at the expense of life itself. Never was such a mistake. Mental consciousness is a purely individual affair. Some men are born to be highly and delicately conscious. But for the vast majority, much mental consciousness is simply a catastrophe, a blight. It just stops their living. ”

“ If now such a sorrow, such painful knowledge or reflection, is so bitter that it becomes altogether unbearable, and the individual is prostrated under it, then, terrified Nature seizes upon madness as the last resource of life; the mind so fearfully tortured at once destroys the thread of its memory, fills up the gaps with fictions, and thus seeks refuge in madness from the mental suffering that exceeds its strength, just as we cut off a mortified limb and replace it with a wooden one. The distracted Ajax, King Lear, and Ophelia may be taken as examples ”

“ Insanity is nothing more or less than disassociated states of mind and need not in reality be any more serious than errors of refraction of vision, faulty locomotion or lack of coordination. It comes because individuals know nothing of the psychology of themselves or their own minds and is the result of over-intensified mental and physical activity and loss of poise, physically, mentally and psychically. The insane are not capable of understanding themselves, and up to the present day there are very few who are able to understand them. ”

“ The insane are no longer absurd and pitiable people, to be herded in asylums till nature either cures them or relieves them, through death, of their misery. The insane who have not been made so by actual injury to their brain or nervous system, are the victims of unconscious forces which cause them to do abnormally things which they might be helped to do normally. ”

“ When men fully understand their own mind's scope, they will find that what the world calls un-natural states of consciousness, are only cerebral and psychic disassociation.
The greater freedom of the race, and the cure and control of insanity will be found in the deeper study of all levels of mind rather than the one or the few. Only as physical science unites with metaphysical, and these both unite with scientific psychical investigation, will humanity pass toward a solution of its insanity problems. ”

“ To deal with the mental changes as if they belonged to a sphere by itself, to the soul which is well or ill through its own independent alterations without steadily relating the changes to the total organism, leads therefore necessarily to failure. The mind reflects only symptoms of the disease; the disease itself belongs always to the organism. Psychotherapy has suffered too much from the belief that the removal of mental symptoms is a cure of disease. ”

“ To understand existential therapy, then, we ought not to expect to encounter a set of specific techniques. What really characterizes existential therapy are its self-consciously endorsed attitudes about life. They include these realizations:
* Anxiety frequently motivates individuals to change their lives. Anxiety often is present to tell you that you need to change; it is not necessarily a bad feeling from which no good will come. ”

“ It takes time to extinguish old habits; it doesn't happen overnight. Clients need patience and tenacity to oppose their old reflexes and replace them with rational, realistic beliefs.
An hour a week in rational-emotive therapy is really, then, like a tutorial session with a teacher. The client-students talk about their feelings; the therapist criticizes underlying irrational beliefs and makes it clear to the clients what a rational response would be. Then the clients are asked to practice applying rational beliefs on their own, outside of therapy. ”

“ It is merely an appeal to truth, which cannot fail to heal and heal forever. It is not a thought that judges an illusion by its size, its seeming gravity, or anything that is related to the form it takes. It merely focuses on what it is, and knows that no illusion can be real.
Let us not try today to seek to cure what cannot suffer sickness. Healing must be sought but where it is, and then applied to what is sick, so that it can be cured. There is no remedy the world provides that can effect a change in anything. The mind that brings illusions to the truth is really changed. ”

“ Indeed this consciousness of insanity is the one diagnostic of sanity that never deceives me and, on the other hand, an obstinate persistence in the hypothesis of perfect rationality demonstrates the fact that insanity yet lingers in the convolutions and recesses of the brain, and that it would not be humane as yet to cast the patient on a world in which he would inevitably be taken some ungenerous advantage of. ”

“ The condition can be treated with a combination of antipsychotic drugs and supportive therapy; hospitalization may be necessary in very serious cases to prevent self harm. Many people with schizophrenia improve sufficiently after treatment to lead satisfying lives although some patients need lifelong support and supervision. ”