💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anonymous-about-madness.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 06:20:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: About Madness
Author: Anonymous
Date: Autumn 2020
Language: en
Topics: mental health, normality, alienation, Spigaou, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #6
Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 6
Notes: Previously published as Autour de la folie in Spigaou (Revue anarchiste apériodique), Issue 1, May 2020

Anonymous

About Madness

This text has been written years ago following a lived experience in an

inner circle. It’s not the purpose here to retell it, but to reflect on

different mechanisms that far too often are put in place when faced with

abnormality and to develop reflections following from it. I don’t use

“we” because of a feeling of belonging but to point out the mechanisms

that touch us all sometimes a bit, others more. Finally, I’ll talk

mainly about “abnormality” and not about severe crises which entail a

serious situation and that need at times a specific involvement.

In the current system the violence of social relations is often

disguised. However it’s difficult to put a mask on madness because it

allows to disclose the vulnerability of a shattered society. Someone who

disintegrates faced with a “valid” world which is imposed on us,

necessarily disturbs - an uncontrollable spirit, an “unhealthy”

phenomenon. Those who can no longer stand this society where your

individuality is denied and where you are only a cog in the machine, are

quickly quarantined. The “illness” or psychological suffering is treated

or punished, never accepted. It is even often denounced as perverse,

shameful or the result of failure. “The Greek word norma refers to the

ruler that one follows to draw a line, and which permits to walk

straight: those who walk in an organised herd are said to be normal.”

Today, everything is “clean”, we are clean on ourselves, we make clean

wars, right down to our relationships: we speak correctly, no rudeness,

nor any deviation is possible, we all walk very very straight... And

finally, as time goes by, the forms of exclusion change (from banishment

to confinement, from asylum to chemical straitjacket) but its process

remains.

Our timidity in the face of what disturbs makes us sometimes silent or

complacent in the face of a “problem” which we will then individualise

and personalise. This frees us from responsibility and avoids us having

to go through a certain number of reflections and to take some delicate

stances. And which will have as a consequence to participate in making a

given situation invisible and taboo. And finally, not reacting is also

taking a stance with obvious consequences. So what do we do? We “reach

out” as in good Judeo-Christian fashion that knows how to do the good,

we close our eyes, we condemn what disturbs, or we question the

mechanisms that accompany this situation and that touch us even in our

own spaces where relationships of power and domination are never

completely absent. Of course, we are not always ready to be open to

suffering. Still one must say it. Because silence is more violent. There

is noisy violence and discrete violence. That of silence, of cowardice

and of disregard is among the hardest because it is underhanded. Without

having a position of angelism, you can’t hold everyone in your arms. We

can, however, approach it the most vigilant as possible in the face of a

situation that is sometimes difficult to discern and to try to create

spaces where people can feel confident and supported.

"People must be left to their own, let them find and practice their own

choice of life, their own project. And this freedom must not be subject

to conditions, agreements, compromises imposed by our limits, our fears,

our paternalism. We cannot transform ourselves into those to whom they

have to be accountable, responsible tutors, good “therapists”. We cannot

again link the existence of persons to a judgement (ours) that can only

be arbitrary and violent." - Giuseppe Bucalo, Derrière chaque idiot il y

a un village. Itinéraire pour se passer de la psychiatrie.

Fear of the other, of contagion, of what it breaks us down to, generates

different systems of defence and mechanisms of protection. It is not

always a simple “fear of the difference”, but very often a recognition

that leads us to avoidance, indifference or false awareness and

hypocrisy. The fact of seeing in the mirror sensations in the other that

are not foreign to us, to discover ourselves similar to those marked by

otherness sometimes leads us towards the extrapolation of unspeakable

fears. Which relates us with a part of ourselves that disgusts us. The

other then becomes a thing, a deviant identification, and this is what

this mechanism of projection reveals, which generates the phenomenon of

exclusion. In this context, the relationship to the other can be

experienced as a destabilizing experience. We can then see that

rejection constitutes, in a way, a refusal to look at ourselves, to see

ourselves defenceless and to live our own madness. A way of excluding

the other in order to free ourselves from its haunting.

It is our tolerance of eccentricity or difference that is diminished

when our disposition to the normalisation of behaviour is becoming more

pronounced in a “society” that is devoted to a real cult of performance.

The dominant culture seeks to conform, lynch or bury alive all subjects

that defy the social norm. One adapts or disappears. The norm erases

intensity, multiplicity. The system abhors what does not work, so it

tends to neutralise the best it can anything outside of the frame.

Domestication is a tool that is excessively well developed through

so-called universal laws and codes (you have to work, to fit in, to go

to school, to smile and to produce).

To be normal is to be socially useful. It means being able to adapt to

the group and to be able to comply with the norms in place, and it is

sometimes also a question of survival because the social environment is

a determining factor in the construction of the self. The rules of the

game are legitimized by the silent acceptance of the majority, by the

integration of the relations of domination. And that is why it is

necessary to restore the social and political dimension of this issue to

give it a global dimension. The dominant model is not sustainable

without social reproduction. And while the institutions of assistance

and control organise the dispossession of bodies and knowledge, we build

our own devices of power and alienation.

Normality has become a means of social control. It is essential to know

in which box to put the individual in order to know where it stands in

the system. If you step out of line, you’re documented, categorised,

diagnosed, put in a box by the psychiatric or social police for a better

management of flows. In short, one is alienated by illness. Diagnosis is

also based on subjective interpretations and depends on the vision of

what is socially compliant, conventional and correct. However, the

boundaries between the normal and the pathological remain fuzzy. Social

alienation and mental alienation are two sides of the same coin for who

has not found their own place or a specific “social utility” for this

system.

Conversely, what is considered madness is sometimes fetishized,

idealized or even considered subversive “by nature”, or an example to

follow. This rather naïve tendency permits to passively accept the

definitions of deviance provided by the dominant ideology (Giovanni

Jervis, “Le mythe de l’Antipsychiatrie”, Ed. Solin). It also allows us

to not have to take responsibility for ourselves by identifying madness

as an imminent liberation, which is tantamount to denying certain

realities. Madness is not an alternative to life as it is presented but

an expression of social violence, it cannot be defined with certainty as

a homogeneous reality, much less romanticized. Any ideology that seeks

to define categories and to clumsily interpret the troubles of the mind

fails faced with the complexity of human relationships and emotions. It

is impossible to make all the reactions of the human body and mind

predictable. Its elusive and spontaneous character plunges us towards

the unexpected…

"Basically, every domination is based on the hypothesis of being able to

regulate the unpredictable future. Every domination has managed to

exorcise fear and uncertainty of the future. The refusal of domination

therefore also passes through the conscious and courageous restoration

of instability, the unknown that awaits us around the corner of the

street." - La nostalgia di Dio, in Canenero, Issue 17, 3rd of March 1995