The case that madness is philosophy in practice

I have twice undergone uninterrupted periods of roughly two months each in which I was “mad” and was diagnosed as “psychotic” by psychiatrists. Both periods are sharply etched in my memory; they differ from all the other periods in my life. During these two periods, I experienced many thoughts, perceptions, and interpretations that were decidedly different from those I had in “normal” life.

For example, I believed that everyone over 40 immediately understood all the world’s languages, which meant there were no real linguistic differences. I felt, and became convinced, that there was no gulf between thinking and being. I feared that it was my turn to be crucified.

I believed that I was telepathic. I worried that the internet had been invented by my father and my uncle, and that I was being surveilled with spyware by a secret alliance (or conspiracy) of wise old men, all for the greater good. I thought that the Earth was flat and that flying was an illusion, the work of another widespread conspiracy.

I was certain that God existed, and nothing but God. Usually,it is assumed that the kind of madness I experienced is abnormal, that it should be explained on the basis of the normal, and that it is a disorder or a deviation with respect to what is taken for granted as normal. According to this conventional wisdom, the brain is the place where we expect and hope to find sense and meaning, and to capture, control, and dominate the gruesome spirit of madness.

But the simple claim that a psychosis is a “dopamine-level disruption,” for example, does not tell us anything at all about how the mad world is _actually_ experienced — how it looks from the inside. And even if a connection were found between madness and the brain, we still would not understand what madness actually is. We might know the matter of which the mad brain consists, but we would understand nothing of its spirit, let alone its soul.

Fortunately, there have been practitioners in the history of psychiatry who were not primarily interested in MRI scans or blood test results. Numerous accounts by these doctors describe the expressions and reports of madmen not as the symptoms of a deformed hippocampus but as portals to a mad world. Since the early 20th century, a tradition and method have developed for observing the behavior and speech of the mad in an attempt to understand their world in its entirety.