This is week 3 of our month-long read of Veronika Decides To Die - a novel where all the action is set within a psychiatric hospital - the setting for Paulo’s exploration of his encounter with what society erroneously calls mental illness and this is the topic we will examine this week. What is madness?
Here are some of Paulo’s thoughts on the subject - all taken from his novel:
From the point of view of the person experiencing psychic disorientation -
‘Madness is the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you, but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there.’
‘We’ve all felt like that.’
“And all of us, one way or another, are mad.’
When psychosis is preferable to reality -
“You don't seem mad at all,' she said.
’But I am, although I'm undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being mad, living life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?”
On being different -
“Am I cured?”
“No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.”
“Is wanting to be different a serious illness?”
“It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another.”
On accepting reality -
“Basically, everything that happens in our life is our fault and ours alone. A lot of people go through the same difficulties we went through, and they react completely differently. We looked for the easiest way out: a separate reality.”
Carl Jung had a brush with ‘madness’ - although he never called it that. He had a…
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