MADNESS AND ITS SPECTRUMS
By: Ajayi Tobbi
Tags: Mental Health, Humanity, Nobel Prize, Critical Thinking, Science

As a community, there are many things we shy away from speaking about, like death, sex, insanity etc, but sometimes as a creative, it is important to think about these things and ask questions that may never be answered.

People who are insane display some set of behaviours uncharacteristic of normal human beings. We use many adjectives to describe madness globally but the most intriguing is probably the phrase “out of your mind”. There are different manifestations of insanity; ranging from the overtly quiet ones to plain erratic ones, who dance in the marketplace. But the key distinguishing characteristic between those in their right mind and those who aren’t is relative control over their person and the attention to general wellbeing. This mindfulness informs our need to be clothed, civil and clean among other things.

I have often wondered what the true markers for the insane are. Are there doors in our minds that are locked on purpose? Are we ready for the answers behind those doors?

Science says that there are sides to our brains we do not use or even have access to, which indicates a biological limitation that keeps us regulated within our society. There are however ways to access these sides of the brain, one of which is drugs. Drug usage and alcohol consumption chemically tampers with the normal function of the human brain, opening some channels while closing others. This is why people experience a heightened sense of creativity, less inhibition and the reduced need to behave like their normal self. The difference between insanity and drug-induced euphoria Is that one is chemically induced and the other is semi-permanent damage to actual brain function. This explains why excessive drug use can lead to actual insanity. That is, constantly tugging on the restricted switch may damage it together.

This limitation on our mental capability might just be the door between our perception of the natural world and the other dimension. A limitation mad people seem to have crossed. When you see a mad person talking with themselves, they are probably interacting with another realm and the people in them. It is widely believed that we cannot experience the supernatural in our human bodies, but insanity seems like a good peek.

It might also be the case that the insane have lost touch with their human side and are stuck in a place between primal animalistic behaviours and higher animals self-control. A place where shame, pain, hygiene, human interaction and comfort are non-existence. Humans are referred to as higher animals and sometimes degenerate to animalistic behaviour once in a while. Case in point Nebuchadnezzar, when “the spirit of an animal was given to him”. He just slipped into animalistic behaviour (quite effortlessly, if I may say) for a while before ‘coming back to his senses.

Furthermore, people who recover from madness never seem to have a recollection of what they did between their last ‘normal’ memory and their present. One may think that this is because they weren’t themselves, but this may just be proof that what happens in every realm stay in that realm and when you are not a member of a society, you lose the ‘rights’, ‘privileges’ and memory.

If this is the case, we do not know how wide the spectrum of sanity runs and where humans lie in it. It may be, that a group of ‘mad people’ on the same frequency can live in a ‘functional society’ of theirs and on their terms. It may also be that by studying and relating with the insane as members of another realm, we may actually get a glimpse into their reality. This means taking whatever they say as a true representation of their reality, not just ramblings of the insane.