Vincent Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate), 1882
Madness is a two-edged sword. In some cases, it can be a good thing, in most cases, it’s a bad thing. We can easily think of the bad, but when can it be good? Where does the positive edge come in? We all know the “mad genius” trope, but is there any truth to it?
Van Gogh ate his paint in his confusion and famously cut off his ear and gave it to a woman at a brothel to deliver it to Gauguin. Neighbors wanted him removed from town after he grabbed women and exhibited many problematic behaviors.
Oppenheimer tried to poison his teacher with a poisoned apple and almost was expelled, and could have been charged with attempted murder
Nikola Tesla had daily unwanted hallucinations and would only stay in hotel rooms divisible by 3
Dante was limerent for Beatrice from when he was 9 until his dying day even though he had only briefly met her twice
Copernicus, the father of modern astronomy, was labeled as an outcast and crazy
Beethoven dipped his head into water and poured water on himself before composing
Sylvia Plath commited suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning via sticking her head in an oven
Isaac Newton stuck a needle into his eye as deep as he could
John Nash, who gave us the principle of Nash equilibrium, struggled with schizophrenia and had an imaginary friend
Virginia Woolf threw herself out of a window while experience a breakdown and delusions
Creative geniuses look where no one else is looking and discover what has not yet been found. They find truth where everyone around them says it cannot be found. They use unconventional ways to achieve goals, create new inventions, art and discover new truths about the universe and humanity while on the “edge of madness”. The edge that people who are mad have is that they aren’t thinking like everyone else is thinking. In fact, it is the refusal to conform to what everyone else is doing that is typically the main ingredient that eventually leads to the “madness”. Detachment from social norms and currently existing paradigms can lead to truth, but it comes at the cost of living on a different plane of reality than those around you, which can get lonely. The people listed above led humanity to new frontiers, but the sword they had/used was double-edged. The progress, joy, knowledge and experiences they gifted us came at the cost of their suffering. They hated their state and lot in life frequently, and in so many ways, their illnesses debilitated them and prevented them from achieving even greater heights.
According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, madness is the state of having a serious mental illness. Right under that, there’s a note saying, “There may be a link between madness and creativity”, which I think is the primary advantage of madness. People who are cuckoo for cocoa puffs are more likely to manifest their inner world into the outer world. This process is inherently “creative” and magical. Even though we all have this ability, these people are more likely to change the world in novel ways. When thinking of mental illness, we can gain insight by thinking of similarities to physical illnesses. We know that illnesses are not good. They make life worse and can even kill us, but what we typically identity as illness is actually the symptoms of an immune response, the body trying to protect itself. In the case of the common cold, the body is using a runny nose or phlegm to flush or capture the virus. In the case of infection, the inflammation and pus is the body is sending white blood cells to kill the bacteria. Fevers are caused by the body to stop viruses, bacteria or other pathogens from being able to multiply or spread as quickly. Fatigue is meant to force your body to rest. So actually, without these unwanted symptoms, you’d feel fine, but the pathogens would eventually kill you. Some symptoms of mental illness are often in a similar way, the manifestations of a psychological defense mechanism. It’s the mind trying to protect itself and pave a way forward to survive or at least signalling to the outside world that it needs help. These symptoms actually stem from a deeper “illness” that is often caused by trauma or bad parenting or bad social conditioning. For physical illness, the symptoms are similar for many different types of pathogens: mucus, sneezing, coughing, fever, or inflammation. Psychological disorders are similar. The symptoms might be anxiety, mental anguish, delusion, psychosis, mania, grandiosity, catatonia, impulsivity, hallucinations, anti-social behavior, distorted perception of self, loneliness, narcissism, nihilism, apathy, obsession, depression, inability to concentrate, etc., but the underlying cause is often trauma such as:
Some were sexually abused. Some people were raped. Some people had parents that beat them. Some people watched their parents abuse each other. Some people were physically disabled or ill. Some people experienced discrimination. Some experienced violence. Some were mugged. Some lost their house. Some grew up poor. Some grew up physically ill. Some grew up neglected or had parents that we addicts. Some grew up in a controlling household. Some grew up in chaotic households. Some grew up with food or housing insecurity. Some grew up in cults. Some grew up without a parent or had a parent die. Some went through war. Some had a sibling or friend die or commit suicide. Some were made fun of for being different—fat, gay, quiet, nerdy, unfashionable, weird, skinny, small, etc. either at school or at home. Some just had plain bad luck for some critical things. Do genetics, environment, personality and chance matter? Definitely, but we could cure a lot more mental illnesses or at least make them more manageable if we focused on these deeper issues earlier. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a wonderful book that goes into the connection between trauma and mental and physical illness. Many of these symptoms, which seem crazy to others on the outside, are actually serving a purpose for us and helping us to survive, even though they suck, just like stuffy noses, fever, pus, pain, and inflammation. Take inability to concentrate for instance. We often are thinking, “Why can’t I focus? I need to get a job/do a better job. I need to outcompete my peers. I need to get my life together. I need more time.” But I think the mind is telling us, “Yes those are important, but there are longer-term problems that we need to address.” And so while the problem is inability to focus and lack of time, the metaproblem is a fear of confronting inner problems lest we fall behind. In the same way that we want to kill the pathogens and not depend on symptom suppressants, we want to heal the underlying trauma and false beliefs, rather than simply band-aiding the problems with medications, drugs, sex, money, “love”, food, work, socializing, isolating, avoidance or some vision that the world has told you will make you happy. According to The Deepest Well by Nadine Harris, the most common outcome of trauma is the inability to manage emotional states. You can imagine how that also might make you a bit crazy, especially if people only saw you in those states. We make snap judgments on people, especially when they are emotional, because when we are emotional, we are the least rational.
Think of these examples of people who we might be labeled as being “crazy” or “insane”:
A storm chaser risking his/her/their life to chase a tornado
A person gambling his life savings on Bitcoin, roulette or a lottery ticket
A homeless person yelling at passersby
A person who obsessively analyzes star charts to predict the stock market
A CEO who sleeps in his office and works 80 hour weeks
An ex-boyfriend or girlfriend who _________
A disgruntled person who murders family or strangers
A zealot for an unconventional religion
A person whose theories are incompatible with modern frameworks—flat-earthers *cough* just kidding.
A paranoid who thinks the government is listening to all of his/her/their conversations
A contestant on American Idol who sucks at singing, but rails at the judges for rejecting him and still walks away with the delusion that everyone loves his singing
So what do we mean when we say that these people are crazy? I think we mean that they fall into one or a combination of these:
Their beliefs are not true or do not make sense to us
Their goals are wrong or do not make sense to us
They are closed off to correction through feedback from environmental cues
For the religious zealot, their weird beliefs are just not true. For the storm chaser, we understand his beliefs; he loves the thrill of seeing a tornado up close, but we don’t think that that thrill is worth risking your life for. For the CEO who sleeps in his office, we can’t fathom why the discomfort of that is worth any potential money he could get. Doesn’t he want a family? What’s the point of living that life? For the crazy ex-boyfriend, we understand his goals, he wants his girlfriend back, but to everyone other than him, it’s clear that his actions are just making things worse.
What seems “crazy” to us might not be so crazy depending on the context or point of view. We can better understand madness if we learn to be curious about why people have the beliefs that they have, why they have the goals they have, and why they might be unwilling to trust the advice of those around them. For instance, maybe an 80+ hour per week worker like Elon Musk was seen as a socially awkward weirdo who was not worth time and attention before he was rich or famous. To understand their craziness, we need to understand why their goals became so rigid and extreme in the first place. If we followed along their journeys from birth, we probably would understand why they adopted the beliefs or goals that they did. Still crazy, yes, but more understandable if we try to put ourselves in their shoes and we can’t put ourselves in their shoes until we know them deeply. Through dialogue, perspective, curiosity and humility, we may learn to understand those who seem crazy to us and then they’ll seem less crazy than we originally thought. Let’s say no to judgment that is divorced from curiosity and empathy and compassion.
There are people who are more objectively insane than the examples we read above. Their goals and beliefs are not only different from ours, but the compass of their mind that tells them what to do has broken in a way that makes it impossible for them to orient themselves in the right direction. Their model of the world and how to reach their goals is UTTERLY BROKEN and they can’t fix it even with others’ help. Mental illness often puts a person into this category because it makes it almost impossible for the sufferer to maintain an accurate model of the world and of themselves.
For the past two years, I was experiencing mental illness and I felt like I was suffering without any silver lining. Any creative edge I got did little to help me achieve any goals. One of the consolations though was I could better connect to the sadness and brokenness of the world. From my point of view, that is half of the human experience and there is much beauty to be found in the brokenness. There are many paths to madness, but in my case, it went something like this:
I’m going to use a diagram from chemistry class. The dots in the diagram below represent gas molecules inside a container. The gas molecules are separated by a barrier, but if that barrier is removed, red gas molecules from the left side will bounce into the right side and green air molecules from the right side will bounce into the left side.
This diagram represents my mind. The left side of the blue line represents my fantasy, imagination and subconscious world. The red “gas” dots represent beliefs and facts and realities that were generated and retained in that idealized fantasy world. They include beliefs about my idealized self, my romantic “happy place”, and idealized futures. They are kept compartmentalized away by the blue “moveable barrier” from the part of my mind that I use to interface with the real world day-to-day which is the side with the green dots. The green “air” dots represents beliefs and facts that I use to interact with others and my environment to hopefully actualize the goals that I have. There is an executive brain function that manages this semi-permeable barrier and lets some dots occasionally travel back and forth between the sides to allow for our imagination to influence the real world. This is a healthy exchange, typically because we can still recognize which side each belief originated from based on its color. Red beliefs are fantasy beliefs and are not real (at least not yet) and green beliefs are consistently true with relatively high confidence.
In 2019 - 2021, my physical and mental health were not good. I had been taking diphenhydramine (generic Benadryl) for 10 years, but when I was practicing jiu-jitsu, I was getting pretty serious allergic reactions and it was making my eczema very bad, so I began taking a lot of pills. There were many days in late 2019 and early 2020 where I was taking 10-15 pills and the inflammation markers in my blood were 5-10x normal levels. The drug disrupted my sleep patterns, gave me brain fog, cognitive impairment and changed the neurotransmitters in my brain. My physical appearance was getting worse and some of my hair was falling out. My health was gradually getting worse, but because it was gradual and I was negligent, I didn’t take it seriously. I had accumulated toxic stress and at the end of 2021, things came to a breaking point. I had poor boundaries and toxic relationships, a startup culture that was toxic, and my church was falling apart due to ongoing investigations of abuse and negligent leadership, which I was in meetings for every month, and I had just left a another ministry where the leader had NPD. I had a falling out with one of those best friends, the startup I co-founded failed, the original founder was hurt and I felt guilty, many of my friends and I left our church in anger, and a girl I liked for two years—mostly through falling in love with her art and humor—rejected me. This was the catalyst for my quarter-life crisis. I was sad, I was experiencing high anxiety for the first time in my life, and I felt stuck and that the feeling I was feeling would never go away. In response to that, I started subconsciously importing the red fantasy beliefs into the real-world side of the barrier to make it a more safe, comfortable environment to live in. What do you do when you are suffering and you can’t find a way out? I found relief from pain by retreating into fantasies where I was with this girl and we were studying or watching TV and talking about the shows or hanging out with friends or playing ping-pong, sharing about our pasts, etc. I was very unhealthy at the time–mentally, physically and psychologically, and that made it hard to distinguish the fantasy beliefs from the real-world beliefs at times. The barrier between fantasy and reality eventually deteriorated and my mind would flicker between normal reality and made up things. One moment, I knew what was true and reasonable, but then all of a sudden, I would get an impulse to believe something that was not true and my inhibition would disappear for a bit and I would say something crazy. It was a bizarre experience. My friend was puzzled at my emotions and behavior and justifiably chastised me saying that I was behaving as if I had gone through a divorce. My models of the world and of myself began to deviate from reality and it became hard to navigate through the complexity of life. At this point, I was no longer simply making mistakes, but I was half-living in an alternate reality where the red and the green blended together in my mind. Future projections and dreams started to feel as real as the present. Now that there were simultaneously idealized beliefs and real facts on the right side that contradicted each other, there were painful dissonances, unresolvable problems and overall confusion. And all of my hope and dreams were melting and it felt like my mind was fracturing. Because of the high stress, I entered into a mild psychosis and mania. I exhibited irrational behavior, developed a compulsion, became even more impulsive than I normally am and made poor decisions and had unrealistic beliefs in my abilities. I thought I could win a jiu-jitsu tournament even with a fairly bad ankle injury. I had social dysfunction and became delusional. When my friends told me that this girl was never going to talk to me again, I just couldn’t accept it. My judgment was poor and I escaped to a fantasy world. I so badly wanted reality to be different than what it actually was, that I tried to make it go away as often as I could afford, but that only made things worse.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. – Philip K. Dick
Sometimes, we cede control of our lives to lies and illusions, because they alleviate the pain. This happens to the Joker in Joker (2019). He has a hard life due to his disability, poverty and mentally ill mother. He imagines an alternate reality where he and the girl down the hall hook up and get into a relationship in order to help him cope with his situation and feel less lonely. On one very, very bad day, he finds out that his mom is delusional and has NPD and that he is adopted and that he and his mother were physically abused severely, but he had since suppressed those memories. The barriers between his fantasy world and reality dissolve and when he goes back to his apartment, instead of going into his apartment, he creepily goes into his imaginary girlfriend’s apartment for comfort since he is in limbo between his fantasy and reality.
Madness, as you know, is like gravity; all it takes is a little push! – The Joker
Another example of this pattern playing out can be found in Shang-Chi’s dad, Wenwu, in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Wenwu was a ruthless warlord whose sole purpose in life was to dominate people and obtain more power through immortality and conquest. On his quest for more power and knowledge, he was stopped by a beautiful, powerful woman named Ying Li at The Bamboo Spring. She showed him a part of himself that he didn’t know was there and opened his eyes to a world that he never knew existed. They fell in love and gave up everything to be with each other. For her, it was her family and friends, her home, her culture and purpose in life. For him, it was his power, his greed, his ego, and his immortality. They started a family and were living a peaceful life when she was murdered in cold blood by his old enemies who had a vendetta against him. He became consumed with hatred and became an abusive father. Wenwu had changed for Ying Li, but he never really changed. He was desperate to connect with his wife in any way possible and an evil demon exploited that vulnerability by convincing him that his wife was still alive. Wenwu, in his desperation, deluded himself into believing that his wife was still alive and that they could be a family again—that he could go back in time.
When she died, I was lost for many years, but I am not lost anymore – Xu Wenwu
Deep down, Wenwu knew his wife was dead, but instead of working through painful reality, he chose a lie. In his world, his wife was still alive and he was still at peace, not an evil warlord or an abusive father and his future was not completely black. The grief, guilt and regret was too much for him and when it was time to accept the truth and move on, he chose instead to destroy the divider between his idealized world and the real world.
People who are not psychologically healthy are using this coping mechanism to escape the pangs of reality, which, like any other addiction, prolongs and intensifies their pain in the long-run, hurts those around them, and ultimately leads to their demise.
I drifted far from reality. I was actively moving away from my goals and interests while believing that I was moving toward them. My ability to assess where I was greatly diminished. I was in a crisis and a slave to compulsions and false beliefs and could not be practically productive for a very long time. I had little money and interviewed for ~30 companies over 7 months and only 1 company wanted to hire me. In a world where I didn’t have support, I would have become a crazy homeless person. The difference between a successful professional and a crazy homeless person sometimes wobbles on a razor thin edge and it is up to God’s mercy which side you will land on. Now, I see myself in people that are less fortunate and where I used to give from a place of superiority, I now give from the same level, because somewhere out there in the multiverse, I am talking to myself on Telegraph, cradling my head in my hands.
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.