Insanity vs Sanity

After seeing madness very closely, here’s another look at it. It’s hard to be sane as well


They say a thin line divides sanity and insanity. It is like saying the world is a global village. I have a little challenge for those who think so: If the world is such a small place, try going around Mongolia. Since I have a heart, I am not asking you to go to, say, North Pole. What I am trying to say is that it is no so easy to go insane. That thin line requires some real weird times (not bad) to become thin enough, so that one can cross over to the where everything is perfect – the world of the mad man.
I have a seen a few really mad people. I am not talking about the cute and expected madness of the artist. What we call methodical madness, seen often in the creative person, is actually not mad enough. In fact, such a condition is very a sane state. How can madness be methodical? I think a smart writer, who saw the beauty in madness, coined this. You are going to find a dozen artists every minute who perfect their madness to make it appear mad enough. It is planned in a fuzzy way – just like legends about rockstars who die young. To cultivate optimum amount of madness one requires great discipline. And the other thing is, the writer who saw came up with the term ‘methodical madness’ must have seen madness from far away.
Really mad people do not do anything else besides being plain mad. Have you lived with a real schizophrenic? A real schizo is irritating, to say the least. And the worst part is you are helpless. You can’t really help them because they do not know, after a certain point, that they are mad. They begin to think they are doing perfectly fine as they make up a world that exists only for them. You can’t do much about an imagination that has turned pathological from your viewpoint.
I have met a whole lot of people who sympathise with insane people and call them mentally challenged. However, people who live or have lived with mad people know that they are actually the ones who deserve more understanding and help. Those that take care of insane people feel the real impact of insanity. It is not hard to find people working in madhouses who gradually lose balance of their mind. They end up half way – a little sane, a little mad. That’s a terrible situation because nobody ever takes you seriously and nor they do they forgive your mistakes. When you do something crazy, they say you are not that crazy and if you do something sane they say you are mad enough to do it. You are crucified by irony. I think only when you are so mad that you have no idea you are absolutely bonkers, you won’t have to deal with the perils of madness.
Whenever you are with a friend or family member who is totally bananas, you will find how hard it is to digest that your insane friend is happy for whatever reason and you are feeling bad about that because a person is not supposed to be behaving that way. But then who knows? Of what I know, a person who is having a grand laugh, mad or otherwise, is feeling okay. The flipside also holds true – a crazy person can be as sad as anyone. The truth is unless you join in the madness you are not going to enjoy a mad person’s company without patronising him or her.

I have come across many people who have no idea what ‘madness’ is really about talk about conditions like schizophrenia as if they are experts. The truth is even the real experts don’t know what it is to be mad. They have brain maps and neuro diagrams, but that means horse. There are hypotheses of what can be done, but there is no solution. A stable state of mind, as we know it, is trivial issue for a mad person. No one really knows how an insane person goes about self-evaluation.
Simply put, an insane person in not in a world of his/her own. S/He just chooses to react differently to the information that the mind processes. Many insane people are in very good physical health. Which is why, I feel we are yet to understand the meaning of the word ‘disease’. I, sometimes, feel madness is a responsible choice one makes to deal with a world mired in rationality. I know you are not going to agree with me, but I am sane enough to understand we all have our opinions. Or, seeing it another way, who knows there may be a mad doctor trying hard to find a cure for all the sane people at this moment.

(Email me: atmavan@gmail.com)