The Other Side of Madness

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

You don’t often hear people talk about madness. Not the real, out there, delusional kind. It’s a word you’ll more often than not hear in its sanitized form. It was a mad night out on the town, or such and such a character is ‘mad’ because of his daring behaviour or a gig or event was mad, meaning it was fun to the point of wild or unruly. We toy with the word in order to make ourselves feel a little less bound by society’s rules and regulations.
And that in itself is no bad thing. We need to let our hair down once in a while. We need to get out from under the yoke of convention every now and then.
But when we do use the word for real we think of a place that is, if you like, beyond the normal boundaries of thought or behaviour. Madness is a realm that we shut off, that we treat almost as if it were not there. And very certainly we tend to consider it as a place that once you wander in, there is no getting out of it again.
That’s why it was so refreshing to hear from one man who wandered in and made his way out again. London Irish poet John O’Donoghue was in town this week giving a reading at University College Dublin as part of the John Hume Institute’s lunchtime ‘Writing Home’ series. He was born in the late 1950s to native Irish speaking parents who had emigrated to London. So he described growing up speaking with an Irish accent at home and an Eastender’s accent when he was out with his mates.
The reality of his life, however, was that he was ‘sectioned’ at the age of 16. Sectioned is a word, for those who don’t know it, that means being detained under the Mental Health Act because you have been diagnosed with, usually, a moderate to serious mental disorder. In John O’Donoghue’s case he said he was mad, psychotic, delusional. And in short, when you present in society with those symptoms you get ‘sectioned’ and your freedom is taken away.
He read a piece of prose about being prepared for electric shock treatment, which he received on numerous occasions, and spoke freely of his stays in psychiatric institutions, of his dealings with zany psychiatrists, and of his battle with the see-saw life of madness and sanity.
It began to end for him, even though it has not quite ended, through, of all things, education. He puts his acceptance to East Anglia university down as the turning point in his life. He studied English and American literature, began writing poetry and saw writing as a cathartic way of understanding and dealing with the world as he saw it. The university was also the place where he met his wife of 20 years.
As he said himself, he is not fully out of the grip of madness. Sometimes he feels it coming on but he quoted something that actor Stephen Fry said about depression. Describing it as an unwelcome visitor, Fry’s words, John O’Donoghue said that when he feels this unwelcome visitor approaching he feels much more ‘friendly’ to the visitor now.
It’s a simple thing but it points up one man’s remarkable ability to come to terms with, even have a relationship with, the symptom that threatened to destroy his life and that, in many other instances, has actually destroyed the lives of others.
It is a fascinating insight into something that psychoanalysis has been championing, if that’s the right word, for over a century and a half. You’ll notice that John O’Donoghue didn’t talk about the word ‘cure’. There was no ‘cure’ for him in the strict sense of the word. But there was an accommodation and acceptance and learning to live with what it was he was suffering from. His madness, according to him, hasn’t gone away but his understanding of it and his relationship to it has changed in such a way as to allow him live and love and work. And that, given the particular mountain he had to climb, must seem close enough to a cure.
The 'fix me' attitude that is so prevalent in society today stems from a belief that all ailments have a cause and a cure and that the cure must involve the taking away of all suffering. All ailments have a cause. But taking away all suffering? Lessening the suffering is the aim, making it understandable and manageable is the goal, and releasing the capacity for happiness that is tightly sealed up within it is the aspiration.
If you are interested in reading John O'Donoghue's work then his current memoir is called ‘Sectioned, A Life Interrupted’ (John Murray 2009) and his full length collection of poetry is called ‘Brunch Poems’ (Waterloo Press 2009).
• The next blog will appear on Friday May 8th, 2009.