What is MADNESS in Psychology

Madness has been a very popular term for centuries and has been used for coexistence and adaptation purposes. Madness is such a relative term that it opens the doors to a diversity of psychological analysis: especially in the social and health consequences. In Psychology-Online we explain what is madness in psychology, a term that may have been misused or abused for the benefit of certain entities and contextualizations that cause very significant clinical confusion.

Index

1. What is madness: meaning
2. The concept of insanity
3. Where is the difference between normality and madness?
4. Is madness a mental illness?
5. The concept of madness through history
6. The love and the madness
7. Does madness have any treatment?
8. Madness phrases

If madness exists, surely there is still no madman who can describe it. Talking about insanity is a luxury that only people who believe they are far from being called crazy allow themselves.

Madness, a difficult term to define

Defining insanity is as complex as defining sanity; dozens, hundreds and perhaps quantifying the fact in a hyperbolic way, there could be thousands of definitions that exist about the madness: psychology and psychiatry manuals, history books, dictionaries and magazines offer descriptions of this popular finished. Society also amuses itself by airing its prejudices here and there trying to define madness, as if this practice were handshakes, but… Isn't this an act of madness? The action of alluding to the social custom about venting moral prejudices could be considered by the most gifted as a characteristic act of madness. The definition of insanity should be provided by the madmen themselves, as they are the ones who present it - or does madness require a certain degree of unconsciousness? – The madman is not aware that he is mad and therefore cannot be the one who describes his madness, but this task is frequently carried out by those who say cope with the effects of the asymmetrical behavior, the divergent lifestyle and the accentuated emotional life of the mad.

Definition of insanity

To define insanity in three or two lines is to take responsibility for being lightly. Labeling any action that is incompatible and unknowable to my reasoning does not exactly amount to an act of madness, but rather to a different procedure from mine. Feeling harmed by the "crazy" actions of the one who is next to us, thus exiling him to a permanent alienation, does not make us sane / sensible or sane, it makes us just as crazy. Who can say that we are not crazy too and we are only arguing with someone who makes a reliable use of his judgment and for this we call him "crazy"? We could not, not with that imperative need to define as madness everything that does not contrast with our concept of normality.

Popular wisdom generally qualifies as crazy what is clearly distinguished from reason, whence the irrational receives the well-known labels of loony or headdress.

Next we will see what is understood by insanity from different perspectives:

Madness from philosophy

Notable philosophical systems have been the promoters of individualism; great authors of French and German illustration such as Kant and Rousseau, authors of English empiricism such as Locke and Hobbes, Existentialist philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche reacted against the generalizing and collective lines of idealism Hegelian. The individualism to which Hegel refers is aimed precisely at dividing the link between the singular and the universal (between the individual and the whole of which he is a part). By ignoring this dialectical relationship, the individual can come to maintain that he is self-sufficient without a link with the spirit of the people, having his own purpose. Is so then a singular / individualistic consciousness, the consciousness of the madman for Hegel.

Also Lacan (1946) explained that madness corresponds to one of the most normal relationships of the human personality «its ideals, 'and he proposes at the same time the famous example: if a man who thinks he is a king is mad, the king is equally mad. believe king.

Madness for society

Most of us know a homeless person who vilifies through the streets of our city, whom, perhaps since we were very young, we label as - the madman with dogs, the madman who is mute, the madman from cans, the madman with boots, the madman at the market, or simply the madman -. Although most people do not know about psychology, it is so easy for them, like a child to diagnose anyone of suffering insanity. Well madness has been considered indistinctly by society as a synonym for mania, delirium, anger, rage, hallucinations, dementia, dissociation panic or anxiety. This causes confusion with significant clinical consequences.

Just meditating for a few minutes on our normality - our concept of normality - (which surely does not agree with the one next to us), would elucidate that we are not as sane as we believed.

Could we consider it normal to have sex with a hen? For some entire communities it is perhaps a well accepted initiation ritual for decades. Would it be normal to kill your own children because that is how God commands it? Would it be normal to talk to the dogs while we cook? Would it be normal to speak out loud to yourself? Would "inbreeding" marriage or reproduction between people of common descent be normal? Would it be normal to constantly cry and think about a significant loss? Would it be normal to always have to leave the volume of the estuary in an even number? Would it be normal to tap the wall three times to avoid a family accident? Would it be normal not to detach from parents? Would it be normal to get attached to an object, a partner, or a job? Would it be normal to kiss Mom on the lips when you say goodbye to her? What would be normal?

This time of meditation could create the corollary that ends the stigma we have about insanity. Learn that that mute homeless man, perhaps never heard any sound from his birth and was later exposed to live on the streets; without words to communicate instinctively used primitive cues to survive, without words to structure a thought and develop a healthy cerebral cortex and per se a socially acceptable behavior of inhibition, would we still think that that homeless person gets naked in the street, why is he mad? Would we think the same even knowing that thought is restructured and modified by transforming itself into language, but that without language there is no thought? Or with what words did you think the deaf and homeless people in your neighborhood think?

If I talk to God, I am religious, if God speaks to me, I am schizophrenic. The article does not seek to create an apology for insanity, normalize or create pathologies in all types of behavior; insanity is considered by most social contexts as synonymous with mental illness. That is why we try, perhaps, with a tinge of impudence and with a bit of tangles between its lines, be able to clarify what a mental illness represents (its symptoms), and what is the concept of craziness; thus also allude to the excessive and exploited use of the terms by pharmaceutical companies, social contexts and religions.

The fact is well known where previously the IQ was used to determine if someone manifested any type of intellectual disability and that currently its measurement is not enough to establish a diagnosis correspondent. In the same way as madness, this type of concepts and definitions are changing, pretending or showing that each era has its own definitions: their own quirks, their own follies, and their corresponding normalities. Just as geniuses have challenged the known, the established, the comfortable, the realistic and have been called crazy as we explained with Hegel and other philosophers (ibid.).

Society uses as a synonym for madness most mental illnesses, but as mentioned it is a label used to intervene in something that is not known. This final ambivalence results from the excessive and exploited use that has been given to the term "madness", since labeling any behavior that goes against what we consider normal is not necessarily a mental disorder.

There has been speculation on various occasions about the involvement of pharmacological laboratories in the massification of mental disorders that appear in the DSM (Manual of diagnosis and statistics of mental disorders), and the alteration to which the symptoms guide with a lucrative interest in their methods that alleviate or improve the health of the people. I believe that there are people who suffer from a real mental disorder (a significant clinical disability caused by symptoms of depression, phobias, attacks of panic, delusions or symptoms characterized by hallucinations), and that they really need and ask for professional help, but clearly their etiopathogenesis.

In the Middle Ages the term began to be used craziness to encompass people who did not know how to treat from a social point of view or perspective. Within this time it is necessary to allude to witchcraft since power in the Middle Ages was assigned between the church and the feudal lords. Some behaviors that suggested or appeared to be subversive (revolutionary) did not fit into this structure, something similar to go against the established. People who went or even tried to go against what was established (dogmas / norms) imposed and regulated by the church in the modus vivendi everyday, you were called witches or heretics. It was believed then that these madmen were demonized and therefore should be submitted to the Holy Inquisition.

The specific method of dealing with this problem was then the Inquisition. Years passed and the rate of sorcerers / possessed / possessed was increasing in a directly proportional way (more sentences, more witches).

It could then be inferred that there were a greater number of witches or demoniacs than normal people, or perhaps there was something that was not working. It was being used since we are in power a tag to contend or fight against a series of people who began to go against the official state of affairs, accepted by a bureaucracy (the church and the feudal lords). For this reason thousands of "witches" who developed a different way of life from what was designated were burned. It was mostly women who showed hysterical symptoms or natural manifestations of a sexual nature. In general, insanity has been a term used for centuries but its implications have gradually changed.

As Oscar Wilde referred to, being in love is surpassing oneself. For centuries, love has been confused with falling in love and consequently love has been associated with madness. Within the state or stage of infatuation people form an extrapolated sense of their emotions, which directs them to states of separation from oneself.

Exceeding oneself corresponds to behaviors that on various occasions are considered acts of madness:

• stop eating to think about the loved one
• annulling one's own existence to enlarge that of the loved object
• annul the existence of the other to become a single being
• keep an eye on the loved object
• elude imperfections of the loved object

Love, confused by falling in love due to misuse of terms, has been considered a state of psychosis where delusions can occur. Here you will find the differences between love and infatuation, as well as the characteristics of the state of infatuation.

Following the lines of what has been explained of madness, this being a label used and established by inexperienced people, a proven treatment cannot be proposed and efficient, however, the exploration of disabilities and deviations from the habitual functioning of the subject referred to by the same or by people who live with her. In case the evaluation concludes with a diagnosis or psychopathological symptomsYes, it may be possible to propose a psychological treatment and / or prescribe a pharmacological treatment, depending on the case.

Some phases of madness are as follows:

• A man of extraordinary genius will never be the product of genetics, an extraordinary man strives to strengthen his inert genius, just as a madman can turn his madness into a genius of art or engulf it in a disease.Bryan Castro (2017) The interviewer.
• I wonder who has defined man as a rational animal. It is the most premature definition they have ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.Oscar Wilde (1890), The Picture of Dorian Gray.
• The genius is abstracted; the alienated is distracted. The absent abstraction of others, the absent distraction of himself. In genius, the Spirit is absent from others; in madness, he is absent from himself. To keep his attributes intact, the genius needs periods of recollection; prolonged contact with mediocrity highlights original ideas and corrodes the most unshakable characters. That is why all superiority is often an exile. The great thinkers became lonely.José Ingenieros (1913)The mediocre man.
• He has no idea what he should do, and his insanity consists in simulating madness. Oscar Wilde (1905) De profundis.
• If we fully understood the reasons for other people's behavior, it would all make sense.Sigmund Freud

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

If you want to read more articles similar to What is madness in psychology, we recommend that you enter our category of Basic psychology.

• Jacques Lacan. (1946). About psychic causality. In writings 1, Mexico.