Madness

As every year, before the beginning of classes, the topics to be presented were distributed in the Mental Health Department, except one: the topic of madness and its comparison with so-called “normality.”

In a meeting in which the aptitudes to be able to give an excellent and, above all, original class were measured, Dr. Klaus was elected, an eccentric sixty-year-old with a crazy face and a psychiatrist by profession. I need to add that there was great expectation around this whole matter since the professor was given complete freedom to say what he thought even if it was truly crazy.

Dr. Klaus entered with slow steps and a worried expression and explained: “I am worried that they chose me to give this class because I think they did it because they considered me too extravagant to be sane or normal. And I am not worried about what they think of me, but about the wrong concept that the professors, and perhaps many of the students, must have about madness.”

I will begin by giving a conventional definition of mental health or normality in a human being. Normal is someone who conforms to certain pre-established social norms. The definitions of mental health proposed by experts generally arrive at the notion of conformism.

Conformism, defined sociologically, is the individual attitude that corresponds to the highest degree of social adaptation and constitutes its most common form. It is the opposite of rebellion. It is also true that there is a great gap between the effort and ideas of the rebel and those of the conformist. There are two types of conformists: those who have their own ideas and those who lack them.

The one who has them and fights once, and is defeated in his attempt, lacks the will required to fight again and ends up conforming: that is the first type of conformist. The second has no ideas to carry out rebellions, and even if he had the necessary will to fight, it would be of no use to him. He simply accepts what is established because he is unaware of the possibility of proposing alternatives, which could even be better.

Meanwhile, being a rebel means fighting to establish a criterion that someone, an unruly person, thinks could be better, fairer, more equitable, more correct.

There are two types of rebels: the verbose and the silent. An example of the former is the political leader who emerges from nowhere with his reforming ideas expressed in the form of promises. An example of the silent rebels are some married women who have the virtue of pretending to accept what they are told and in reality do what they feel like.

The conformist is not born, they are made. From birth, “conformist” people are raised in the current of progressively admitting, registering and then acting on the things that their parents thought, felt and later taught them as “correct.” Along with this, the social role, “instrumental masculine” or “expressive feminine” is learned.

If everything goes well in the family and at school, the individual reaches the point of the identity crisis of adolescence, when he takes stock of everything that has conditioned him up to that point, of everything with which he has been stuffed. Then he projects himself an “independent” future, but necessarily reduces it to what is conventionally accepted.

From then on, he lives forty or fifty years in that same state of conformity, although through a process of accretion he becomes more “experienced,” more “prudent,” he says he knows what is “best” for him and for most people. He lives in this way in social approval and then dies. He is known, little remembered and quickly forgotten. This is the tedious life of those socially considered “mentally healthy.”

To put it another way: from the womb, we are placed at birth in the family box, from which we advance to the school box, after almost twelve years in it, we are so accustomed to being pigeonholed, that from then on, due to lack of imagination, we continue this comical situation by erecting our own box, until finally we are put in the coffin.

The rebel, the one they call crazy for his ideas, is locked up because he tells too many truths, which no one wants to hear, and they lock him up also because they are jealous of seeing him so intelligent and out of the ordinary, because I tell you something: no satisfied man has invented anything, has revolutionized anything.

Thank you.