From: Dennis Budd <nitewing@ku.edu>
Date: Fri Nov 22, 2002 9:22 pm
Subject: Re: [no-list] Madness
On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Yyy wrote:
> I disagree strongly.
>
> 1) "Madness" is also the preferred term of Dr. Torrey. IMHO this
> term is one of the most pejorative we could use in "public"
> descriptions of ourselves and is exclusively used in his latest book
> "The Invisible Plague" which purports to prove an increase in
> violent mental illness since 1750. Personally I would prefer to
> use the term "visionary", which is what I believe this not only
> describes this effort we undertaking better to ourselves, but will
> certainly be more acceptable to the general public. Leave "madness"
> in the centuries in which it belongs.
You could get strong reactions on this one.
We don't want the term "madness" or "mad people" in our name, but
otherwise I couldn't disagree with you more.
Madness is a term that needs to be reclaimed. It's not simply the
*term* that people don't respect, it's the entire *phenomenon* that it
represents that people don't respect as basic *human* experience,
whatever weasel word people may use to "respectfully" describe it.
I spent almost a year of my youth having "fallen off the edge of the
earth". There are no words that convey the "edge", the "brokenness",
the out-of-kilter quality of that experience. Madness is a word that
has a bite, that begins to convey some of that. What I went through
during that year was not visionary. It was pure horror. Having come
out of it and gone through healing, it has since given me vision I
would not have had in any other way. But not then.
It is my strong feeling that these kinds of experiences need to
respected as a basic part of human experience and the human condition
and not dismissed, not devalued, not looked at only as "illness", not
labelled away.
Fuller Torrey very forcefully uses the terms "treatment", "caring",
and "compassion" as well, twisting them totally out of what they would
really be if they were applied to us in a true manner. Yes madness is
a term that has a lot of baggage, but it's only one of many terms that
Torrey uses to label our experiences away, many of which carry
entirely different kinds of "baggage". It's what Torrey uses those
words to mean that needs to be challenged.
Dennis