What does it feel like to go insane?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What does it feel like to loose your mind? I understand that the definition is open to interpretation, but I am interested in hearing your story no matter how you define it whether it be fever delirium, drug tripping, schizophrenia, etc. as long as it is interesting.

I assume, of course, that anyone responding has since recovered from their unbalanced state enough to provide a lucid account, or is a reliable witness of another’s suffering.

I have often wondered about what sanity is (reading Lovecraft didn’t help matters), but more importantly what sanity means about the nature of reality. As I see it the real trouble in trying to understand reality is that reality can never go wrong. Most of what we have learned (especially in the field of medicine and the mind) is when we notice something having gone wrong or otherwise behaving abnormally. As far as I can figure, the closest we can get to reality going wrong is only when our most fundamental perceptions of it go wrong, only then can you get something to compare and contrast to.

I should emphasize that I reject the pseudo-mystical beliefs that great truths are revealed through these lapses into madness. Rather, great lies are the product, but by analyzing these lies we can (hopefully) gain a greater understanding of truth.

2

Judging from my own experiences, each situation and each kind of delerium or madness would be different.

The one time that I think I had an actual psychotic episode, I had been given the wrong medication for a misdiagnosis of what was later determined to be depression. I lived in a college dorm. The first thing that I noticed was that I had trouble sitting still. Walking around or lying down didn’t relieve the problem either. Then I could not stay still. I just had this irresistible urge to move, only moving did not cure the urge.

Within a few hours I had trouble walking. I was very shaky on my feet. But I did walk across the street to Vanderbilt emergency room. There I went through some of the worst of it in a room alone waiting to see a doctor. My mind was sort of in a rage. I thought that I was going to explode literally. I knew that people weren’t supposed to explode, but I didn’t think that the human body could contain the kind of anguish – mental and physical – that I was feeling. I was a sort of silent scream. I was the scream itself. It was the worst pain I’ve ever known. Passing a kidney stone pales in comparison. Finally, someone came for me.

When I tried to talk, the words would sometimes get jumbled up and I felt like I had no strength to get them out sensibly. I managed to convey that I couldn’t be still and probably needed psychiatric help. The doctor said their mental health ward was full and all that remained was for them to send me to the state hospital.

Normally, that would discourage most people. I asked them how I could get there. They said they could have the police take me. I told them to call the police for me. I tried to call my parents to let them know what was going on, but I couldn’t make much sense to them.

The police came and I got in the back of the car and lay down. I remember very little about the trip. I had on an emerald green coat. I will never wear that color again. We cut across town on Chestnut Street which went on and on forever. Sometimes my husband drives down that street and I get sick in the pit of my stomach.

When we got to the hospital, the floor was black and white and there was an Admissions Deak. The police left me there. Someone took me into a room where a woman sat behind a desk. She was talking on the phone. I lay down on a sofa and began to get very aggitated and sat up again. I started to chant, “Get off the phone. Get off the phone. Get off the phone.” Those words came out okay. I think I was rocking back and forth.

She did get off the phone. She was a doctor and she asked me who I was and why I was there. I told her my story and said that I wanted to be admitted. She gave me a thorazine and told me to go back to the dorm and take it and get some sleep. I was really scared to do that – to go back to where I started. But I did. Someone called the police, I think, and they took me back.

I took the pill and slept for 23 and a half hours. I remember getting up to go to the bathroom one time and having to push myself out of the bottom of the bathtub after falling in. I also came to in the floor near the bed with my panties still around my ankles. Another time I answered the phone and it was my mother. I just said, “Can’t talk,” and hung up. To the best of my knowledge, those were the only times I was conscious.

After almost a day of sleep, I returned to a reasonably normal state.

Fever delerium and reactions to synthetic heroin and other pain medications were pleasant. The high fever made me hallucinate: butterflies playing football, a World Series baseball game became my high school students playing football. I even sat up in bed and sang our fight song. Pain medication made me love everyone and be grateful – which I think is the natural state of man when unincumbered with life’s burdens.

For a while I was taking some medication which caused me to have hallucinations while I was sleeping. I always woke up and saw animals – a crow, a bear and a swarm of bees. I remember that I knew that the medicine was causing it and I could say that aloud, but I still begged not to be made to look at that crow.

3

A long journey, begun with purpose, and spite. Small steps, each seeming reasonable, each one only slightly deflected from the common path. The process is controlled, reversed, and one finds that holding a view removed from the common one gives a sharp insight. Constant examination of the state of one’s own motives brings a sharp awareness of other peoples nature. When mistakes are found, they become new insights. Being wrong is a matter of consensus.

The journey becomes a habit. The path no longer goes to the places where others travel. It becomes lonely, but very pleasing in a dark way. Power comes from understanding how very little difference there is between understanding how much power is an illusion, and how powerful illusion is. Knowing that you are hiding from what you fear makes it easy to understand the fears that other people have. What do they hide from? If you master that, they will defer to you, fear you.

The signs along the road are more restricting than walls. Ignore the signs. Go where you wish, and you have more freedom. Being lost is only a desire to be in the same place as everyone else. Wanting the same as others want means you must do what others do. So seek a different type of wanting. It’s all just definition.

One day, you realize that you do not know the way back. The fear is enough to make rejecting the definition that makes you lost the only reasonable choice. Better to just follow no path, than to be really lost. The things that you do to be unusual to others are not the things they find unusual. It’s the things you do because they seem reasonable that set you apart. Lonely is now a way of life, a suit of armor, and a familiar landscape. It doesn’t hurt much.

The dark moments come and go. The bright places are vivid, and remembering them is seductive. Going back would be very hard, and it would hurt a lot. Better to go adrift, than to drown. How much difference is there, really? But no one can love you, if they cannot ever know who you really are. Lonely is the dark place, and living in the darkness is no different than fleeing from it. How sad is that?

You’ll need help. Taking it will be hard too.

Tris

P. S. Take your meds. Yeah, they suck. Take them anyway.

4

I’ve been on plenty of drug trips where I felt incredibly isolated and paranoid. My distrust of others was extremely high (adding in the illegal aspect of illegal drugs makes it understandable that one may feel this way… I was always worried about someone “catching” me tripping and turning me into police, or just the police themselves seeing me)

So although I think of myself only as very mildly crazy today, I can imagine how someone could be living in a constant state of isolation and paranoia as I experienced and be construed as “insane”.

5

I didn’t realize that there was a claim that great truths are revealed through lapses into madness. I agree with you. The brain is in too much disorder. I do believe, however, that there are times when the brain can become extra focused and is able to see things with great clarity and depth of understanding. Some might call this a “mystical” experience. Others might think of it as exposure to another level of reality.

There are people that have senses that I don’t have. Should I deny that it’s possible? For example, I have little, if any, depth perception. I don’t know what it is that I am missing and you can’t describe it to me in a way that will make me really understand. I also have no sense of direction except for “around.” But I accept that for others these things do exist.

I know that for a short time (fifteen minutes at the most), I had a sense or perception that I don’t have access to now. Others have had similar experiences and have come away with descriptions that are much like mine. And yet words fail to describe this experience adequately. Your rejection of the validity of these experiences or your labelling of them has no bearing on the truth. Considering how complex the brain is, I’m amazed that Dopers still dismiss possibilities so easily.

6

The trouble with discovering ‘truths’ or ‘enlightment’ in a deranged state is that by the nature of one’s mental state at the time, these discoveries will not be easy to put into words, and may seem alien when comfortably sane again. I had a fever when I was young where I had an overwhelming sense of what in hindsight seems like cell division - the conception of exponential proliferation at an infinitesimal scale was quite terrifying. Now, I haven’t gone on to become a biologist or anything useful like that, but I like to think that it gave me a sense of the enormity of the microscopic world - nothing tangible, but maybe helpful on a personal level.

7

Here ya go. Great read.

8

-Oops, You need to reconsider this point. Too easily you rejected the premises of your arguement.
Consider:
Van Gough: through ingestion of paint thinner saw a ‘better’ way of color.
Let me pose it to you this way:

If Hemingway had never touched alcohol, would you know his name today?

9

Well, once I was normal. Then I got this email from the SDMB

Moved to IMHO.

samclem GQ moderator

10

Did your hands feel just like two balloons?

11

My uncle is extremely, extremely psychotic (I mean, family members are often recipients of 20-minute answering machine messages in which he reports, among other things, people putting corpses in his cigarettes.) I think, based on what I have seen with him, there is no visible line between reality and insanity. He doesn’t notice the difference between what’s real and what he thinks is real. He’s been diagnosed for over 20 years now, and he still insists he’s not mentally ill and that people really are trying to kill him.

So I think, the TRUE answer to “What’s it like to go insane”? Is this.
You’re living your life out naturally…
One day someone comes by, sits you down in a room and says, “I’ve got some bad news. That guy you were talking to in the waiting room? Doesn’t exist. These memories you recall so fondly? Never happened. That time you almost died in the fire that started spontaneously in the corner of your bedroom? You didn’t really almost die… there was no fire.”
Nothing changes. Your reality is still your reality-- the people you talk to still exist, your memories are still cherished and true… the one, crucial difference is, people consistently keep telling you you’re crazy, even when you damn well know better.

It’s not a coincidence that the vast majority of schizophrenics don’t believe they are sick. Why wouldn’t you trust your own perceptions? Imagine that someone came to you one day, sat you down, and gently explained to you that your most cherished family members and your dog didn’t really exist. You’d surely trust your own perceptions over theirs, wouldn’t you? What if they kept coming back, kept insisting these people didn’t exist? What if they did this while your loved ones were sitting in the same damn room with you? You’d think THEY were the crazy ones, and once they started force-feeding you medications that ravaged your body, you’d come to believe they were persecuting you.

So I imagine that’s what going insane is like. Having someone come to you one day, sit you down, and explain to you your life is not real. And keep insisting. And keep insisting. And keep insisting…

12

Understanding things. Oh, you know, just like back when you were in grade school and first got the concept of logarithms or how mitosis works or, well, anything like that where there was a moment when you were being told stuff but didn’t get the purpose or gist of it and then it clicked into place for you? Except that you’re understanding things of Great Importance. To you, to everyone, to the species, to the fate of universes. Except that it’s awfully hard to distinguish the things your mind is using as placeholders or symbols for aspects of this new reality you’ve grasped from the realities themselves. Is splitting the atom “like” taking the first break shot in pool or billiards and making the array of billiard balls fly apart in all directions, or is that image actually “it” (“klack!”)? Is the tendency to package goods in plastic bubbles sealed in more pressed plastic a symbolic and metaphorical reflection of detachment and fear of contagion, or is that actually why they’ve packaged them in that fashion, and if detachment and fear of contagion is an unfortunate and reactive social state is it a good idea to start freeing products from those awful isolationist / fear-of-contagion plastic packages? Or is that silly, like associating a preference for white bread and refined white sugar with sterile segregationist world of the 1950s to the point that you think white bread itself is literally racist? You’re thinking all these new thoughts so fast you don’t have time to sort it all out, and so it all gets mixed up together in a hodgepodge of things you really understand and things that started out as metaphors and symbols and then got mixed up with the realities and then more erroneous conclusions were drawn from those things (Well, those people always eat the white bread, so they’re racist, so the other things they do that other people don’t do as often are therefore analogous to racism…)

You! Don’t get near me with your iceberg lettuce! You’ll infect me with your lettuce racism! You’re wet inside, don’t you know it?!? Back! I can throw pepper over my shoulder, you know!

13

There was a guy who would occasionally go to the gas station I worked at when I was in high school who had a disorder unlike I’d ever seen. He was absolutely terrified of germs. So much so that he would wait in his car in the corner of the parking lot until there was NOBODY around except myself. He would then creep up to the gas pump and step out of his car VERY carefully (tip toes and lots of nervous glances around) wearing a couple layers of plastic gloves and a face mask. If anyone would pull up he’d jump right back in his car and stay there. When he would pay he would take a bag containing the exact change and ask me to step back as far as I could then he would dart forward and toss it on the counter then leave… Using his elbow to open the door then running to his car and speeding off.

After a couple of his infrequent visits I talked to him for a few moments… asking him how is day was and what he thought of the weather. Eventually he warmed up a bit and came in once around closing to get gas. He talked to me a bit about gas prices, daylight savings, a couple other random things… then matter of factly said “You know I wasn’t always like this.”

I wasn’t sure what to say… I was talking to him just as I would anyone else and felt that acknowledging his disability even when he brought it up would divert the conversation in a direction that he’d feel uncomfortable… So I shrugged and said “oh?”

He told me back when he was young, even through all of college, he was entirely normal. He washed his hands a bit more than others and wouldn’t use public restrooms, but that was it. Then one day he woke up and things had changed. He said he knew it was irrational and that there was nothing for him to fear but that it didn’t matter. I talked to him once or twice more until one time when my boss came in and fake sneezed right next to him. The asshole… and I told him that. He slammed into the door hard enough to knock most people out before running blindly to his car. I never saw him again, but a letter to the editor by a friend of his a year or two later thanking an eye doctor for letting the man have an appointment after hours let me know he was still “ok”.

A sad story for me. I’ll never forget the guy… Mostly because of the sad look in his eyes when he said he knew his fear was irrational and extreme… but that he couldn’t stop.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling story… Just wanted to let you all know about someone who did know their “insanity” was not rational and could talk about it.

14

I lost my mind during minor surgury. They doped me up and when I woke I panicked. I didn’t know where I was or why and tried to run away, but slid all over the floor and cut myself. They rushed me and I screamed and screamed. This lasted for a few minutes, then I was calm but confused. And verrry sullen. When my family was called in it all came back to me.