Dude That's Insane!

It’s common for words which mean one thing to be used so often that they become a cliché, soon losing their essence. Take for example the word 'insane'. If a friend does something really fun and is telling you about it, you can be sure (even more so nowadays) to hear him say ‘insane’, AT LEAST ONCE.  In our daily conversations, we often use this word as an adjective for something shocking, amazing, or outrageous. This colloquial definition of the word and its wide use has sort of lead to an overshadowing of the real, formal definition of the word, which is: “in a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behaviour, or social interaction; seriously mentally ill”.

Every society considers some of its members insane. However, this label of insanity usually stems from society’s failure to understand a person’s behaviour. For example, a gruesome murder arising out of envy, quarrels or vengeance are usually not linked to madness, but when a murder occurs without any socially recognisable motive being found, it usually results in the person being called mad. To cite a more recognizable example, would you consider the highly obsessive behaviour of Monica or Phoebe’s talking to imaginary friends, from the TV show F.R.I.E.N.D.S. as insane? No, right? I thought so. But you wouldn’t waste a second to label the Joker insane (when in fact, he actually made a LOT of sense on many occasions).

There are numerous books and guidelines used to determine if a person is insane, but not a single line of text to classify someone as being sane. Different textbooks and legal systems define the word differently, in the same way that different individuals define what is sane and what is not for them.

Most times, it seems as though the relationship between insanity and sanity is like that between heat and cold. Cold is commonly said to be the mere absence of heat. So must it be construed then, that insanity is the mere absence of sanity?

Countless elaborate textbooks and complete treatises exist, that describe various psychological disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorder, depression, insomnia, and paedophilia, to name a few. All of these are considered to be examples of insanity, varying in intensity from problem to problem, and person to person. It is fascinating how much psychologists have, over the years, studied various forms of insanity. There are over 300 major psychological disorders, right from bipolar disorder to depression, bulimia to a mortal fear of light, psychopathy (read: Sherlock Holmes and Dexter) to a very strange one called the Munchausen’s Syndrome, in which the affected person feigns illness to gain sympathy or attention. What’s even more interesting is that a startling number of these forms of insanity are connected to sex or sexual health. For example, there are as many as six different forms of paedophilia!

It seems that mental health experts and psychiatrists are content to arrive at their diagnosis by eliminating possible problems and if they run out of options, declaring the person sane. This is worth mulling over because if ‘sanity’ is a diagnosis of exclusion, it makes for a stellar topic for debate. It is ripe for discussion and dissection. This is an interesting conundrum where there are literally hundreds of ways to determine if a person is insane, but no way to determine whether a person is sane.

Given that sanity is not precisely defined by psychology, it is worth considering whether it actually exists. Definitions of insanity can be wide and varied depending on various jurisdictions (while declaring a person criminally insane) or when describing a person with abnormal behavioural patterns.  Moreover, only a tiny fraction of behaviours associated with insanity lead to crimes.

The line separating insanity from sanity is for individuals to draw and thereupon decide what lies where. The lack of any credible source for distinguishing between sanity and insanity might just be psychology’s way of telling us that we are all a little sane and a bit insane, that complete sanity doesn’t exist. Now that’s a disturbing thought….