The other day I was dismayed to come across this article in the Guardian, exploring the features of a tragic case of knife crime that took place in Nottingham in June 2023. I often avoid the news media, and miss headlines and events that have taken place – so this was the first I had heard of it. Or perhaps I did hear of it at the time, but it washed over me as just yet another example of frenzied violence boiling over into the streets, in our pressure-cooker world.
A voice-hearing man named Valdo Calocane slipped through the net of mental health services, killing three people and injuring three others. He had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and had evaded services and anti-psychotic medication for years, when the voices urged him to kill.
The papers all printed his arrest photo: a burly, bearded black man starting blank-eyed into the camera. Here is a monster, they suggested; here is the face you should fear. My heart sank, because this tragedy encompasses more than the victims of his knife attack, more than their bereaved, tormented friends and families, more than the community that grieves and seeks justice. This tragedy also touches the mad, all of us, because it so baldly reinforces stereotypes about psychosis.
Violence connected to psychosis is a complex subject, often intertwined with other factors such as homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and childhood trauma. Psychotic individuals are more likely to be victimised than to perpetrate crimes. And psychotic individuals commit far less crime than non-psychotic individuals. At the end of the day, a paranoid killing spree is a rare occurrence. That doesn't take away the horror and tragedy of this case. But it does add a context that is omitted in the mass media narrative which spotlights the knife-wielding maniac run amok.
Yet how do I account for this type of event, in my earnest and admittedly speculative posts about madreality as a legitimate and perhaps even sacred state of mind? Surely I'm not suggesting that we should embrace states of mind that lead to such evil? And yes, the murder of innocent people is an evil event. (Note that this is different than saying that the perpetrator is an evil person.)
Well here's where my pondering has led me: good and evil co-exist. Not either/or. Both/and. Not side by side: but rather two sides of the same coin, different aspects of the same phenomena. When we try to pin good and evil down as discrete, binary forces that are pitted against one another, we distort the abstract and ineffible nature of madreality.
What is paranoia, other than an extreme form of fear? And what is violence, other than a desperate response to fear? Hearing voices that urge one to stab other people presents us with a very frightening, threatening scenario that plays on our fears of pain and loss. Yet objectively: why do we not then welcome the voices which urge love and compassion? Because voice-hearers will tell you: not all voices are negative. If hearing voices is a way of tapping into our psyches, a way that language is used to touch what is beyond our ken, then how can it be dismissed as a symptom of illness?
I don't write this to excuse what happened in Nottingham. I just wonder if our social reactions and our framings of this are limited by our weddedness to consensus reality. I wonder what we would make of Valdo Calocane if we allowed our imaginations to step into madreality?
Photo by Carly Hendrickson on Unsplash