I've been sectioned twice: incarcerated. Held in a locked hospital ward against my will. I'm still trying to make sense of it, to understand how I responded. At some moments I was docile and accepting; at others, defiant and resistant.
The first time it happened I felt overwhelmed with fear of the hospital staff, and of their interference in my life. At one point I was tackled to the ground and hauled into custody by a hospital warden. At another point I was forcibly injected with anti-psychotic medication. Did they not understand how terrifying it is, to have one's body transgressed? Eventually the drugs did their work: obedience and compliance followed. I became a Good Patient. I learned quickly that I must keep my real thoughts to myself, and play along with the power dynamics. And only by doing so did I convince them that I had obtained the grand prize: insight. (For those unfamiliar with the term: insight refers to “the ability to recognize one's own mental illness.” - Wikipedia. Of course, it's a catch-22, when denial of mental illness is categorised as a symptom! Damned if you do and damned if you don't.)
But the second time I was hospitalised, I went willingly, obligingly. In that case, I was held in a locked cell by myself with only a mattress on the floor, for what felt like hours, before I was transferred to the inpatients' ward. Despite the indignity of this type of reception, I went along with it all without a fuss. Again, compliance and cooperativity was the way out. When the discharge panel met with my family, I think I just kept my mouth shut. Even though I disagreed vehemently with the interpretation of my experiences as being symptomatic of illness, I kept quiet and passively let them discuss me. I needed to be set free and this was the way to do it.
I am musing about these experiences in hindsight, as it's now been several years since these things happened. All this time I've been taking my medication and staying on the right side of the hospital wall. But at the end of the day, I recognise that what happened to me was an assault upon my person. It was a condemnation of my state of mind and state of being, and ultimately a violation of my human rights.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not nursing a grievance. I've lived a comfortable and privileged life, with so much support and love and freedom. These experiences of mine were blips; minor setbacks compared to the horrors some people endure regularly and without respite. My family love me and didn't understand how else to deal with what had happened to me, when I went mad. They didn't have the tools or the knowledge or the inclination to question authority, there was no alternative system in place to help. They just wanted me to be ok. And I love them for that.
I've been thinking about incarceration again because of the plight being suffered by one Richard Saville-Smith – a mad scholar whose recently published Acute Religious Experiences is “an exploration of extraordinary/anomalous/extreme states of consciousness.” Richard is currently incarcerated in a mental hospital in Inverness. I don't know the particulars of his dilemma, only that he is live tweeting his experience (Twitter handle @DrAnamorphosis ) I am therefore reminded of my own hospitalisations, and the turmoil they caused. And I am writing this post out of solidarity, a sense of comradery with another mad person who is being pathologised against his will.
Only two weeks ago, I listened to Richard give a brilliant talk at the Too Mad To Be True conference that was held by the Dutch organisation Stichting Psychiatrie en Filosofie (Foundation of Psychiatry and Philosophy). It was a wise and extremely witty piece, a highlight of the conference. Here is the programme abstract:
Richard Saville-Smith – Resisting the ambivalent collapse from certainty to despair
“I am the way, the truth and the light” (Jesus)
“It’s me, I, I’m the problem, it’s me” (Taylor Swift)
The distance between these two subjective positions is vast. But it is possible to imagine them being held by the same person at different times. It is the process of ambivalent transition which interests me, particularly how mad subjects may invest in resisting the collapse, from the excessive position to the deficit position, by invoking strategies for going higher. That the intentionality of the subject is at work in this process is found in the fact that so many ‘psychotics’ are detained rather than voluntarily seek psychiatric assistance. In the West this relationship, between the mad subject and the sane medical establishment, has become entrenched as one of alienation precisely because the threat of being returned to normal can readily be perceived as a threat to the powerful certainty of madness. Describing this certainty as delusional is no more than a deflationary tactic because in spite of Western philosophy Pontius Pilate’s question ‘what is truth?’ remains as slippery now as when first spoken. Labelling of the other’s truth delusional may lack self-reflexivity about the constructed nature of the accuser’s reality, the presuppositions of which may also be subject to a legitimate mad critique. Where social acceptance becomes the criteria for judging normal, mad dissent may be better understood as resistance to orthodoxy rather than being merely wrong. In this presentation, I am more interested in Jesus than Taylor Swift. Jesus is an effective case study, not only because his story is better known than the case studies of psychiatry, but also because his story predates psychiatry, rendering it anachronistic. My interest in the Jesus story is in how it demonstrates both the need and the capacity to go higher. As the realization that the public ministry of proclaiming the good news to individual is like emptying the sea with a bucket, the transfiguration represents a radical gear change in which systemic change is perceived as possible through an institutionally sanctioned death. From this perspective the role of cultural context in making this idea both plausible and possible can be clarified as Jesus plays the authorities to secure his ends. This case study puts me in a position to refocus on the contemporary fact that, according to the not very good research available, 25% of those detained in the secure units of Western psychiatry articulate their experience in religious terms. This has consequences for any renewal of phenomenological psychopathology. If the metaphysical and, more importantly, epistemological consequences of being driven by the hand of God are un-understandable, however much epoché is undertaken, the motives of the individual to do their duty, maintain their certainty and resist being collapsed into the sad world of the anti-hero in Taylor Swift’s lyric will inevitably be misunderstood.
Richard Saville-Smith’s three careers began with and were punctuated by madness. After seeking out the low risk routines of business management in London, followed by the high risk atmosphere of a campaigning public relations firm in Edinburgh, Richard found academia to be a goldilocks playground where ideas have consequences but the stress is less. With a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and based on the Isle of Skye, Richard now seeks to persuade philosophers and scientists to engage more effectively with religious studies as an arena of common interest, particularly in the role of mad consciousness and experience within the human story. His first monograph Acute Religious Experiences: Madness, Psychosis and Religious Studies was published by Bloomsbury Academic in March 2023.
Richard is now biding his time in the Heavenly Garden of Eternal Patience. You can send messages of support to him at DrAnamorphosis@gmail.com.
Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash
I’m sitting here feeling into the enormity of your encounters with incarceration. Even when, as you say, you have also been well loved and are mostly situated on the outside of hospital walls, I imagine there is still so much digestion needed of these experiences. Hopefully writing will help and your voice feels very clear and warm. I’m glad you’re including yourself.
And I’m glad you (and I) live at a time when mad voices can ravel with other discourses to make a richer knottier fabric. I guess there is some unravelling going on at the same time of the standard medical views? I’m not sure what kind of cloth we are making but it will be alive.
Thank you for your solidarity 🙏 it is together that we make the change! I have the advantage of coming from a long genealogy of madness. This makes it much easier to resist the psychiatric demand that they control the definition and parameters of NORMAL