I write this piece at my desk in Pune home office, in the winter month of December, on the last day of the year 2023. Normally, the winter yanks me down but here am I, maddeningly and furiously churning my mind and undertaking the pursuit of writing the memoir and biography of the Madness in all nuances across the civilizations as it has presented in all its might and persisted and survived it’s recent contra normal. The comprehensiveness with which I propose to cover the entire gamut of the subject matter to the best of my knowledge has not covered by any Indian . I pray that when I falter Charak, Sushrut and Hippocrates, lend me a helping hand.

Why Write about Madness and Civilization

But why write about Madness and why Madness and civilization? Why someone will be or should be interested in such a boring and outcaste subject?

Well all I say that, for the last twenty five years, I have been obsessed with the subject matter of Madness, Madness in Civilization, lunacy and insanity, mad houses, lunatic asylum, history of mad doctors, mind fixers, alienists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, therapists of all hues and the history of psychiatry as they have evolved. It has been rather extraordinary serious pursuit of peeping inside the black-hole and trying to know the unknown and unknowable even if I stumble and fail.

And in the process, I have soaked in all the knowledge treasures that I could harness, lay my hands on and one Sunday morning, that also happens to be the last day of the year 2023, I have decided to give it all back- spill out what all I have learnt and continue to learn bit by bit if not one piece a day then at least two pieces a week.I am neither the first person in the world nor the last in the world to embark on this Odyssey nor and carry the debt of all the scientists, researchers and lay men and women who have attempted to explore this unfathomable black hole.

The Himalayan Expedition

Nonetheless, I am painfully aware that the misadventure that I have embarked upon is humungous and unattainable, rather akin to trying to climb the Mount Everest, one legged, without oxygen, without the help of the Nepalese coolies to share the load and more critically without a sherpa as a path finder.

Why do I say so?

Because the subject matter that I have chosen to to unravel and narrate is complex and gigantic. The philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, politics, pharmacology, genetics and politics of the madness and the study of the duality of mind and body is an alien subject in today’s India. Equally compelling is the task of decoding the medical profession ( the field of psychiatry ) that seeks to treat or ameliorate madness or at the best provide palliative care to mad men and women – some times successfully, but more often without much luck. In my three decades dalliance with psychiatrists ala mad doctors (my apology to the profession for choosing the name ) , often I have found that the jugalbandi is such that mad doctors are as clueless about the madness as madmen and mad women

The Fifth Caste

Before I move forward, I take a brief contextual detour-the specific context of the Indian Nation. On November 30, 2023 in a televised address the Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined his version of India’s new four varnas, the four castes- the poor, the youth, women, and farmers. I say with all the humility and conviction at my command that there is a fifth Indian caste. I call them “Mad”.

And what an outcaste caste it is. It cuts across all caste, class, gender and religion. It is also the most marginalized caste, shunned by all, ignored, feared, discriminated, stigmatised and profiled.

Mad men, women, boys, girls and transgenders are also non-citizens, those seriously mad are ostracized by the Constitution of India, Representation of People Act, Marriage Acts of all hues and more than 1000 other Indian statutes.

Well I will return to the subject matter of the Mad in Indian Civilization and Mad in India that is Bharat later in future pieces

In this inaugural piece, I just provide a trailer of the story behind the two words- Normal and Madness, the ones around which this series will be weaved together

Normalis ala Normal

Before I come to Madness per se, let me introduce its contra, the Normal.

What Normal Means ? And who are normal?

Normal latin normalis, is defined by the Oxford dictionary as “typical, usual, standard or ordinary; what you would expect perfectly. Contrary to the popular belief, the etymology and usage of the word normal ( both noun and adjective) is relatively new. As per the Oxford dictionary, the earliest evidence of the usage of the word normal is found from 1598, in the writing of one A. M. Also, intriguingly, as per Oxford notations,it is not a very-frequently used word-about 100 occurrences per million words in modern written English. And till 1810 the usage of the word “normal” was relatively very rare.

Why then I am obsessed with normal?

I will tell the reason a bit later, but suffices to say here that my connotation of normal is to do with the health, more particularly those with poor mental health who in my lexicon are considered mad

And talking about the health, I am reminded of the famous saying of the English philosopher Aldous Huxley-

“Medical research has made such enormous advances that there are hardly enough healthy people left”.

And when it comes to the normal as contrasted with the madness, taking cue from Huxley, I begin with injecting a controversial word “Saving Normal”. In an extraordinary work of science, art and literature, an author not so well known to a normal Indiann, defined the saving normal, on the cover page of his book with the same name as –

“saving nor.mal- an insider’s revolt against out of control psychiatric diagnosis, DSM 5 , big pharma and the medicalization of normal life”

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Allen Frances M.D. the author of the above book is neither a rogue nor a renegade, instead he is noted American Psychiatrist, the Professor and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, . He had played a major role in the framing of DSM III, DSM III-TR and was the Chair of DSM-IV Taskforce. When he wrote Saving Normal in 2013, DSM -5 was just coming out of the closet and as I write this piece, 1050 pages thick volume of DSM -5-TR (2022) is staring me at my face sitting at my desk. And as someone, who has internalised every volume of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, including DSM -5-TR, I am afraid , no normal person is left on the Planet Earth such has been the diagnostic inflation of diagnosing madness in the zeal to medicalize the small and not so small aberration and disturbances of reason, cognition, behaviour and emotion of us humans. This statement should not be taken as negation of the fact that psychiatrists treat and at least ameliorate the conditions of many mad men and women if not altogether cure them.

Madness

Having seen the crisis, in which the normal has landed itself over last few decades, or say past one century, it is time now to turn to madness perse. And what better way than to begin with two famous quotes- One, Isaac Newton once said famously “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people”. And two, a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll : Alice: “But i don’t want to go mad people.” Chesire Cat “Oh, you can’t help it, we’re all mad here”.

What is madness but ?

And who are mad people from whom society must be protected ?

And why mad, idiots, insane and lunatics are proscribed under the Constitution of India and various statutes from their basic human rights, including the most fundamental right of -adult suffrage. Their lot is no better in other nations including the developed North.

Madness brings in its train too many questions? Too few answers?

I am entering a Chakravyuh where i neither know the pathway to go inside nor how to exit. Enter i still with full might.

Madness Defined

Defining madness first – Oxford dictionary defines the word madness, a noun, as the state of being mad, insane, idiot, lunatic and senseless folly. Well these words have been used with impunity through the millennium.

In the prehistoric times, madness got described and inscribed in every ancient society. Saul the first king of Isrealities and Nebuchadnezzar the mighty king of Babylon both got declared mad. There existed classical link between madness and Gods who meted madness as punishment in ancient Greek, Christian and Hinduism and later in Islam. The compact of Madness with ancient societies has been so deep and complex that few pieces of this series will be specifically devoted to it

There is enough evidence that word madness entered literature and language much before it’s contra normal. Every religious book across religions has its own way of describing madness. Even as per the Oxford dictionary the word madness was used first in 1000 AD more than 500 AD before the word normal emerged. The earliest entry in Oxford English Dictionary is around 1384 in Bible

Complexity Galore

Writing about Madness and Civilization is exceedingly complex topic. Like mad people the word madness is also ostracized- used only 6 times in one million English words . Contrary to the word normal which was rarely used before 1800, the word madness got maximum currency in 1700s after which it’s usage has slowly tapered down

Moving beyond madness perse writing about the history of Lunatic Asylums, Asylum Reforms, Madness before psychiatry, history of psychiatry in all its

nuances along with that psychologists, psychoanalysts and therapists, institutionalization and deinstitutionalization, biological and neurological and genetic psychiatry is all going to be unnerving.

Worse, I am no scientist nor do i pretend to be one.

Still i begin on an expedition of which there is no begining and there will be no happy ending. Still i try.

There is lot more coming in this series

It will be objective, evidence based narrative which to the best of my knowledge no Indian has attempted to write in its entirety. While you wait for the narrative to unfold let me end the volume 1 with the following poignant description of Madness-

Quote “Madness reminds us of how tenous our own hold over reality may prove to be, It challenges our very sense of what it means to be human. Madness continues to tease and bewilder us, to frighten and fascinate, to challenges us to probe its ambiguities and trepidations. Reason and ureason coexist uneasily in our everyday lives, their boundaries fraught and contested. And like every soceity before it, the twenty first century world finds its effort to confront and solve the problems posed by serious forms of mental disturbance largely unavailing and counterproductive” Unqote -Andrew Skull in Psychiatry and its Disontents