Just Finished Reading: Madness – A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Scull (FP: 2011)

It would appear that madness of all things is rather difficult to define. Thinking about it a bit more I suppose it makes perfect sense – since sanity appears to be equally difficult to pin down. In some ways madness is one of those ‘we know it when we see it’ sort of things but as with most ‘common sense’ rule-of-thumb definitions it really doesn’t help much.

Of course the origins and cures for madness in all its forms have been debated and struggled with since Ancient times. Most of the names for the conditions we all know – and some of us have experienced – are either Greek or Latin. In those days the mad tended to be housed in ‘the community’ or exiled if they were considered too mad to be safe. Madness was seen as an affliction of the gods – for good or evil. Much later in the 16^th and 17^th centuries European civilisation began the big lock-up in such famous ‘hospitals’ as Bedlam. No real attempt was made in these imitations and intimations of Hell to understand much less cure people of whatever ailed them. Indeed such places operated as a form of entertainment and morality tale for the rich and shameless. Only with the 19^th and especially the 20^th centuries was any concerted attempt to systematically and scientifically understand exactly what was going on, what had gone wrong and what could be done about it. Inevitably the early attempts were crude involving various forms of shock treatment to bounce people back to normal. The surprising thing was that sometimes it actually seemed to work.

Inevitably I suppose there emerged two competing philosophies which attempted to explain madness – the psychological and the physical. The psychological was exemplified by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts such as Freud. At first this seemed to hold out great promise but, after decades of trying didn’t really seem to solve very much at all. Such very public failure allowed the pharmacologists to try their various chemical solutions which, again at first, seemed to promise so much and ultimately to deliver so little. Neither ‘side’ of course has yet to admit defeat and both have promised that a breakthrough is just around the corner or that they simply need more time.

At the core of the whole problem is the seeming inability to get to grips with the thing itself. Madness seems as elusive as ever. We can, to one extent or another, control it or supress it. But ultimately we have yet to understand it. Scull’s book is interesting in that it does not propose trite answers to difficult problems. It looks at the problem head on and says something that the professionals seem either unable or unwilling to confront – the fact that we don’t yet (and have really never) actually understood what we’ve tried to deal with and that it’s about time we started. Recommended for anyone interested in this equally fascinating and frightening subject.