this March, I only trust the mad
It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
We’re all mad here.
In a mad world, only the mad are sane.
There are no shortage of quips and quotations about madness and insanity. Personally, I am quite interested in the concept and construct of hysteria, and what it means from a feminist and an historical perspective to construct ideas of in/sanity.
Last year, my Ophelia collection was inspired by the final appearance on stage by the character Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. That scene is often called “Ophelia’s Madness.” As I’ve said when I talk about the play, that scene in particular, and when I wrote my artist statement for the collection, I don’t believe Ophelia to be mad at all. I think she is grief-stricken, I think she is filled with rage and righteous indignation for all that she loves having been ripped away from her. I think she is the most sane, most honest person on the stage. And for that she is called mad.
“Mental health” is invoked to discredit extreme emotional responses by marginalized and oppressed peoples. Words like crazy and insane are peppered through our conversations and pervade our unconscious bias with ableism. “Prolonged grief disorder” was added to the DSM V during the middle of the COVID pandemic, while disabled and chronically ill people were consistently advocating for stronger measures and simultaneously grieving the losses of their friends and family, their health and autonomy, and watching mass death and mass disability unfold daily across the country.
While we as disabled folks feel intense grief or rage as a right and proper response to a catastrophic trauma, the Powers That Be categorize our honest and sane response as madness, illness, or disorder.
Likewise, resistance to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza, to the ongoing genocides and displacement of the people of Sudan and the Congo, is framed by media and governing powers as criminal or mentally unsound.
“Wellness” and “adjustment” to the present state of the world — be it war, genocide, the housing crisis, climate catastrophe — seems like madness to me. Award shows and Super Bowls and March Madness brackets feel like madness to me.
My upper level religion professor in university ended every class meeting by saying “Stay sane out there.” My friend Peter and I (who met in university) used to exchange this farewell. We don’t anymore. I have reached the point where I only trust the mad, whose madness comes from a deep well of love and grief for the burning world.
