From Mad in Italy: While the concept of “schizophrenia” still remains a mystery, there is no denying how difficult it is to live with it, not so much for the disease itself, but for how everyone looks at you with different eyes once you have an obvious psychotic episode. Ordinary people tend to leave you alone, and even those you thought were your friends disappear, leaving you with the stigma of “insane” once you come to your senses. But what is madness, if not an extreme attempt to escape from a deeply insane reality, to embrace one that is equally alienating?
Read article in Italian here, or translated into English here.
I am so glad you are free from the psychiatric system–my late husband worked on the problem of “schizophrenia” and “mental illness” for 40 years. (I am writing an essay.) You might be interested in the work of Dutch philosopher (and former psychiatric patient) Wouter Kusters who is attempting to see “madness” from a non medical view. I am reading his latest book, “A Philosophy of Madness”.
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A writer once observed that in any big city it was possible to see old men talking to themselves in public, but not to see young men talking to themselves in public.
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