Mad, From Within and Beyond

Insanity is a state of the mind and it’s nothing more or anything less. At least, I think, you think and psychiatric patients think- at their own level. When people behave in certain unusual ways, we associate their behaviours to a state of health, emotional state or life experiences. But on the face of it, the behaviour of a person who seems to have lost it mentally is very similar to that found in persons with strange behaviours. In fact, people are only described as mad based on the degree of their derailment from what we term norm or the ordinarily expected behaviour. If this is the case, then we might as well say that all of us have a degree of latent madness.

Can we say that this white man mimicking local traders is mad?

It is uncommon to find a mad baby. While I have not made adequate findings as to whether infants run mad let alone unearth the causes, I am certain that babies too can have mental derailment. I strongly believe they could be born with it. It is only difficult to recognize or diagnose an infant’s lunacy due to the fact that they are yet to form behavioural identity. Every Day Health alleged in one of its Blog posts of February 2011 that the American Psychological Association affirmed the foregoing fact. In my search for the original reference, I found it to be true here.

Can we say that sane youths dressed in this manner for fun are partially lunatic?

When infants come out of their mothers, it is naturally expected that they find the environment strange and consequently react. The separation from a warm environment to a new one in an independent state is a considerable ordeal. Many of us passed through that stage but we can hardly remember. However, if we imagined ourselves, isolated from earth in another planet containing millions of aliens having similar but more gigantic physiques, we would react someway. This is a close illustration of what infants undergo. In a bid to ensure that babies respond to this change in environment, maternity nurses and midwives usually influence a little measure of sensation or pain to ascertain their aliveness and ability to perceive pain. In his interesting self-help book titled, Where There Is No Doctor, David Werner accurately explains that act. Yet, there are several cases. Many of which have not been through the pipeline of scholastic archive. For example, where the new-born child does not cry and yet breathes, could it be assumed that such a child is mentally imbalanced or nervously disadvantaged?

To be continued...