The Invention of Sanity, Bauer, October 2014

The Invention of Sanity 

Robin Williams’s passing has affected everyone within our ‘sane’ society. As a result, maybe those Victorian definitions of sanity really need to be re-questioned - after all the Victorians invented ‘sanity’. I consider myself to be bonkers, but I know that’s only measured by what the rest of the world sees as sane. And let’s face it Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness until the 1970’s – after that date, I have no excuse.

“Williams had everything and he was just so… funny... but I suppose depression is an unknown disease….” 

Roll on the great morality debate as the world continues to pathologize Williams’s mental state. This misunderstanding tells us more about the ignorance surrounding issues of ‘other’ mental states than a failure to recognize them within ourselves. Hence my refusal to personally cite “mental”, illness, disease or health.

Cocaine rots the brain and destroys the nervous system. Not the best way to die, but who cares when you’re approaching hypernormality? Let’s collectively condemn the evil users right now for screwing up the world. Phew, doesn’t that make you feel saner already?

But apparently this isn’t a legal or moral issue, so we’re still left with the questions of what ‘mental illness’ actually is.

Here’s the easiest scenario; Robin Williams had fallen off the wagon after 30 years sober. He didn’t want to go through that withdrawal again so he made the choice to die instead. A personal choice that he couldn’t disclose. And to fail is a felony.

Thirty years earlier he would have also been arrested for having a toot backstage to get him beyond the curtain where, after the first laugh, he would have been flying on adrenalin.

Brain frying drugs and criminality aside - lets go back even further. The chances are that Robin Williams was something of a show-off at school - making everyone laugh as a mini version of the buffoon he eventually became.

Today they call it ADHD or something or other but either way we were (and still are) forced to change. The biggest change happened when it became illegal for teachers to beat the crap out of kids, thus permitting the drug companies to step in and dish out amphetamines to hyperactive children like M&M’s.

My generation never had that that amount of Pharma intervention, so many self-medicated themselves into the world of sanity with rapid cyclicals – speed rather than weed. Of course it would have been easier to let everyone just be, (suggesting that we were sane to begin with) and to let us live our lives creatively while supporting the lows and the highs - the only real De facto currency of the creative. 

A raft of media personalities have spoken publically about their ‘mental health’ and bipolarity - Stephen Fry and his university mate Tony Slattery to name but a few. And I’m not throwing in all things gay here but we also have to include the ‘close to genius’ Alexander (Lee) McQueen into the same mix.

Stephen Fry has made television programmes about his bipolarity, interviewing the likes of Robbie Williams – someone else on the hit list – and someone else who has taken grandiose quantities of that evil cocaine stuff. But it’s not fair to say that they were merely ‘addicts’, or that they ‘repented’ via recovery - that’s just another Victorian package. And some say they deserve such a crash for being rich, successful and having more money than sense. But contrition aside, nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood.

...nobody still admits to ‘using’ as a product of their own self-regulated boyhood...

Lee McQueen’s passing would not have been a knee jerk decision. Perhaps, like Robin Williams, he had been planning that departure for most of his adult life – perhaps also to be delivered from the isolation and pain of the imposter genius. A wandering child waiting in order to avoid the consequences of his actions on the one person he loved most, the protector who understood him as a child and even more so as an adult. It’s no coincidence that within a week of his mother’s passing Lee McQueen was also dead - the genius voided.

Let’s take Robin Williams, McQueen and everyone else I’ve mentioned back to kindergarten and watch them through the window unobserved. Do they look like normal kids? You bet your sweet ass they don’t. They look and act like kids that knew there were no barriers. Kids who believed they could do anything.

But not long afterwards, these naughty kids began to have their sanity questioned. As usual, because they knew them best, the parents fail to see anything wrong with their child and so defensively lock horns with the authorities - while maintaining a private discourse of support with their child.   
Nevertheless, in the big world the child begins to interpret their own creative behavior as disruptive and so begins a process of self-regulation to fit in with the ‘normal.’  Their lost identities now appearing before them as a self-neglect – as a lie to the self. It’s easy to jump forward to 2014 and observe the hugely wealthy, much loved comic genius Robin Williams feeling as if he’s been dying from the same neglect.

The ‘loony bin’, as a system of ordering the sane, creative or disruptive into boxes is no more. Maybe we should also abolish the Victorian labels and judgments surrounding ‘addicts’ while we're at it.  Or, for that matter, Pharmaceutical decisions by interventionists whose only real motor is a big payday.