Research Article

Madness as Communicative Resistance

Gert Hellerich¹* and Daniel White²*

¹Professor Emeritus, Hochschule Bremen, Germany

²Professor Emeritus, Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, United States

Submission: March 02, 2020; Published: April 08, 2020

*Corresponding author: Gert Hellerich, Professor Emeritus, Hochschule Bremen, Germany. Daniel White, Professor Emeritus, Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University, United States

How to cite this article: Gert H, Daniel W. Madness as Communicative Resistance. Psychol Behav Sci Int J .2020; 14(5): 555898. DOI:10.19080/PBSIJ.2019.10.555898.

Keywords: Biopsychosocial model of human behavior; Biomedical model; Schizophrenia; Psychological traumas; Self-making; Psychiatric evaluation; Mental disorders; Antipsychiatry

Short Communication

The biopsychosocial model of human behavior (BPSM) Hochschule Bremen provides an interdisciplinary expansion of the biomedical model of by including biological, psychological, and social (including cultural) factors in its analysis [1-3]. Since its inception, the model has served as an ideal that has not always been observed in practice [4] and in any case it should be followed and augmented in clinical work [5]. In our work we have suggested strengthening and supplementing its premises regarding “madness” [6] in terms of Michel Foucault’s critical social theory [7,8] as well as in light of anti-psychiatric perspectives, including its visionary dimensions [9-11]. In this paper we look briefly at a practical application of this expanded approach. In keeping with the BPSM model, we argue that social context such as the workplace, the “street” that comes with unemployment, the school or university, and the family can precipitate “breakdown” (Lebensbrüche) or a fracture in one’s life. Contributing to this perspective and to the self-help activities to overcome breakdown described below, Laing [12] studied the kinds of social “binds” that pervade everyday life, from typical interpersonal relationships to schizophrenia ([13] pp. 194-278). Psychiatrists might be able to stabilize clients undergoing extreme stress with medication but exploring and attempting to resolve them interpersonally in an informal setting—trying to unravel the “knots” of human conduct—is a different matter.

To deal directly with the breaks and binds in everyday life beyond the clinical distance of the hospital, one of the present authors has organized a self-help group in Bremen, Germany, creating a Night Place (Nachtstätte) for an “illuminating gathering” (Nachtschwärmer), as when moths collect themselves ‘round a light in the darkness. Here psychiatric patients who had undergone psychological traumas and in-patient experience were offered a place to sit, to form subgroups—a women’s gathering, a philosophy circle, workshops focused on specific life-problems like broken homes—where they could work out their problems over dinner, coffee, or beer, and hours of free time. In short, the evening gathering provided an open self-determining context for thirty to fifty individuals to sort out their problems, to help avoid recurrences of breakdown and hospitalization [14].

Personal conversations with Night Place participants revealed the variety of experiences and behaviors informally described as “mad,” including not only breakdowns but also new visions of life’s possibilities. Individual visitors typically resisted conformity to the social and economic constraints of life “on the market” and in formal schooling. They preferred to follow their desires and aspirations in original and creative ways, exploring how to think for themselves, make their own artworks, form new kinds of bonds with others, and find a niche in the vernacular handicraft economies that have grown up out of the cracks, so to speak, of advance industrial cities, as well as in their adjacent slums [15]. Self-Making or autopoiesis [16] was their overriding concern: to develop a new “aesthetics of self” in the art of self-fashioning.

For example, one university student participant wanted to pursue an undergraduate major in philosophy. However, his father, a successful businessman, strongly disagreed preferring, as many parents do, that his son pursue a more promising economic option like engineering or business administration. Their familial setting augmented the conflict. The father treated his son at home like he treated his employees in his workplace: in a hierarchical, frosty, formal and, for the young man, alienating manner. In response, the son chose not to confront the father’s educational advice directly, but instead to reshape the context in which their discussions took place. Thus, he purchased a good supply of candles, and lit them in every room of the house to greet his father when he returned from the office. His message was: our home needs the light of life. Perhaps expectably, the father failed to appreciate the aesthetic gesture and instead called the police, demanding that they arrest and commit his son for psychiatric evaluation. This family drama suggests how different visions of life’s purpose and quality can lead to serious domestic conflict. Night Place provided a supportive setting for the student to tell his story, finding a sympathetic audience for his narrative view of the life and exploring his options with others.

Narratives resistant to a biopsychosocial or biomedical model of “mental disorders” have gained ground since the work of Laing [9,12] and Foucault [17] leading to a wide social pushback to the medicalization of human action. The popular films Girl Interrupted (Mangold, James, Dir [18]; based on the narrative of Kaysen [19]) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Foreman [20]; based on the novel by Ken Kesey [21]), for example, have depicted resistance to medicalization and psychosocial categorization by “disorderly” individuals. Similarly, the “Mad Pride” movement offers a social label for the broader trend of what might be called communicative resistance to the subsumption of “madness” under biopsychosocial or biomedical classifications such as those of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—DSM 5 [22-24]. This social uprising was heralded by Foucault when he praised the “hysterics” once incarcerated in French psychiatric hospitals: ‘‘The hysteric has magnificent symptoms, but at the same time she side steps the reality of her illness; she goes against the current of the asylum game and, to that extent, we salute the hysterics as the true militants of antipsychiatry” [25]. To put the point of the alternative culture of madness most simply, we might close with the title of a recent reader in “mad studies”: Mad Matters [26]. The fundamental principle of mad studies is humane and heuristic: the search for an abundance of life beyond the clinic (Lebensgängigkeit).

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