Let me see if I can accurately convey for you the experience of going mad. As far as I understand, my diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder with a paranoid component. I can only tell you that the presence of paranoia in my disorder has had the greatest impact on my experience and interpretation of the world, coloring most of what I see with a veil of fear and even panic. Terrors have run through my head, and I suspect they’re not done with me yet.
We read the world through our brain first and impose on the world our need for pattern, repetition, and meaning. Just the way we see astrological images in the light of the stars, so we impose patterns on the rest of the world. We try to make sense of these patterns to act for our own benefit and well-being. Who’s to say if the configurations we recognize are legitimate or a full comprehension of reality? At this time, the jury seems to be out and scholars in different fields make arguments, each for their own case. I suspect these patterns are on the spectrum of real, but I also have detailed experience in learning how they can be altered due to ill health and deviant brain activity that can lead to personal devastation and ruin.
I first fell ill in graduate school while studying to become a history professor. Thus my delusions were crowded with details from my research. They were finely calibrated, and to me they represented a clearer (as I thought of it) understanding of reality than I had ever had before. I told myself that I suddenly saw the real truth of the world as it was and as I had never seen it before. I made meaning in ways that diverged from an ordinary interpretation of existence as we perceive it.
It was shocking the amount of detail I found in this new world. In a day there are so many things the mind relegates to background information. But suddenly, I saw it all: animals, trees, birds, weather, leaves, bushes, people moving in and out of line of sight, the components of buildings like planks, bricks, or steel. If the sun was shining it meant something to me, so did clouds drifting across the horizon, or more at hand, flyers posted on bulletin boards. Any objects, the clothing of people, their interactions with each other and perhaps myself as well had to be integrated into the meaning of a scene. And all scenes had meaning. A fog, sticks on the ground, a look from a stranger, someone brushing up on me by accident, outdoor tables and how their chairs were arranged, especially car license plates. Instead of automatically filtering through data and noticing details that were significant to daily life I reasoned in insanity that each minute bit of reality had a story to tell that was all its own. And that story was a great epic of which I’d suddenly become a part without really knowing how or why. To be honest, from the beginning I didn’t want to be there, but that didn’t seem to be an option over which I had any control.
There were so many details in my day now that it became overwhelming. I felt exhausted and took to writing down what I thought was pertinent information in a notebook so I could take it home and interpret it all at night. Interpretation, meaning, was very important to me. In fact, meaning was everything. If a leaf fell I thought it held a special message for me. The shape of ordinary objects even held information I felt I had to decode. If something had a phallic shape I thought it was a romantic advance by a hidden interlocutor. If it had a rounded shape I thought that it meant I was supposed to lose weight. Obviously, the meaning was often very basic and even primitive. Yet sometimes it held complex, paranoid conspiracy theories.
Indeed, my delusions turned to what I thought was the oncoming rise of another world war. In the early 1990s (covering the date of my breakdown), the Internet was an emerging force for the dissemination of knowledge. Commonly newspapers held the ubiquitous email prefix that began “www.” It’s not entirely logical but I thought this represented a coded message for World War III. Imagine how dislocated I felt. In history, I was involved in interpreting textual data and information. Suddenly I had tumbled into a world where all was not as it seemed. In reality, I was plunged into a madness that seemed to develop without warning. However, as I thought of it, I was plunged into a world where minutiae was everything and where it contradicted my understanding of the world to date. I was bombarded with meaning and I was afraid.
Soon I began to believe that coded messages were held for me in signs, billboards, and advertising. I remember vividly one day how it began. I was taking a walk down a city street trying to figure out what was happening to me. I passed a Macy’s store. It held a banner on the lintel of the doors that proclaimed something like, “Free Gift For You Inside. Clinique Makeup.” That “For You” held me spellbound. Clearly it was an advertisement that paradoxically held dual messages. One for the public and one especially, and solely, meant for me. The message was received loud and clear. With some confusion but with clear certainty I entered the department store and bought some very pretty items believing it was a duty imposed on me. Somehow the “Free” part was lost on me and my wallet, which certainly suffered from a lack of oversight during my breakdown.
Unfortunately, I soon began to wonder if the TV and films held messages that I was supposed to follow too. In order to explore this avenue I began to go to movies in the early afternoon. One day a movie came out that would profoundly influence me in madness. That movie which I cringe to think of today was called The Net and it starred Sandra Bullock. You never know what might influence you, how one message will get through and not others, how one message will impact your whole understanding of reality. That was this movie for me.
I shared similar physical traits with Sandra Bullock and that led me to identify with her character. Sandra Bullock had brown eyes and brown hair. She was of average height. This small overlap of physical resemblance was enough for me to recognize that the actress represented me. I realized with a sense of epiphany that I was supposed to examine the screenplay of the film as if it were an allegory, saying one thing on the surface but in reality meaning another. It was up to me to understand what that allegory meant. If someone said something in the dialogue I had to interpret it as quickly as possible to understand how it related to my situation, and I had to reflect on how it spoke to me about what I was to do with my life now. Remaining in graduate school was not an option I had the privilege of pursuing anymore, not, as I began to realize more and more, when the fate of the world was at stake.
At this point I want to digress briefly. Something terrible happened to me as I watched the aptly named movie, The Net. The only way I can make sense of it, is to say my consciousness began to break down. Atavistic expressions of feeling woke and shook me to my core. In the darkened movie theater a young African American woman sat a few rows away from me. I just happened to notice her and suddenly a loud and terrible epithet (which I will not repeat) sounded in my head, ringing in my ears. I was shocked and sick at heart.
These kinds of thoughts were an anathema to me. They represented the worst in human nature and I was opposed to such words and their ideology. Then it happened again. This time awful misogynist language broke through my consciousness. “Cunt,” “Whore,” and similar curses were like a bell in my brain. I felt sick. I felt besieged. Fortunately, these thoughts remained cradled in my skull. Otherwise I thought they may have incited violence. My shame at even hearing these words in my head ran deep, but I couldn’t make them stop. I tried my best to suppress them but they welled up like poison in a spring. To cope with the loss of control and the sense of vertigo, I tried to concentrate on hidden meanings in the movie. I was completely unprepared for such a surprising and unforeseen onslaught. How do you maintain humanity in the face of barbarism, especially when that barbarism is you? I felt the crack in my humanity like an avalanche. Sometime later I would believe people could read my mind. This made the repetition of vulgarity almost unbearable. It was as if I was cursing at strangers to their face.
Meanwhile, in The Net, Sandra Bullock’s character was stripped of her identity, home, and possessions. She became effectively stateless. I believed this was an introduction to my own fate. I reasoned that this was how nameless guides (whom I never thought to question) informed me about how to proceed in my days. It seemed so obvious to me that I was supposed to emulate Bullock’s character. This meant effectively that I was supposed to rid myself of possessions and friends and go on the run as the character in the movie did. This random film spoke clearly to me of how I was now meant to live my life. I’ve always been rule bound and now this meant so much more to me. I followed what I thought were the rules in excess, shattering my life and destroying my understanding of my place in the world. This is because I believed it was my duty (like a soldier or a spy!), imposed on me regardless of my own hopes and dreams. I learned all of this in 1 day as sheer chance led me to this one movie that would color the whole picture book of my delusions.
With much complaining to these guides (who at this point had no name) I bowed to what I thought was pressure. I broke with friends, family, and school. I formally withdrew from my graduate program. I gave away all I owned, including precious objects given to me or acquired on my travels, and I broke the lease on my apartment. I embraced adventure and went out on a long-distance road trip, staying in high-end or low-rent hotels and motels along the way, depending on my mood for the night or where I thought I might be safest.
Once I stayed at a seedy hotel where the proprietor thought I was a prostitute looking for a room with her customer. It took me days to understand her suspicious questions and rude insinuations. Another time I registered under a false name and couldn’t remember that name when I needed to replace a room key I had lost. Mostly I tried to steer clear of people so I could complete what I thought of increasingly as my mission, my French resistance to a Vichy government. My goal was to work as a spy to a looming world war.
That’s now what I thought I was, a spy! I had a heroic place in the hidden world of war that most people didn’t pay attention to. Over time I learned to read the hidden dialogue of the world. I learned to decode the messages left for me that only sounded as if they were meant for public consumption. I was clinically insane for 7 months before I was discovered and rescued at a university hospital. This gave me ample time to learn how to respond to the world of prolific meaning that had opened so unexpectedly at my feet. One clue built on another until I had a perfect understanding of how to create order and how to function in this new world. I learned how to prosper in meaning so that I could undermine the power of an evil and brutal dictator, who I thought existed within the corners of observable reality.
This evil dictator (as I called him) pursued me down the highways of the United States. It was my duty to try to undermine the government of a Hitler or Stalin, whose initial intent was to possess the whole of my country, transforming it into a slave state. I was in danger but so was the whole world as far as I was concerned. I was convinced of my righteousness and of my vulnerability in this quest. I tried to face with courage experiences that felt like torture, with the spreading darkness that wanted to devour my nation and consume its citizens. Terror woke and slept with me and I learned to live with it like a friend. Perhaps this is how people learn to live through actual war? I repeated endless litanies of words on paper and in my head. I put my trust in empty rituals to influence the fate of the world, much like ancient astrologers and magicians attempted to assert their will against fate.
What I found most difficult was conversation with other people. In my mind I had to decode the meaning of each statement and learn how to proceed next from the clues embedded in discourse. It was a cause and effect situation. If someone said, “It’s never hailed here like this before,” I had to break down the code written in invisible ink, which might mean something like the following, “You’ve brought disaster to my home and I see you for what you, are, a spy and traitor to our leader (the evil dictator).” Then I had to respond but in a way that addressed only the obvious in the conversation: “That sure was a lot of hail.” Internally I was drawing conclusions, planning actions, and working out that hidden meaning so I would know how to proceed in the face of what I thought was such a blatant and looming threat. To call this constant vigilance complicated and exhausting is an understatement. I moved 1 foot at a time and followed the course of such reasoning to my doom.
In madness it was up to me to do my part in freeing the country from its stranglehold by a new and seemingly omnipotent potentate. I ate (the little I could eat), slept (the little I could sleep), and breathed freedom (which was my main preoccupation). And the fear of being caught and tortured in dark, badly lit rooms was always with me. So meaning turned upon itself and created a world colored by chance. I believed it was my duty to free each individual in the United States from the mental tyranny of the “evil dictator.” In fact, I drove myself into breakdown to save my world from what I thought was the threat of annihilation.
So meaning made and broke me. With no adequate reality testing to save me, my paranoid delusions spun out of control. I was a slave to madness as, ironically, I believed others to be slaves of a new historical evil. My interpretation of the world was flawed and the details of madness flooded and almost drowned my soul. Though I have fully recovered, I will never forget the overwhelming threat of minutia that effectively replaced my understanding of how to make sense of and cope with the world.