What is
insanity? What is
sanity? For a concept as central to our
mental well-being as this, it seems maddeningly
vacuously defined.
My
knowledge of psychology and
the things I've read both point towards an answer that can be summed up thus:
A mental illness is any mental problem that significantly harms normal activity.
Possibly excepting clear cases of
missing brain bits or faulty wiring, insanity is defined by deviance from
society's dominant
reality paradigm. A person considered tidy and neat under one could be diagnosed with
OCD in another. It's telling that in various places, at various times, disagreeing with the accepted
world-view meant refusing to accept the
true way of things and was grounds for
mental illness.
Make no mistake - our various societies all have a number of idiosyncrasies and faults, from
the massive to the
smaller, prompting the insightful, the
observant and the arrogant to famously wonder: "
Am I insane, or is everyone else insane?" Not a one is non-mad. Not all the way through. And when madness is found, by definition the one sane thing to do is to excise it.
Insanity
always is the sane response to a mad society.
"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, "You are mad, you are not like us."
-St. Anthony of Egypt