Can we all go crazy?

Have you ever been on the verge of a nervous breakdown, going down the subway in the morning? Have you ever had an irresistible urge to yell at a teenager who pisses you off for the hundredth time? Have you ever wanted to smash the office of the boss who is lecturing you to smithereens? What prevents us from taking action in such situations? Can it happen that the internal brakes fail?

“Yes,” says psychiatrist and therapist Marie-Noelle Besançon. – In a situation of hypercontrol, when a person is completely squeezed out and too depressed, he is more likely to “fly off the coils.” However, there is an important clarification: “Mental disorder is more likely to threaten those who have an innate predisposition to it,” notes psychiatrist Grigory Gorshunin. “That is, if such a disease is diagnosed in close relatives: father, mother, brother or sister.”

A single “out of temper” indicates overstrain and the need for rest, and not at all about the onset of the disease. And yet, sometimes it seems that there are more and more bouts of insanity: a forty-year-old woman with a knife in her hands threatens an electrician, a man shoots his neighbors because his girlfriend left him; The postman tries to commit suicide right at work…

In hospital emergency centres, mental health services and elsewhere, doctors, psychiatrists and therapists are bombarded with requests for help. What’s the matter?

“We live in a society that eschews complexity and calls for “positivity,” explains psychoanalyst Vincent Estellon. – You need to love everyone: friends, family, husband, wife, children. But this is feigned behavior – human nature is based on duality. Thus we begin to hate the people we love the most. And we break down.”

Mental inequality

Madness is the most human of all human traits, said Sigmund Freud. Jealousy or anger can lead to insanity: in the heat of a quarrel, we say what we did not want to say, we break objects. There are factors that transcend our understanding and cause us to lose control of ourselves. This can happen to anyone. There are a million things that throw the mind out of balance. Loss and deep sorrow, heavy unhappy love, passion, betrayal …

Stressful situations and the use of toxic substances (alcohol, drugs) that affect our consciousness – all this can lead to the fact that we cease to control ourselves. But it is impossible to predict the course of events in advance. Everything depends on the body’s ability to resist, on the mental organization of each person, and most importantly, on his vulnerability. Some people come out of life’s trials with severe mental trauma, while others do not.

“The disease can develop with more or less ease depending on the environment in which a particular person is immersed,” explains psychoanalyst Pierre Marie. It is no coincidence that we say that everything is laid before the age of six: a fragile child who is lucky with his parents – they have a stable psyche, they take care of his upbringing – will be able to overcome many tragedies. But if he served as a consolation (for example, replaced another, deceased child in the family) or was an object of deep sadness, it will be much more difficult for him to get out of life’s trials.

In this regard, there is a deep injustice “at the start” – everything that happens in the first years of life is imprinted forever. This is where our identity begins. Any child perceives the world in the context of the parental relationship in which he is immersed.

“Normal” fluctuations

Reckless actions or sudden bouts of insanity are not always symptoms of mental illness.

“Do not forget that any person, even the strongest and most enduring, has moments when he does not understand very well where he is – in the realm of the imaginary, in illusions, in the unreal world, although he is aware that all this is not reality, says Marie-Noel Besancon. “Such fluctuations are part of the “normal” functioning of the psyche. True, sometimes they scare us so much that we try to forget them as soon as possible.

Hasn’t this ever happened to you – you stop hearing the interlocutor who is boring to you? Silently, imperceptibly to others, we leave ourselves every day, leaving our mind for a split second. But we are not sick.

When to go to a specialist?

And how can we determine the line, overstepping which we should seek help from a specialist?

“And you shouldn’t,” says Grigory Gorshunin. – The task of a specialist is to help you if you yourself want this help. For example, if you are afraid of losing control of yourself, or you notice that your bad mood is not caused by specific events, but accompanies you all the time, or you understand that your behavior is destroying relationships that are important to you.

And the decision to whom exactly to turn, we also make ourselves. “If you don’t want to discuss your life and are set on drug treatment, then you can contact a psychiatrist, and if, on the contrary, you prefer to avoid drugs, but are ready to change your lifestyle, then it makes sense to talk with a psychotherapist,” says Grigory Gorshunin.

Teenage seizures

They frighten those who become their unwitting witness, and plunge parents into despair. And this is no accident – after all, bouts of insanity are always very strong, and especially in adolescents.

“Such attacks often occur in adolescents, but rarely recur more than once,” explains psychoanalyst Pierre Marie. – This is not a symptom of mental illness, but a sign that something is wrong with the child. Take, for example, a graduate who is preparing to enter a university. He’s under tremendous pressure! And sometimes insanity is the only way to say to your neighbors: “Leave me alone!”. It will pass without a trace after a few days of hospitalization.” The crisis will disappear as suddenly as it appeared.

Two types of violations

Psychiatrists do not use the term “madness” in professional conversations. They talk about “illness”, “disorder”, about “mental disorders”. Among these, two main categories can be distinguished – psychoses and neuroses. Psychosis includes disorders associated with the loss of contact with reality: delusions, hallucinations.

The most famous of the psychoses is schizophrenia, but there are others: persecution mania (paranoia), erotomania … “Neuroses are like an excessive exaggeration of ordinary feelings,” Marie-Noelle Besancon defines. “For example, depression is a distorted manifestation of grief, and anxiety disorders are fear.”

And one more important clarification: health does not mean some particularly positive outlook on life. According to the definition of Grigory Gorshunin, “a healthy soul is not the content of thoughts, but a way of dealing with them.” Neurosis is not the presence of the bad, but the power of the bad. These two things are constantly confused and trying to “get rid of the bad.” And we must get rid of the need for evil power, from the “right to torment and suffer.”