How does it feel to become insane?

[The Dark Side of the Moon]

I have always wondered this, but my interest really peaked after listening to brain damage by Pink Floyd

[Solar Storm]

Try cocaine and LSD together and you will know.

[Sam Varriano]

Feels pretty insane ._.

[RedAnarchist]

I would assume that there is a feeling of reality and fantasy becoming blurred, perhaps also a loss of identity and clarity. A person going insane would probably not think they were going insane, though.

[socialistjustin]

Define insane? If insane is me punching the wall and screaming at the time when the ref fucks Fulham, then it feels pretty good.

[00000000000]

I don't know, let me consult my shoe-box of melting wristwatches ("Beware the digital heathens, they will make your eyes lazy and fat!")
Well, they were no help at all.

But seriously, un-funny jokes about mental illness aside, I've no idea but I imagine it's quite terrifying

[La Comédie Noire]

I actually have had some experience with this because I have a history of mental illness in my family and I myself have had a "nervous breakdown".

Basically you get really anxious and you start believing horrible things that you once only entertained, for instance I went from merely wondering if people poisoned my food, to thinking people had definitely poisoned my food. I also thought every car was following me and people were always talking "shit" about me. There was one point in my life where I couldn't leave the house because I feared I would die or be arrested or something equally horrible.

Of course I wasn't "insane" I think that's a crude term, but what we are finding now is that psychosis can be brought on by a variety of mental illnesses that start out as rather harmless. Thus people with depression or even a lot of stress will begin to hear voices or have cognitive distortions.

It's very unsettling because it can be so gradual, you go from being able to dismiss those little horrible thoughts with complete certainty, to believing in them beyond a doubt.

EDIT:

Forgot about this Phillip K. Dick quote:

"The first step to going insane is to think you are going insane."

I don't know if that fits in with your definition of insanity, but I know Syd Barret from Pink Floyd had problems similar to what I describe.

[Искра]

It's ok.

[Lev Bronsteinovich]

There are many different flavors of insane (and of course, defining terms here would help). I don't think any one description can capture all of the different experiences. If we are talking primarily about psychosis, it often involve acute anxiety, delusions and auditory hallucinations. Anxiety, which is low-level fear, is quite punishing. Fear is the harshest of the basic human emotions -- as it evolved to alert animals to danger and foster immediate action. I've seen a lot of what one might call insanity working in psychiatric units in hospitals.

[RED DAVE]

For me it was having an unbelievably strong negative feeling, that dominated everything, and that I could not control, stifle, rationalize. It just hung there like a horrible sun until I drank myself into oblivion.

RED DAVE

[El Louton]

Right now I can't walk. So it's pretty shit.

[CommieTroll]

I assume it's like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

[Red Rosa]

What's this got to do with forum Learning?

[SHORAS]

Ask Charlie Sheen?

[Commissar Rykov]

Ask Charlie Sheen?
Charlie Sheen is a warlock and is beyond your simple troll mind.

[Art Vandelay]

Its a question that has actually always intrigued me as well. I have a friend that has suffered from some severe mental illness and I struggled with some issues for a while as well, although I wouldn't classify it as going insane. The pink floyd line from brain damage: " you scream and no one seems to hear" has always seemed like a good example to me. I actually have a unfinished novel which is written in stream of consciousness that centers around the diary excerpts of a man losing his mind.

[Sputnik_1]

I don't have any other but mainly depressive experience (connected to eating disorder). It's really hard to explain what a depressed person feels like, cause it's not comparable to anything else you normally feel in any situation. It's not even about nice or bad things happening to you (well, of course I'm not talking about origins of mental illness, but about everyday life of a person suffering depression). The general sense of emptiness, pointlessness doesn't leave you for a second. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try to escape it. And so you stop trying, or you never even tried (you don't believe anything can help you). You just truly want to stop existing. It doesn't mean tho that the sense of guilt or awareness of how you're hurting and disappointing people around you disappears (at least that's how you feel like about it- you're hurting them, nonetheless their lives are just as meaningless as yours). You don't want to eat, you don't want to talk, you can't sleep. You're terribly scared that something terrible is gonna happen to you or to your family. You sometimes beg them not to leave house cause you're convinced that something terrible is gonna happen. You can't even cry after a while, you just stare at the wall and probably look pretty much creepy and miserable to the others. Hmmm.... If I could describe it by comparing it somehow to feelings that anyone else has experienced, I would say that it's a bit like being extremely bored, tired, sad and scared at the same time, but much more than you could ever imagine, and it doesn't seem to ever end, you can't escape it even in your sleep (not that you sleep much, barely at all).
Well, i know it sounds kinda dramatic, but the depression is pretty tough. Anyone who ever really experienced depression (and I'm not talking about classic teenage "I'm depressed, no one understands me" depression) will know what I'm talking about.

[RadioRaheem84]

Basically you get really anxious and you start believing horrible things that you once only entertained, for instance I went from merely wondering if people poisoned my food, to thinking people had definitely poisoned my food. I also thought every car was following me and people were always talking "shit" about me. There was one point in my life where I couldn't leave the house because I feared I would die or be arrested or something equally horrible.



So it's a feeling of extreme paranoia coupled with crippling anxiety?

[Sasha]

I would recommend reading or even better watch a performance of Sarah Kane's "4.48 psychosis" (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.48_Psychosis)

[Yuppie Grinder]

There are many forms of mental illness, people. They vary wildly.

[Le Libérer]

Love this topic just slightly misplaced.

Moving this to non-political forum.

[Os Cangaceiros]

One time I became so paranoid from drug use that I literally believed that people were following me and were going to kill me. Those people happened to be my neighbors, too.

Luckily the feeling wore off in an hour or two. :sleep:

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I'd like to echo Taco's sentiment - refering to "insanity" only serves to gloss over a huge expanse of wildly different experiences.

Yeah.

This thread is full of some pretty problematic stuff.

[Magón]

"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

Hunter S. Thompson

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig is partly about Pirsig, then a philosophy professor in Montana, going insane. He elaborates on his experience more in Lila.Apparently the author went though a period when he was profoundly interested in "the meaning of life" and deep philosophic questions. He delved so far into this that he couldn't get out. His wife found him, sitting on their bed, holding a cigarette and staring into space. For hours.His wife called the cops who then came to take him away. The cops treated him not with compassion but as a deviant whom it was necessary to punish. "We;'ll fix you", they kept taunting him, as they took him to the asylum.

Both "Zen.." and "Lila" are interesting. They badly need a class analysis but otherwise they are very moving and have a lot of insight.

"Girl, Interrupted" (the book and the film)is a very interesting of accounthat its like to experience insanity.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_interupted

Allen Ginsburg spent time in a psych ward at McClean Hospital, as did many other talented people

http://poetry.about.com/od/poetryaroundtheworld/a/holderpsychward.htm

After having a mescaline trip in the early 1930s Jean Paul Sartre spent a year when he saw a giant lobster follow him around everywhere.He was a young philosophy teacher. The lobster would follow him into class. He had to tell it to be very quiet in class and he had it stay under his desk until his class was over.One time Sartre was in Marseilles with his partner Simone DeBeauvoir. Simone was feeling a bit frisky. Jean Paul was not in the mood. Simone asked him what was up. Jean Paul finally confessed and told her about the lobster. She was supportive. Eventually Sartre saw his friend Lacan, then a young psychiatrist. (They were in the same CP branch in Paris).Lacan analyzed the lobster as being the product of guilt feelings produced by Sartre abandoning the working class and the class struggle to become a bourgeois philosophy teacher.

The lobster disappeared after a year. Sartre's "friend" was known about but for various reasons he originally claimed it was a crab not a lobster.The extent of his hallucination wasn't fully known until interview of Sartre made towards the end of his life was finally published a few years ago.

[praxis1966]

Love this topic just slightly misplaced.

Moving this to non-political forum.

I'd actually rather it were in Chit-Chat. Moved.

[Robespierre Richard]

I was insane from about November 2010 to July 2011 when I started taking pills, it sucked. Basically you don't know what is meaningful and what isn't, and end up constructing completely parallel realities that don't really get torn down because you almost completely stop experiencing cognitive dissonance, and when you do it's not for the better.

What else, a lot of feelings of grandeur, at least for me. People on the Internet think you are smart though because a lot of people who spend a lot of time on the Internet are not very sane.

Being insane was better than my current condition in some respects though. I was able to have a job, for example. I only stopped when I started having really bad suicidal depression, though this was after leaving my job because I was sick all the time and having conflicts with my co-workers.

It's definitely true though that when you are insane, you think that everyone else is insane. I had a friend with what was obviously schizophrenia, even by his own admission (having a running commentary on his life in his head, extreme paranoia, completely insane rants), and he refused to get treatment "because everyone else is crazy too," so I ended up having to stop talking to him because it was too depressing. Oh and he lives on the other wide of the country so it wasn't that brutal. Also this was back when I was still sorta insane and decided that talking to people on IM was destroying me as a person or something.

I guess in the end it's just a really non-standard way of dealin with stress.

[Obs]

I'd actually rather it were in Chit-Chat. Moved.
Good call.

[∞]

IAmA insane person. AMA