What is Insanity?

[mentalgongfu2]

A popular trope, often attributed to Einstein, is that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Personally, I've always thought this line to be bullshit.

That may help explain why I appreciated so much Wombat's recent reply (paraphrasing) in a separate thread pointing out that doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result is also the mantra of every successful athlete.

Even ignoring that insight, the idea that repetition defines insanity seems to me to miscalculate the entire nature of insanity. If it were easy to define and diagnose, we would have long ago eliminated the insane from our leadership class at least.

Then, of course, is the idea that anyone who entertains certain off-mainstream ideas we discuss here must be 'crazy,' which is only a nicer way of saying insane.

And one of my favorites, that anyone operating with sanity in an insane world would appear to others to be insane.

Off their rocker. Past the edge. Looney tunes. Gone Nuts. Beyond the pale. Silly.

Let this thread be a repository for what may define sanity and its opposite, and if I have my way, to be an archive of personal observations/statements from members and not a series of articles written by third parties. I want this to be a group analysis of sanity and its opposite rather than a data dump on the topic...

[IanEye]

*



Repetition is a form of change.



*

[zangtang]

back to the funny farm!

man, that's a big ask - people are going to have to think.
but we're good at that here, innit?

drifted off there for fully 3-4 minutes, saw a magpie on the telegraph pole, wondering , one for sorrow, two for joy, do i have anything cogent to say about sanity or.....the other thing?
It would surprise me not if just living in this version of the world we have built around ourselves, painted ourselves into a phantasmagoric existential corner of hell, has driven
pretty much all of us insane.
If you stop several times a day and listen to the psychic drivel the chattering monkey is putting on the tickertape that's prattling along, like the location telex in a spy movie when they show the airiel shot of Langley,
yeah that one, Jesus how DO you spell aerial?...............thats not healthy.....*

is that real self awareness? - when you think....shit, is that the real me? - boy, you've got some work to do! - omg, journey of a billion miles begins with, blah drone woof woof and...........
.....stop....s t o . . . . op. gentlly,.......sl. . .o . . w. . .ly.

The staggering levels of uncertainty, the wholesale insecurity, the ambiguity.
- and the surefire unease that whatever the fuck they think they're doing up at the top table, its obviously (tho only by inference, because we're not important enough to be told)
its absolutely horrific.
- eternal recurrence hellfire-level horrific.

i need to lie down for a bit.

*on edit: by which i mean, if that was ambiguous, reading the tickertape to catch yourself is i think, healthy - view it as a technique.....
- its whats on the tickertape.....Jesus - its a disaster!!!!!

[Elvis]

I just Googled "insanity" — Insanity® has been trademarked and repurposed:

"Buy INSANITY® from the Official Beachbody site. 60-day Money-Back Guarantee.

I was looking for the 'dictionary definition' and it's pretty vague: insanity is a "state of being seriously mentally ill"; the usual synonyms apply: "mental illness, madness, dementia; lunacy, instability, mania, psychosis."

Insanity usually implies a "break with reality"—still vague, but "I know it when I see it." It's all been pathologized, of course, each shade of madness has a number.

It's all sort of relative, isn't it? In a way, we're all a bit insane, traumatized by an insidious capitalist-consumer techno-fascistic society. Functional integration in the system could be called a "functional insanity" and serve as a baseline, an acceptably low-level dementia, readily treated with a little hard work and the appropriate pharmeceutical drugs.

Deviations from the functional baseline comprise the spectrum of accepted clinical disorders—crazy, mad, looney tunes, schizophrenic, total nut case, psychotic and, perhaps the most severe form of mental illness, Trump supporter.

A rising sanity baseline may, in the future, redefine insanity as we know it. Marketing studies indicate that insanity can be eliminated altogether by 2025 if consumers buy a sufficient quantity of bodybuilding products.

Personal experience: insane on one occasion for 3 or 4 hours while on PCP.



(Edited to replace "relevant" with "relative")

[zangtang]

you forgot Whackjob !

- and fruitloop. I mean fruitloop is fluffy-edged, touchy-feely - so not real insanity....
but Whackjob - now thats gotta be a favorite of mine........

HAVE YOU GOT SOMETHING AGAINST WHACKJOBS OR SOMETHING?

[brainpanhandler]

One moment I can recall because it was like there was an observer me outside the experience watching the meltdown was a time that I was alternately profoundly sobbing, deep wracking waves of sadness, that would then morph into laughing hysterically. The two states alternated and then finally merged into one laughing/blubbering mess. That state felt like insanity. The observer shook his head but was still there. I think true insanity is when that observer says, "I'm outta here.".

[zangtang]

i did a drug once (& only time) called 2cv or similar - left me exactly like that - may not have helped that i watched a documentary about a celebrated war photojourno...
followed by a full on documntry about Palestinian suicide bombers & Israeli security etc. 'laughing/blubbering mess' exactly that.

separate - but before i forget - inability to communicate...... - doesn't define it, but its a function/ big aspect of insanity.
both speaking the same language - but neither understanding a single word, nor even the frames of reference....resulting in a desperate frustration.

listening to some Al Di Meola - flash git!

[tapitsbo]

In my experience, the crux of "insanity" is always interpersonal - a breakdown in relations

[Wombaticus Rex]

Much like obscenity -- I only know it when I see it.

Back when I helped manage a crisis/safe house, I came to love one of my supervisor's helpful clarifying questions: Can they make themselves a sandwich right now?

The word definitely gets thrown around altogether too much, as a slur towards someone's motivations or logic. If you're acting on the basis of either, though, you're still functional.

[guruilla]

Definition that popped into my mind body recently: Sanity is the ability not to literalize what does not need to be literalized.

[Nordic]

To me it's a denial of reality.

The woman at the bus stop who started talking to me in downtown Santa Monica, clearly believing I was an orderly in the hospital that did not exist around her. Her mind had denied reality for her, presumably at an unconscious level.

How is this different from a "break" from reality? Not sure how to explain but it is. Because somewhere, the mind actually knows what it's doing. Denying reality to the owner of the brain for some purpose, even if it's a mistake, like when a human body has an anaphylactic reaction to an allergen, which is sort of an insane-level attempt to deal with what the body believes to be a pathogen. Even though the anaphylaxis will likely kill the person.

I'm fascinated by this having had some recent first hand experience with a mentally ill person in my midst. And by having a deadly food allergy myself.

And yes, that quote has always bugged the shot out of me because it is clearly NOT a definition of insanity. At all. And I doubt Einstein ever said it. He was smarter than that.

[zangtang]

i didn't want to mention the Einstein thing. The # of quotes being wrongly attributed to him is quite (i've got better things to worry about) but really is quite, getting on my tits.

You can't escape the 'doing the same thing & expecting etc' now, but I only came across it (??) ten yrs ago or so....

[MacCruiskeen]

And yes, that quote has always bugged the shot out of me because it is clearly NOT a definition of insanity. At all. And I doubt Einstein ever said it. He was smarter than that.

Yup. What it is, is a definition of practice. (Why do musicians spend so much time running up and down the same scales? Over and over again, day in, day out. Are they insane?)

My favourite Einstein quote:

You don't HAVE to be MAD to work here - but it HELPS!!!

He used to say it daily. It made him a popular colleague in that patent office in Berne.

[KUAN]

.

doing different things and expecting the same result?

.

[guruilla]

My favorite Einstein quote, relevant here I think.

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

Since this is SOP on planet earth, then insanity is probably best viewed IMO as a spectrum we are all on.