Days 6 & 7 - Catching Up to Mad

I admit it. Sometimes, I get mad.

That's right; I said it.

Mad.

The word we equate with crazy - he's a MADMAN! - a complete fucking lunatic.

Or it's sexy, in a nostalgic, forbidden, revisionist kind of way - a la Mad Men of the telly's AMC. Good on ya if you like it; nary an episode watched, myself, mainly for a lack of time.

But, back to me (it's always about me, isn't it?): I sometimes get mad. I don't know if that's the same as angry. Is it? I think it might be.

Sometimes that makes a person feel... well, out of line from "acceptable" in this world of so much control, courtesy and decorum.

We all are part of a society increasingly governed by specialists diagnosing more and more of us - and especially more and more of our children - as anti-social, AD-HD, bi-polar, and the list goes on describing different forms of, well, for lack of a better term, madness. We diagnose and drug away both the legitimate ill and the original. When abnormality becomes a disease, we are in serious trouble.

After he did enter college, one professor told [Albert] Einstein, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.” The very characteristics of Einstein that upset authorities so much were exactly the ones that allowed him to excel." 

The preceding quote comes from a post by Bruce Levine called Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill on the blog Mad in America. This is one of those interesting sites the great World Wide Web is inevitably bound to (literally) throw up on your screen from time to time when your lifetime net-browsing hours begin to roll over on the 100,000 mile mark. It's an interesting and mostly unusual collection of views and opinions from people speaking out against the modern practice of psychiatry, psychology and the role of professional care in the arena of mental health.

There's plenty to be mad about in the world today; we all either are or should be mad about something; otherwise, as the saying goes, we're not paying attention. Does your madness make you work harder or give up?

Self-portrait of the Artist looking mad.

This post represents another entry on my part in a "40 Days of Writing" project entered into voluntarily and without coercion.