Insanity

Insanity is an experience where the connection with reality thins. Thoughts, fears, or ideas overtake the mind so completely that they become unverifiable.

You notice that the world stops obeying the laws that once seemed unshakable. Familiar faces become strangers, the ticking of a clock turns into a threat, and your own thoughts sound like alien voices in the next room. The boundary separating “self” from “not-self” suddenly vanishes—and you find yourself in a dimension where everything has become one dense, breathing fabric, in which you can find neither edge nor exit. This is not merely intense agitation or anxiety—it is when your very inner world ceases to be a compliant instrument and becomes a master, pulling you deeper into its own labyrinth.

The anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing called Insanity a journey into a land where familiar shores have disappeared and maps are redrawn anew—each moment. He saw in this not so much an illness as a radical attempt by the psyche to cope with an unbearable contradiction, when old meanings have crumbled and new ones have yet to be born. But in this journey, the very ability to distinguish is lost: we no longer know where our own thought ends and where an obsessive idea, arriving from outside, begins. Where is reality, and where is the projection of my fear? Insanity is that state in which you cease to be the judge of your own perception and become its prisoner.

In such moments, the body lives its own life, detached from you. The heart pounds so hard that its beats echo in your temples and fingertips—or, conversely, it stops for a few seconds, and you gasp for air, thinking you’re about to cease. Your skin breaks out in a cold sweat, even though the room is warm; you feel goosebumps racing down your spine, not from fear, but from the sensation that your body has become an alien spacesuit. Your gaze loses focus: objects blur, edges grow hazy, as if you’re looking through water.

Sometimes a strange feeling of weightlessness arises—your feet don’t feel the floor, your arms seem too light or, conversely, filled with lead. Your breathing becomes shallow and rapid, and you catch yourself forgetting to exhale. Your head hums—not with pain, but with a steady, tense ringing, as if a transformer has been switched on inside. All of this is not a set of symptoms, but the way your body tries to anchor you when your consciousness has already broken its chain. You might not notice hunger or fatigue—only this strange electric current running beneath your skin.

At the core of insanity lies the illusion that you can still control your mind—if only you try harder. You strive to grasp an elusive thought, to anchor reality, to prove to yourself that you haven’t lost your mind. But each such lurch only rocks the boat more violently: you fling yourself toward the saving shore, and the shore recedes even further. The belief hidden within this state sounds like this: “I must not lose touch with reality. If I lose it, I will vanish forever.”

This belief is a collar that tightens the more fiercely you struggle. In truth, insanity is its ultimate tension: you cling so desperately to your familiar picture of the world that it cracks under the pressure. The paradox is that letting go means risking a fall, yet sometimes letting go becomes the first step back. Only you cannot do it alone: you need someone to hold the thread while your hands are busy fighting.

How it feels:

• Time ceases to be linear: the past suddenly becomes the present, and you relive old events as if they are happening right now, unable to separate them from the current moment.
• Every sound, word, or rustle takes on immense significance—you feel they are addressed directly to you, as if the world has switched to an encrypted language you must decipher.
• Your own reflection in the mirror seems like a stranger: you look at a face that should be yours, but feel no connection to it—it lives separately.
• Boundaries shrink or expand: walls may seem infinitely distant or closing in, and the floor may sway like a ship’s deck.
• You feel that those around you can read your thoughts, or that your secrets have become common knowledge—though your mind knows this is impossible, the sensation lingers.

Internal monologue:

• “Where am I? Is this my home? Why do people’s faces change so strangely—are they actors?”
• “I must remember who I am. My name. The name… Why does it slip away? I can’t hold onto it.”
• “They all know. They look at me and know I’m about to fall apart. I have to pretend to be normal. But how?”
• “If I close my eyes, the world will vanish. It exists only as long as I’m watching. Don’t you dare close your eyes.”
• “Is this a dream? Am I sleeping? Pinch yourself. No, this isn’t a dream. Then what is it?”

What others see often frightens them more than your internal state. You might suddenly fall silent mid-sentence, staring at a single point, unresponsive to anyone calling your name. Or conversely, you might start talking without pause, jumping from topic to topic so that the listener loses the thread. Your movements become strange: you could pace the same route around the room for hours, or freeze motionless like a statue. Sometimes you check the locks twenty times, or rearrange objects strictly parallel, as if casting a spell against chaos.

Your appearance changes too: you might stop caring about your clothes, wearing the same outfit day after day, or conversely, dress in layers unsuited to the weather. Your speech becomes fragmented: you break off sentences, repeat the same words, or whisper something unintelligible. Your loved ones notice that you avoid eye contact, flinch at sudden sounds, might refuse food or, conversely, eat nonstop without tasting anything. All of this is your psyche’s attempt to build some kind of barrier between itself and what has seized you.

Those around you react to insanity with an animal fear—one older than any knowledge of the psyche. People recoil, avert their eyes, cross to the other side of the street. At best, they try to “calm” you with exhortations: “Pull yourself together,” “It’s all nonsense, don’t think about it.” But these words miss their mark—they only deepen the isolation, because you understand: no one knows what is happening to you, and no one is ready to see it.

At worst, they begin to shun you, exclude you from their circle, whisper behind your back. Social media and work demand “normalcy,” and you cannot provide it—and this becomes a double bind: you fear being fired, abandoned, judged, and that fear feeds the very state itself. Sometimes loved ones, in desperation, drag you to a doctor by force, which may become a salvation but is experienced as betrayal. Insanity is loneliness in the midst of a crowd, when even the most loving person remains on the other side of an invisible glass wall.

In antiquity, insanity was perceived as an invasion of the divine or demonic. Shamans and priests saw in it a mark of chosenness—a person became a medium, a conduit between worlds. In ancient times, Democritus considered insanity a consequence of a disruption in the atomic balance of the soul, robbing a person of clarity of judgment. But by the Middle Ages, this gift had turned into a curse: possession that must be driven out with fire and prayer. The Age of Enlightenment “liberated” the insane by locking them away in asylums—for the first time, insanity became a medical problem, isolated from society.

Today we know that insanity is, above all, a loss of connection with shared reality, yet our understanding of it remains unsettled. Modern culture—with its endless stream of information, the blurring of boundaries between truth and fiction, and the cult of productivity and perfectionism—creates ideal conditions for a mental breakdown. Social media imposes multiple “selves” that cannot be synthesized, while the news feed delivers constant stress that shatters defense mechanisms. In the past, insanity was dismissed as a whim or a weakness—now we know it is the cry of our very capacity to perceive reality when the burden upon it exceeds its limit.

• Insanity vs Obsession: obsession is captivity by a single thought while the connection with reality remains intact: you still see that you are seized. Insanity is the rupture of that connection: the possession has grown so large that it has flooded the mind, and the line between delusion and reality has been erased. Obsession holds you in a vice; insanity carries you away.

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When there is too much insanity, a person loses the ability to negotiate with the world. Every event can become a trigger: a flash of light, a word from a passerby, one’s own reflection. The psyche becomes an open wound, into which any speck of dust can fall. To live like this is to constantly defend oneself against reality, until the defenses collapse one by one. In this pole, there is no expanse: only a narrow corridor of fear and obsessive ideas.

But there is another pole—when insanity is suppressed, switched off, inaccessible. A person becomes too rigid: they trust no unusual sensations, stifle their imagination, fear any deviation from the familiar routine. They live in a concrete bunker of predictability, where there is no room for dreams, spontaneity, or risk. Such suppression also speaks of fear—fear of one’s own inner chaos, which may one day breach the dam. Between these poles lies a thin line, where the psyche remains flexible: capable of enduring uncertainty, but not drowning in it.

Philosophy and traditions of different cultures have seen not only darkness in insanity. The shamanic practices of Siberia and the Americas included initiation through the “shaman’s sickness”—a state where the future healer spent days and nights in delirium, conversed with spirits, died, and was reborn. In this context, insanity was a gateway to a different kind of wisdom, accessible only to those who had undergone the dissolution of their familiar self.

Daoist and Buddhist texts describe the “great doubt”—a state where habitual categories collapse and the mind remains in emptiness, only to be reborn anew. Zen Master Hakuin spoke of the “great death” of the ego, which precedes enlightenment. In Sufism, there is the concept of “jadhbah”—the attraction of the Divine, which can appear as madness. Twentieth-century Western philosophy (Foucault, Deleuze) reimagined insanity as a resistance to the normative order—a way of seeing the world beyond the dictates of rationality. All these perspectives remind us that at the very core of insanity lies not only suffering but also the potential for transformation—if a person has the support to see it through to the end.

Literature

In the diary entries of Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” the protagonist’s mind is like a house into which an alien, icy moisture seeps. With each page, familiar reality thins, giving way to the presence of an invisible being whose will gradually supplants the narrator’s identity. This narrative captures the moment when logic finally capitulates to the realization that the boundaries of one’s own self no longer belong to the person.

Painting

In Théodore Géricault’s “Portrait of a Kleptomaniac,” madness is stripped of theatrical gestures and external chaos, appearing before us in the guise of a deep, almost intimate concentration. The subject’s gaze, fixed on emptiness, and the heavy folds of his garments create a sense of frozen time, where inner darkness has become the only true mode of existence. The artist lays bare the terrifying fragility of the human spirit, which, even when captive to obsessive torments, retains its profound, almost painful humanity.

Music

Gaetano Donizetti’s “Mad Scene of Lucia” transforms the disintegration of personality into a virtuosic dialogue between the human voice and a flute, mimicking the echo of impossible dreams. Coloratura passages soar to unthinkable heights, reflecting the fragility of a reason that seeks harmony in a world where all that was familiar has already turned to dust. Here, music ceases to be mere melody, becoming a pulsating testimony of how the mind loses its foothold in reality and begins to speak in the language of ghostly sounds.

Cinema

In Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, the protagonist’s apartment becomes a living organism, where cracks on the walls and rotting food mirror the disintegration of an inner world slowly walling itself off from people. The camera captures every nervous gesture, turning everyday household objects into instruments of torture, until the world around the heroine shrinks to the dimensions of her own isolation. Gazing at how the camera, following the heroine, penetrates a consciousness where reality begins to flake off like plaster, one can realize how thin and translucent the veil is that separates our familiar world from silent chaos.

1. Use a loved one’s breath and scent as an anchor. The most important thing is not to remain alone within it. Find someone who can simply sit beside you, without trying to cure or dissuade you. Another person’s breathing, their scent, the timbre of their voice—these small things become anchors you can grasp when your inner world begins to tremble again.
2. Stop the inner battle and ease the external irritation. Do not try to fight hallucinations or delusions—they will not disappear from argument. Instead, reduce the flow of stimulation: dim the lights, remove loud sounds, give yourself permission to lie down and close your eyes. If a loved one is nearby, ask them to speak to you in a calm voice about simple things—about the weather, about what they see out the window. Not about what is happening to you, but about what is outside you. This will help your attention detach from the inner whirlpool.
3. Take off the armor of “I can handle it” and allow yourself to be vulnerable. Madness intensifies not only from fear but also from the exhausting game of normalcy—the attempts to look composed while everything inside is falling apart. Admitting to yourself that you can’t cope is not shame, but the shedding of an unnecessary weight. It is precisely in this collapsed, unconcealed state that the psyche first gains the right to rest, without which the journey back cannot begin.

Insanity keeps a cruel rule: desperate attempts to “return to reality” push you even further away—it comes on its own when you stop demanding it. And then someone’s calm presence ceases to be a threat and becomes a guide. Sometimes emerging from these wanderings beside one who remembers where the shore is proves to be the only way not to drown in your own mind.