Wow, long time no post - it was half a year ago! But I'm back on the blog now with some thoughts about madpeople as less than human.
On the first of August, I did an Instagram review of Will MacLean's Solace House. The whole post is longer, but part of it says
"It has lots of sanism, though, which is somewhat mitigated later on but jarring when you read it. Love interest Ella talks about working a crisis hotline and how some caller was clearly psychotic, so "for all intents and purposes, no longer human". And no one needs to tell me that writers don't always agree with what their characters say because I know this already - everyone knows this already! - but characters don't speak their lines in a vacuum either. Ella is a nice person, and there's zero indication that she's supposed to voice any prejudice here.
Reminds me of lots of shit I've been told in real life, which might merit a blog post ..."
Here comes the blog post.
In 2025-2026, I had an on-off mail conversation with a philosopher from another European country who wanted to come to Umeå and work with me. Also did psych stuff, but based on different philosophical traditions. Ok, might be interesting, I thought. Finally, they had the funding to do so. And then, I took a proper look at their previously published work. I should have done so at some earlier point in our mail conversation, I know, but there's always lots to do at work and it's so easy to keep postponing things that you should do but that isn't of the deadline kind. Anyway. Turns out they had published a paper where they "analyzed" psychotic states as a regression, a devolution, a return to a primitive state of being, such that psychotic people are much more similar to snakes and other reptiles than to human beings.
Well, I mailed them and said why the fuck do you want to come work with me if this is what you think of people like me? In the same mail, I also made a dry and academic point about how setting the insult aside, what you write here is problematic because it clashes with this empirical data. But also, I'm not just gonna set the insult aside. You do know who I am and what I do, right? Since it was you reaching out to me.
I'm a philosopher of madness. I'm mad, I collaborate with other mad philosophers, I'm organizing workshops and conferences for madpeople, and we tend to regard ourselves as human beings, actually. Fully human, all the time. Not subhuman reptile creatures.
And then, this other philosopher replied and they were so upset and couldn't understand how badly I had misunderstood their paper. Because they never meant what they wrote as an insult! They didn't mean to say that people like me are subhuman reptile creatures in a bad or insulting sense, no, on the contrary, they find it very interesting how devolved and primitive people like me can get, how close we can get to "the origins of life" - that's kinda wonderful, and not insulting at all!
Yeah whatever bye forever I'm not gonna work with you. Go use your funding elsewhere.
I laugh about the absurdity of the whole thing, but yeah, it also got to me. I did feel quite insulted. In particular by the fact that this wasn't just someone's social media post or private blog. This was published in a peer-reviewed journal. More than one person had read through the stuff about psychotic people being more reptile than human, nodded their heads and been like "yeah, makes sense. Solid theory right there".
This spring, I was asked to lead a panel discussion with two other specfic authors about "madness in literature" at a culture event. As is customary, I emailed them a long text about possible conversation topics, and explained my personal interest too. Then, one of the other authors withdrew. The stated reasons were vague, but I got the impression that this author felt worried about my lived experience angle. Perhaps they felt that it wasn't their place, after all, to talk about madness, as a mere horror author who doesn't know from personal experience what it's really like. Or, they worried about putting their foot in their mouth and offending anyone. I don't know, I might be wrong, but that's the vibe I got - a sensitive person who didn't want to do the wrong thing here, and therefore preferred to withdraw. The organizers promptly replaced them with a new name. I sent the new person all the same texts, but they might not have bothered reading any of it before the panel, because boy oh boy ...
New Author goes: "Nowadays, it's not really stigmatized to have a psychiatric diagnosis anymore, right? Everyone's got a diagnosis, and openly talk about it! Write books about it! It's not like in the past, where literature dealing with madness presented it as something grotesque, like people go mad and think they're chased by demons!"
Me, without missing a beat: "Sure, many diagnoses have become more normalized, but as someone with grotesque demon madness myself, I think there's still a place in literature for dealing with this ..."
I don't remember quite how I continued the line, but I managed to tie it to some new topic and just keep on talking. As I said, without flinching or missing a beat. Because I'm so used to this kind of shit. However, I still feel insulted when people say stuff like this, even if I don't let it show. Clearly, I was sufficiently insulted to vividly remember this little exchange several months later, when writing this post.
So many people want to draw this sharp line between the pretty normal psychiatric stuff, your pretty normal ADHDers and autistics and depressives, and the grotesque ones, the ones who are no longer human. That the line exists might seem so obvious to people that they never even think to question it; they think the greatest acceptance they can show someone like me is to place us on the "right" side of the line. Like a colleague once told me (anonymously quoted in my 2023 paper "Exemption, self-exemption and compassionate self-excuse"), in a discussion about P.F. Strawson and applying "an objective attitude" to "the warped and deranged":
"That's not about you, because you're mostly normal."
Maybe I should print a t-shirt with "mostly normal" at the front and "subhuman reptile creature" at the back, or the other way around.
I'm not really as normal as people think. But I'm gonna tread carefully here ...
So, on the one hand, I manage really well. I work full time. My career is going well. I even have a burgeoning career as a fiction writer next to my academic one. I'm not even on meds anymore! I managed to get off them in 2018, and now I'm doing without! Of course, all of this does say something important about my mental health. You could define "normal" based on societal expectations of what an adult is supposed to manage - like working and making money, that's top of the list, right? nothing is deemed more important than that - and I would truly be "mostly normal" by that definition. I'm not denying any of that. But people still overestimate the extent of my normalcy.
First, once again, it truly says something about my mental health that I manage this job as well as I do - but it also says something that there are so many common jobs that I couldn't manage. As a university professor, I can works lots sometimes and next to nothing sometimes, as long as it all adds up to a sufficiently high productivity. For me, this isn't some luxury, it's what makes working full time possible at all.
Moreover, when I was still on the job market with much more baseline stress, I was on ever-increasing doses of psych drugs plus alcohol, because psych drugs alone just wasn't enough. I can only manage without now because of how stable my entire life situation has become. That includes Alexander, my husband, by the way, who still plays an important part in propping me up, and has played an enormous role in keeping me going in the past. So, I'm not nearly as self-sufficient as people imagine.
Even in my current rather idyllic state, I've come quite close to a florid relapse a few times. I blogged about this here, for instance: psych drugs food and internalized stigma People who don't keep up with either my blog or academic publications tend to assume, when I speak openly about psychosis, that I had this one stint of madness in the past when I went to psych and all, it inspired Cogwheel Souls and some philosophical writing I do now, but I fully recovered afterwards and have been normal ever since. And people who do read, say, the above blog post, still misunderstand what I mean by passages like this one:
"I had it bad this past week. Probably a bit overworked towards the end of the semester. Monday morning, when I looked in the bathroom mirror, my face looked completely skewed, like a Picasso painting. My first impulse was that I should paint it into a straighter shape with make-up. Then I thought: no, I should go about this face problem rationally. I should double-check what it looks like in other devices. I turned my phone to mirror mode and looked, and it was normal on the little phone screen. Then I turned on a Zoom meeting for one at the computer, and it was normal on Zoom as well. Only in the mirror did my face look fucked up. So I thought to myself: it's just a mirror illusion. Maybe stress-induced.
And then the week followed. For various reasons, I decided to still go to work even though I didn't do much. I had other bad experiences. I pulled out all the tricks in my bag to handle them (stuff I've written and published about, and then some). It was pretty bad, but now I'm much better. No big breakdown in the end, no disaster, I pulled through."
They think "all the tricks in my bag" would be stuff like exercise, long walks in nature, talking to Alexander or other friends, normal things people can do to feel better and more grounded. Well, I always go for long walks with my dogs and regularly work out at the gym. I'm sure this is good for my mental health, but it's no special trick that can help with crises like the one described above. When it comes to socializing and talking to others, I instinctively pull back from that when in a bad state.
When I say "all the tricks in my bag" I mean weirder shit. But that's another reason I still manage without meds ... I went to therapy for my own money in 2019. The therapist convinced me that I needed to ditch the little "madness cop" constantly sitting on my shoulder and telling me what's sufficiently normal to be allowed, vs what's too mad and must not be done! I should think in terms of helpful or not, rather than normal or not.
So. When the above happened, skewed-face-in-the-mirror and all that shit, I became terrified of leaving the house, going to work, being around lots of other people. I remember Alexander was at work already when this happened. Only me and the dogs at home. I had figured out my face wasn't actually skewed, but I still felt terrified. The thought of others seeing me, interacting with me - no! On the one hand, going out, going to work, felt impossibly frightening. On the other hand, I thought that if I don't do this, I'm gonna be paralyzed by fear, I will get stuck in this state, stuck at home ...
The situation felt hopeless. Like I also talk about in the linked blog post above, I thought that I'd have to go back on the meds, but not only that, I thought I'd probably have to be wheeled away to psych again. Because I couldn't act on my own anymore.
And then I thought no, I have one more option - I can ask Alberta and Glenn what to do.
Alberta and Glenn are voices in my head. I've had auditory hallucinations too, on-off during my life, which sound exactly like normal voices or other normal sounds, so I will only think of them as hallucinations if something tips me off that no one else can hear them (most obvious: if I ask Alexander and he says no, nothing). Alberta and Glenn are different, because they're only inside my head. Also, they're nice and helpful, not evil bullies like my demons. They developed some time after I got this job, when my mental health was improving (probably why they're so helpful). Now, I thought: Alberta and Glenn come from my mind, and therefore, they might know a lot about what's going on in there, and also have some good suggestions for how to solve my problem. So, I should ask them what to do.
Unfortunately, at first, this also seemed like a dead end. The inside of my head was so stuck, so paralyzed, that nothing could be heard in there. Besides my own thoughts, there was nothing, quiet like the grave. But I wasn't ready to give up just yet. Instead, I tried putting my hands on the keyboard and then withdraw from my body. Like Lovisa, in Cogwheel Souls: Your body is nothing but flesh, nothing but cogs and wheels and springs. Only your soul is you. And then, contract the soul, make it smaller and smaller till it's absolutely tiny, just a speck deep inside the brain. Wait and see what the body will do - what the hands will do - when left to their own devices.
I waited and waited and eventually, my hands did write down a message from Alberta and Glenn. They always spell like shit and press the space bar in the wrong places, but it's still readable. They said: remember that no one can see you. All they can see is your flesh. They can see your face, but they can't see you. They can't hear you either, if you don't say anything, if you merely let the mouth talk on autopilot when it has to. You can stay quiet and hidden deep inside the skull while your body goes to work and sits around other people. You can stay protected by the shield of flesh which is your face, and leave all interactions to the body.
I thought wow, this is some good advice. I can do this! What a relief! Then, I sent a message to Alexander, briefly explaining things. He said yeah, you should probably listen to Alberta and Glenn, it will be fine.*
So, that's what was behind "all the tricks in my bag". Not just going for a walk or calling a friend.
Now I'm gonna quote myself again, from my 2023 paper "a wide-enough range of 'test environments' for psychiatric disabilities":
"I believe that we often focus too much on stigma and not enough on other problems when discussing environmental obstacles that psychiatrically disabled people face. Nevertheless, destigmatization is important. But it’s worth asking, with Aftab and Rashed (2021), what it means for an environment to be fully destigmatized. People often assume that there’s no stigma if a psychiatrically disabled person can disclose their condition without facing negative reactions or consequences for so doing. However, information campaigns and medical advice sites often take a narrow view on what proper disclosure should look like. Australian government-funded website Health Direct advises psychiatrically disabled people on what they can do to help decrease the stigma: ‘If you have bipolar disorder, say “I have bipolar disorder”, not “I’m bipolar”. If you convince yourself first that you’re a person, not a walking illness, others will find it easier to see you that way too’. This is quite typical advice from this kind of site. You’re supposed to explain to people that you’re essentially a normal person like everyone else, except that you carry this regrettable illness around.
There’s nothing wrong with seeing your psychiatric condition as something you have which is distinct from who you are if that works for you (Jeppsson, 2022a). But it doesn’t suit everyone; an environment in which this is the only way one may disclose without facing backlash is still severely stigmatizing for many people.
I can’t honestly say that I’m a pretty normal person who merely has schizo-something. I’m mad, that’s who I am. I wasn’t fully aware of how constricted I felt when I still kept one foot in the closet because I was afraid of discrimination. But since I got job security and fully came out, it’s been an enormous relief and boost for my self-esteem. An environment isn’t stigma-free until it’s perfectly okay, not only to say that you have a psychiatric condition, but also okay to be mad, to be neurodivergent, and, in general, to be as weird as you need to be."
Proper destigmatization can't happen as long as you continue to uphold a line between the mostly normal people with a diagnosis and the truly subhuman crazies. Nor is it ultimately helpful to attempt to move more and more individuals to the "mostly normal" box, as long as you continue to contrast it against the other one. People gotta come to grips with the fact that someone can be, simultaneously, pretty fucking weird and a real person, fully human, at the same time.
*Alexander also asked, by the way, if Alberta and Glenn are from Gothenburg? At least the name
"Glenn" is strongly associated with Gothenburg in Sweden. Sorry, I have
no idea. I did have a job in Gothenburg while I was spiraling downwards
and then Alberta and Glenn both appeared when I had gotten a new job
and moved. I don't know. Maybe this means something. Then again, maybe
not. Are there any psychoanalysts reading this blog? Do you have any ideas?
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