Listen to thisSurrounded by strangers
All my friends are gone
I ain't had the blues yet today but
I can feel them coming on
Everywhere I go trouble's all I find
No matter what I do I feel like
I'm losing my mind
Govt Mule
If you are losing your mind, be sure and lose the
parts that need losin’
John Trudell
To lose one’s mind is generally a pretty unpleasant and unnerving experience. It encompasses all sorts of experiences in which a person’s ability to reason in a conventional manner appears to fail. Extremes in emotion or aberrant thought are often described as insanity or going insane. Or in another term, the insane are said to have lost their mind. If we encounter people who are behaving in ways that are incomprehensible to us, we might also say they have lost their minds. Indeed, pretty much every day that I look around at the society in which we live, I can be found muttering under my breath, “we have lost our damn minds.”
The uses and variations of the phrase are generally somewhat pithy. It doesn’t carry the weight or stigma of mental illness or psychiatric diagnoses. Many times, it is a statement of frustration at the level of fractured or strained social relations when someone is behaving in a way that is very frustrating to us. It is an indication that irritating or unsettled behaviors have crossed a line where the ability to talk together about a shared world view has become difficult or even seemingly impossible.
So, in a number of key ways the description of losing your mind is
more social than clinical. Indeed, mental health professionals,
therapists, counselors, and trained CYC workers would probably shy away
from describing their clients as having lost their minds. It is not
something you would find in a case note, although it might be a
description used in frustration in supervision or at the end of shift
debriefing. At some level, it is an older mode of speech that precedes
the clinical language of professional management of human distress. It
is colloquial, that is to say familiar and informal, founded in the ways
we speak to each other in daily life. As such, it might well hold
insights into our experience of the world that run under the surface of
the sanitized veneer of mental health.
The experience of losing one’s
mind can be messy, untidy, and to some degree ineffable. The confusion
and disorientation that accompanies the unsettling of a centered and
defined consciousness doesn’t lend itself easily to external order or
control. To lose one’s mind seems to have an implicit loss of
self-control as well. This diminishing of the ability to manage
ourselves in our interactions internal and external can be quite
challenging and a bit frightening.
Tchiki Davis in her column in Psychology Today “click here for happiness” describes losing your mind as feeling as though your mind has been hijacked. She attributes a sense of being “frazzled” to the stresses of modern day living such as the pandemic, encounters with demanding technology, and the stress of a 24/7 connection to work. This state of high anxiety can impact on our productivity, our irritability, and even cause us physical distress. She suggests that under these conditions we want to get our mind back and that there are science-based strategies that can help us do that.
There are two things that I would suggest about Dr. Davis’ approach to losing our mind and how to get it back. In the first instance, the description she gives of having our mind hijacked is quite evocative. Such a viewpoint would imply that there is an external force that is stealing our minds, like hijacking a car with some degree of force. I would suggest that in the context of our contemporary society, there is some merit in this description.
The world of virtual capitalism is absolutely reliant on the extraction and appropriation of our creative capacities in order to produce the virtual worlds of e-commerce and social media. To suggest that such appropriation of our intellectual and social labor might feel as though our minds are being highjacked seems quite apt. There can be a powerful sense of disorientation associated with a loss of control over how our thoughts are being extracted and manipulated to the purposes of e-commerce and social control. In this sense, losing our minds is a disturbingly accurate portrayal of having our minds stolen.
My second thought is that the idea that we get our mind back through science driven strategies seems a bit facile. At best, we might get some control over our visceral reaction to being covertly manipulated by the dominant social. That is to say, that we might get some degree of symptom management, but little remedy for the disease itself. To become less uncomfortable with the symptoms accompanying the traumatizing experience of unacknowledged theft of our very thoughts and creative impulses might bring us a sense of peace, but at what cost? The question of symptom relief raises the larger question as to the function of the symptom. In other words, is the process of losing our minds a warning that something has gone amiss?
The role of the symptom in how we approach making sense of discomfort of varying types can be read from several different perspectives. In the most common reading, the symptom is an indication that something has gone wrong at the level of the individual body. This may well be because our awareness of the discomfort caused by the symptom is registered at the level of conscious awareness. That is, we become aware that the body is signaling a problem at the level of mind. It is a cognition that translates the physical description of the body’s discomfort into awareness, “that hurts.”
This gets more complicated if the pain occurs at the level of cognition i.e., I am losing my mind. Davis describes the relation of the mind under these circumstances as a certain kind of internalized loss of control. “We often feel at the mercy of our mind—it always seems to go running off wherever it wants.” Here, Davis makes an interesting separation between our self and our mind that is implied in the phrase losing my mind. She suggests that this relationship between self and mind is an extension of the relationship of the self to the body. “But at the core, our brain is just another body part, and ultimately, we have control over our body parts. So how might we stop our brains running off just like we might stop our body running off?”
This assertion that we have control over our body parts and ipso facto control over our minds is deeply rooted in western notions of the colonial self. The idea that human beings have control over their minds and bodies is foundational to the idea that settler subjects have control over the rest of nature. In this framework, the symptom of losing one’s mind is an indication that there has been a loss of control and domination of our body. In this way of thinking, it is centrally important to exercise dominion over the physical aspects of lives. We can and must control the body and by extension our thoughts/mind as part of our body.
I would argue that there are a number of fallacies here. Not the least of which is the claim that we can control our body parts. In fact, the great majority of our body parts operate fully outside our conscious control as part of our autonomic nervous system. Our heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, arteries and so on function without our conscious interference. Indeed, if we try to stop breathing or stop our heart from beating, we will discover pretty quickly how little conscious control we have over the body. It is a dangerous illusion that we are in charge of our bodies. It is far more complicated than that, although perhaps the simplest indication of the body’s autonomy can found at the moments of malfunction or pain. Anyone who has experienced intense or chronic pain can testify to how little control we actually have over what the body can and will do under duress.
Similarly, we hold strongly in western culture to the belief that we can control our thoughts. This is the basis of any number of therapeutic interventions. But I would argue that this is also a bit too easy. Our thoughts are the product of a remarkably complex ecology of chemical and electrical impulses that extend throughout the body and its outside environment. In addition, to the degree our thoughts are framed in language, they arise out of a collective ecology of meaning constantly morphing and changing in response to an ever shifting social and material environment. The conscious awareness that we deploy when we appear to control out thoughts is the end product of a long string of complex interactions over which we actually have very little control. So much of what is being produced as the thought and perception that is motivating our actions and who we believe ourselves to be is happening at speeds and complexities well beyond the capacity of our conscious awareness. This is why what we know is always so tentative and fragile and may be why we spend so much of our lives shoring up an ever eroding set of beliefs and ideas that have become habitual.
It is in this latter sense that losing one’s mind may have a certain utility. It may be that the experience of losing one’s mind might well be a symptom. Perhaps a symptom that who we have been and what we have believed no longer work for us. That, we need to come apart a little, so that we can begin the process of reconfiguring who we are becoming. If that is so, then psychotherapeutic techniques designed as controlling our thoughts are quite likely to miss the opportunity unregulated thought might offer. The attempt to calm and recenter ourselves may only cover over the symptom so that we no longer feel its urgency and can return to a way of living that may not really work for us. Losing our minds may have more possibility than the acute levels of distress may indicate.
Of course, if we stay in a state of chaos too long or fail to be attentive to what our disorientation might offer, losing our minds can be quite destructive. Once the process has begun to take us apart, it might well be very important to begin to think about what parts of us we want to retain and what we might want to let go. The quote at the beginning of this column about being careful to lose the parts of your mind you want lose is a very important insight. To lose your mind in this way is to think about who you are with a very different sense of control. To reshape ourselves by letting ourselves go, requires the ability to discover what naturally belongs to us and what has been imposed on us. When we lose our minds our tendency is to want to put ourselves back together in the way we understood ourselves before. But what if in losing our minds we had the opportunity to creatively discover a new pattern that has more capacity for life and living. To do that, we would have to overcome a great deal of fear and anxiety associated with feeling out of control and find the courage to be ok with not being ok for a minute.
Of course, for those of us who work in CYC this coming apart is an ongoing process for the young people with whom work. Regrettably, there are a lot of adult and professional descriptions that see this coming apart as something to be managed and brought under control. Young people are seen as incomplete adults who will sort themselves out over time and learn self-control and emotional regulation. While both tools are useful, to center adult life in them is a kind of death sentence. Instead, we might learn something from young people that we may have forgotten, and that is how to create and recreate yourself, as life creates and recreates itself without surcease. In that sense, to lose your mind is a sign of potentially life enhancing transition that refreshes those aspects of ourselves that we tend to lose track of in our pursuit of adulthood. Instead of becoming perpetual adults perhaps we might lose our minds now and again and as Bob Dylan says “ build a ladder to the stars, And climb on every rung” and stay forever young.
