one of the various end credit comments from the show "Two and a Half Men" written by Chuck Lorre.

We're all mad it seems. Or are we? it's difficult to define mad precisely, but we do know when someone is loopy...

Humans are a peculiar species. We're mostly weirdoes and eccentrics within a range of socially accepted variables and tricks — most as important as a car passing-by in the street. We don't know where it's coming from nor where it's going to, but we chase and bark like dogs at it. Some of our inhibitors are like this: annoyingly noisy and irrelevant. Some others, we've learned early in life, we don't touch because it's hot and it burns... We are forcibly told we need to drive according to the rules. We mostly do.

We've got bile to vent off — and we have love to give. We do it with some conviction, hesitation and/or fear of rejection — or full of booze...

Most of us have hopes that can't be fulfilled and grand delusions about one self. We dream of "happiness" but happiness is most likely going to be hard work. We tend to limit our knowledge of complexities — such as science and mathematics— as it demands an effort that our brain has difficulty with learning such stuff, yet we'll learn useless trivia about a pop star... All this mix of behaviour and hopes makes us "normal" or not. We're normal if we live "successfully" (survive) in this (these) social system that itself has many faults, quirks and benefits — as long as we're not hurting anyone — including our self. We're mad if our rate of failure makes us unable to psychologically care for our self or if we hurt other people.

Some of us believe in things that can't be quantified, qualified or simply don't exist, yet we still fit in — because some studied deceptive sections of our systems make us believe in things that don't exist...  Madness could thus relate to the failure of management of our memory and/or the lack of it —through defective states-of-mind-shifts (emotions). Amongst all this, we also have the ability to lie. We can lie to our self or we can lie to others... Lying is one of the most amazing skill somewhat peculiar to the human species. Yet this ability born from nature's ways to deceive and from our memory management is often at the source of mental health problems when we cannot discern between the lies and the reality within. Not only we can lie but we learn to lie cleverly. Lying can lead to improvement in status, but often to the detriment of — and in conflict with — our own "integrity"... This lying ability imprinted in our memory management can also lead to false memory syndrome. We have room for "healthy" cynicism... but when we don't trust anything anymore, we're in for a rough ride.

As well as psychological deficiencies, there are also various trauma-induced distress and depression. And there are times when we are simply not the master of our own mind.

Overall, we busy ourselves, like squirrels collecting nuts to store in underground locations for winter ... and this could be the only sane thing we do. But too often we raid the future on credit, because "we think or feel we've never have enough". We are made to think this way. The human species is the least satisfied species on earth, yet the most prolific, and the most devastating plague on the planet... We envy what others have and, from our field of red tulips, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. We get bored easily and we crave the "new", but not so big a change that could be overwhelming or confusing...

Change is only accepted in the range of "normal" as long, as we are comfortable — or made comfortable (advertising works on this). Some ants collect debris to feed larvae of other animals to feed upon, in their nests. Bees make honey out of pollen and nectar. They know how to do this so well that they produce the stuff in excess — in order for the colony to grow and split into new hives. They have been doing it for millions of years. We rob them in five minutes.

Of all the things humans do that are most insane, are wars and the harbour of desires to destroy, hate and steal. In order to do this without too much "moral" psychological conflict, we invent wicked social codification that makes us accept this insanity: honour, bravery, courage, motherland, martyrdom, glory, etc. What works in one culture is insane in another. Most of us operate, though, in the safe zone of follow the lead and don't ask questions... This does not mean that we are sane, because some leaders are insane and following them is "insane". Hitler had his many followers...

So, what makes humans successful and insane at the same time?

Our behaviour is reliant on many factors: perception, memory, interpretation, acceptance, rejection, pain. contentment, aggressiveness, submission, inducted social "values" including money, relationships, faith, beliefs, understanding, status, as well as our internal dialogue in which we "discuss" consciously and subconsciously our actions and reactions. We also accumulate "rubbish" — knowledge and/or information that has no bearing on our well-being and can often confuse us by being contrary to reality and/or our decisions to be.

There is a hardware and software component in all these factors, multiplying the possibility of failure. Our hardware is the nervous system, especially the brain, in which cholesterol plays a part in supplying serotonin (a neurotransmitter).

Dopamine (another neurotransmitter) is also an essential ingredient amongst many. Pituitary hormone is also essential for the rest of the body to function properly. Too little or too much of these substances and the brain can go into a spin. On the software side, our belief stack may be faulty and include erroneous information, deliberately or accidentally picked up... Thus we can become adept at lying or at misunderstanding. On top of all this, we can indulge in behaviour modifying substances or in consciousness altering drugs — including caffeine. We are at the mercy of input of information and of chemicals. Too many things can go wrong, yet the system is stable, more often than not. Memory (the delta shift of memory is our consciousness) is the core of all these "components"...

My first encounter with "mad" people was from afar, when my grandfather took our family to see a local cycling race in a village adjacent to our own small town. There was a working windmill on the left of the road and to the right, across a small dirt track, there was a strongly fenced-off area — like a secret military compound. I saw them behind it. Dressed in dark grey linen coats, about forty people were walking, slowly, heavily, with their gaze affixed to the ground. Their backs were hunched. My mother said something like: "Verrukt!" with a sign to the the head indicating a problem which I did not understood straight away. With some explanation I thus understood "madness"... They were "mad" people. I was five years old.

We had in our street a young man of forty-plus "who was a bit simple", was still living with his mother and and did not understand much. Same thing: he was called "mad" but he was docile and his mum was rich enough to provide care for him. The others people behind the fence were kept in an asylum as they "could have been dangerous" (or came from poor families)... Apparently they were allowed to go for a walk every Sunday, within the greater perimeter of the place, under the surveillance of armed guards and nurses.

My second major encounter with loopy was when my parents sent me to see one of my aunts in another town. They'd organised for me to take a night ride with a travelling country salesman, Nillich (not his real name). Half way through the trip, Nillich had a nervous breakdown... We nearly drove into a ditch. And nearly hit a tree. He managed to carry on to a small village and there he stopped. He cried and cried, crouched by the side of the petrol pump. His wife had left him, his business was tanking and his big dog, next to his samples on the back seat, had just spewed an ugly lunch... The smell in the car was putrid... And it was raining. I was ten years old. I did not know what to do... Communication in those days was pretty basic... But people around were nice and helpful... An old couple going in the same direction offered to deliver me to the front door where my aunt lived. I never saw Nillich ever again...

After this I saw quite a few mad people, some drowning, some falling off bicycles, mostly from alcoholism induced madness,  others from being simply "stupid" and those who 'flew the cuckoo's nest...

Six years later, it was my own turn to go loopy... I remember how my "drive" caved in. As if my "metabolic will" disappeared. Then, a few weird moments of alertness waiting to die. When I realised I was still kicking, I saw a shape pass by... I recognised it: a tree had passed by... I was being driven home in a car. Though recognising a tree was a moment of reckoning from having lost cognition, it took me more than a year and a half to be half-"normal". Then I came to a startling conclusion: I had to reorganise my life according to what I believed it should be, not what people nor religion told me... The Catholics and the Protestants had made life too weird since I was young, with stories and rituals that made no sense and contained no reality...

For the following ten years I was more or less devoid of emotional responses to trauma — my own and that of others. I became like a machine... That was my own decision. It was self-protection, not selfishness, but very few people understood that. My mind knew the pathway to deep depression and I swore to myself: never again. Once trail-blazed, the pathway to depression — and especially that of the loss of cognition is easy to take... We're creatures of habits and depression can become a habit. Let me show you how it's easy to loose track of reality... No, I won't. You don't need to know. One can become "bipolar" in this rough ride of ups and downs if one let it go on for too long. We thus compound the chemical imbalance in the brain.

The fact is that external events that we perceive and the processing of those do "normally" affect that chemical balance of the brain (in which our "memory" and our reactivity is contained).... In general this balance is in a stable flux, but when some events create a strong trauma, our brain chemical reaction may not be up to the task of maintaining stability. We can brood in conflict. Our hormonal balance may also become off-skew. It can take days to fall down the hole. It took me about thirty seconds. As my brain shut down, I collapsed on the floor. It was not loosing consciousness but loosing cognition: the ability of our memory to relate perceptions with "knowledge". Apparently I was taken to the sick bay where I laid crouched up — like Alan Harper in "Two and a Half Men" when he discovers his life is worth shit (see illustration at top taken from one of T&aHM episode). I feel a certain affinity there. I have been on that bed... Often that pathway to depression involves trauma and delusions, but the way out of it also involves delusions and possible trauma. It's uncanny...

These were the days when there was no pills, no Valium nor Prozac... Thus getting out of it was a to perform a "memory trick".

At sixteen, I was thus a teenager — that time between 12 and 25 years of age when the human brain "restructures" itself. This is also the time when some other mental disorders tend to take hold, such as schizophrenia. My parents were worried.

The list of what can go wrong away from "normal" behaviour in the mind is long and I am prepared to believe that most "madness" (mental health problems) though grouped in specific categories, are peculiar to each person, due to the degree of damage versus the ability of the brain to fix itself or not — and of previous education level on which the strength of disturbance will imprint on the memory... Often in order for repair to our psychological/chemical turmoil, we need to be looked after, because in most such "mad" situation we are unable to look after our self... We need to be cocooned. Our original trauma and its trigger need to be dealt with, either by a psychiatrist (shrink) or by the self. Compassionate relatives and friends provide support such as food and safety. Anything else like "advice" can become vastly irritating. Priest would love to put their hands on the "lost soul" but they only offer the wrong kind of delusions when one is focused on truly understand and grasp life as it is.

Some people are in their own mental disturbance for life... They need constant care. This is an area where humans are different from other animals: We care for the sick and the unfit.

Art can be swimming in madness... Many young new artists seek a form of madness to be "original". But often they only come with innocuous images of monkeys with rabbit ears, or such... Sure it's fun but, yawn, only worthy of a cartoon not a lifetime dedication, though it could become a stupidly forced obsession. One cannot enforce madness, though brainwashing can make sane people do insane things and believe in unreality.

Was Van Gogh mad? Possibly. He was desperate enough to push his artistic style in one direction without being able to provide for his supper — because no-one understood what he was doing and he was obsessed with what he was doing... Mental inability of caring for oneself is a relative form of madness if one is still physically strong enough to care. Lucky, Van Gogh's brother took care of him as much as he could, until Van Gogh "took his own life"...  The art scene is full of pretend mad people and many artists will indulge in psychotic drugs in order to be so, but often drugs only channel a poor understanding of life while threatening our mechanical life. For me, art should be about expressing the understanding of as much as possible of the mechanical gamut of life — including bio-mechanics — via relative visions of stylised images, music or words. I could be mad...

The "Art Brut" is the art of the deranged. There is a fantastic museum in Lausane, Switzerland, that houses a collection of artwork coming from asylums around the world. Mad people were given pens and paints to express whatever was in their head. The result is amazing, but disturbing: madness is so close to "normal" with a thin twist.

I remember one of the artists who repeated the same complex image over and over like duplicates but with some small variation as if his memory had shifted between works — a little. Another artist did a drawing in small bits on a huge 300 metres roll of craft paper that he rolled back for the drawing never to be see again. The Art Brut is also called "outsider Art" in England but this name also includes the peculiar and the eccentric rather that just the "mad".

Salvador Dali was not mad but brilliantly insane with a purpose of dislodged purpose, like many other surrealists. he was able to pluck images from the mainstream into his dreams and vice versa. His famous work known as "Les Montres Molles" ( La Persistence de la Memoire — "The Soft Watches" really titled "the Persistence of Memory")  shows how he grasped the concept of the elasticity of time which was, at the time, at the centre of the dissemination of Einstein's work on relativity.

Thus most madness comes from the deficiencies of our memory and of the many processing thereof. It has it's own bio-mechanics that resonates "wrongly" with our actions, reactions and inaction. We can become inactive or dangerously active...

Then comes the law. Hey, here come "temporary insanity" "crimes of passion" which are grey areas of the law and other stuff such as when one makes a will: I, undersigned, sane of mind and free of spirit gives my fortune (or debt) to...

A few weeks ago, that grand (now old) man of politics, Neville Wran, 80+something, was pushed into a strange corner. From what I understood, apparently his wife, Jill, whom he loves dearly, wanted to have declared him "kind of not fully mentally fit" so she could have power of attorney over his (and hers) affairs... They have quite a bit of property and business which he has managed very well for a long time... Miffed (I heard all this on the grapevine — it could be wrong), he moved out of his Woollahra home and set himself up in a fully-furnished fully-serviced apartment in the Toaster, near the Opera House — though he still loves his other half... It's complicated, like the movie. Why should I care? Well, both are lovely people, him a hard-nosed no bullshit politician, her a very dedicated capable woman... and it's a strange drama set in the sunset of life... Will we ever go there is the subtext? Doing so I believe Neville wanted the people of his circle of interaction to know that he had all his marbles and was able to count them. Why should I care again? It's a human story and we learn from other humans trauma. We're so good at learning their problems that sometimes they become our own... We're in trouble waters from there. More false memory syndrome....

Thus the list of "mad" is long, from depression which is a form of loosing the plot to other psychotic disorders where the plot is confused, seen from multiple wrong angles, via phobias in which we freak out at seeing real things, while other disorders make us see unreality.

I don't fear spiders. But when I am too close to some species of spiders, especially hunting spiders, I have a kind of an annoying ear-buzz. It's reactive. There is nothing I can do about the buzz in my ear which in turn makes my spine chill. But I don't fear spiders... So there is a primeval reason or an early memorised moment in my life that sparks this uncontrollable reaction.

I often talk to myself aloud.

I sometimes use a meaningless language, in which sounds are not related to "knowledge" but to expression only. When I do some works I will go in a trance... I will also swear loud when something is not working as It ought to. It psychological: Swearing dispels the memory of that small temporary failure. Within seconds of swearing, "come on! You can f@#$%^&* do better!" the problem is fixed. All is sweet. Amazing?... It's a manipulation of the possibility of success and the dismissal of failure in relation to what we feel against what we can do. It can appear insane but it works for me.

And there is the plain dumb. Life is cruel and sometimes dishes out very low level of understanding to some of us. One of the most cruel life's degradation is dementia of whatever kind, in which our "memory is slowly being erased".

The social structure which is designed to deal with mental health issues has to deal with all this variety. With efficiency, at all levels and, as much as possible, without being sued. In short, there are a lot of hoops and barriers to minimise the expenditure on "treatments", maximise the efficiency of the system of "adequate care" and lower the risks of law suits. This is dealt in several ways. For example there are Public Offices designed to strictly sort out and manage the financial affairs of some mad or mentally incapacitated people AND there is a public mental health system, mostly designed to deliver the right pills to the right patients at the lowest cost possible. There are also some charitable and private organisation that deal with mental health problem. But in general, despite much success, the whole lot is inadequate for some patients.

In most cases, the public system cannot afford too many shrinks. I know a few people for which their shrinks is fully paid for by the system, as it should... But dealing with "mad" people — basically persons in the full-on loopy side of humanity — is not always fun...  This can lead to 'burn-out" of very dedicated nurses as its hard yakka, and nurses can have their own ideas on treatment of patients — as patients are still people. I guess the system is built on average of treatments available from pharmaceuticals — not on specific educated relationships, which nurses cannot avoid, unless they were robots.

There is of course the side effects related to drugs. No drug to cure an illness is ever perfect. I knew people on cholesterol lowering drugs that were going completely loopy...  As well I know of some psychoanalysts and shrinks who indulge in illegal "recreational" drugs to relax... "Not allowed" to take on board patients problems, drug addiction becomes the only way they can deal with the stress. I know, I don't mind indulging in some red ned, in moderation of course, to "relax" or change my own mind set.

Amongst all this, there is lurking danger. Some mental health patients are mad and dangerous. It has happened that nurses have been killed by mad patients. But since the days of "asylum" institution in this country have been terminated, it's either hospital, prison or half-way housing... and a visit from the nurse on pill day...

With the utmost alertness from nurses and doctors, some patients' dangerous traits can escape detection. The media will froth up the problem as a massive systematic problem when it's a local failure that can be fixed by a small tweak of the system. Otherwise, can we go back to the days of barbed-wired asylums?...

I place in the lot of mad people, suicide bombers, whose cultural brainwashing has driven their survival of the self away from proper care through well-crafted illusions — dished out by their leaders. Soldiers on the other end are trained to kill with blood on their hands and survive, while not feeling much about what they do. But they often feel later on... As shown on the shooting from a US helicopter in Iraq, there is a certain amount of cynicism needed to deal with the act of killing. It's back to the top of this story in which wars can be glorified, while guts are spilled. Our leaders can appear sane but are sometimes totally psychopathic or sociopathic. For me, Julia Gillard is the most sane leader we've had for a long time, though I could be wrong... Yet most of the media persecute her as if she was the devil. Bob Hawke was a drunk, John Howard was devious, Tony Abbott is even more devious, often idiotic while trying to show 'sane" while he is fully untrustworthy.

So as we raise above our animality though complex stylised social interactions, the range of "normal" and of "mad" has grown. For example I would suggest that many shock-jocks should be institutionalised for using free-speech to promote rubbish. They are expert at selecting the bits that suit their agenda, while knowingly twisting the truth. That's lying, That's mad. That is dangerous, especially on the subject of global warming.

In general the mental health system will always be underfunded as mental health is a growing undefined complex areas of care. Most mental health care workers, doctors and nurses, are very dedicated to make things work despite what some of them see as a problematic contrary system, possibly designed to cover management' s arses. Only the people who deal directly with the "mad"  can tell us what we should be doing more to minimise madness and take care of mad people in our midst... And these carers also need more holidays than most of us, to enable them to cope more efficiently with the bottom of the barrel. It's action/reward dynamics helping wadding in the slosh of humanity...