Metaphors of ‘Madness’: “I’m losing my mind—or maybe my head?”

Austin Keane, Fourth Year Medicine

‘Mind’ is an old word. It is a ‘supraphysical’ word: common, necessary, and widespread with meaning (Earl J. 1881: 1). The origin of the Mind ‘getting lost’ is as difficult to identify as the old word is to define. However, imagine a speaker of this metaphor: “I think I’m losing my mind.” This phrase possesses a routine lay meaning, denoting mental distress/illness, commonly characterised as ‘madness’. I argue that its widespread lay use in self-descriptive accounts exemplifies three overlapping things: a culturally-mediated individualised self; a Cartesian legacy; and confusion about the meaning of ‘madness’. 

A close reading of the phrase highlights assumptions relative to the culture that produces the metaphor—and not the specific speaker—therefore may be done. I approximate ‘mind’ (in this metaphor context) to describe an interruption in the control of cognition mediated by consciousness. While I acknowledge the broad limits of this definition, I argue they map well onto the broad images within the lay consciousness that ‘madness’ evokes (Frith C. 2016). After all, such a quality forms a lay understanding’s universality. 

The reflexive nature of ‘mind’ with its personal pronoun ‘my’ indicates not only possession but separateness, otherwise described as the ‘Western convention’ of a distinct, unique artefact, as opposed to a collective imagining of identity (Giles J. 1993). The verb form ‘lost’ affirms this: that the mind is a specific, localised entity; a single unit that can go missing. We might consider the idea of hope here: what is lost may be found; it has not been destroyed or erased. This makes sense: the mind is often accessed, or consciously experienced through practices, for example, meditation (Campion and Rocco 2009).

There is an important contradiction here. Typically, possession is binary: not here/here; lost/found. But the persistent use of the present participle (‘losing’) suggests that the process is not instantaneous, and is an illuminated halfway state. In this way, there is room for the awareness of having an altered awareness. This break in tenses, in position between illness and health states, is a common feature of ‘Illness Narratives’, and has been referred to as ‘fragmentation’ (Rimmon-Kenan S. 2002: 11). Perhaps the speaker is stuck between Sontag’s ‘Kingdoms’ of the Well and the Sick—unable to travel without a passport (1982). Otherwise, it’s an example of aporia: our speaker who says they are ‘losing their mind’ is by virtue of this an unreliable witness, an unreliable statement-maker—how to parse whether a speaker who declares ‘I am lying’ is telling the truth?

Let us vary slightly what our speaker is saying, or even in what language. In British English, “losing your mind/head” is used interchangeably. That, even in idiomatic use, the mind cannot escape conflation with the brain via the head (it contains the brain) is revealing. This is the same ‘classic’ mistake of Biomedicine in transforming mind-body divisions to body-body divisions (Scheper-Hughes N. and Lock M. 1987). Interestingly, losing the head in hiberno-english translates directly into French (je perds la tête) and Spanish (estoy perdiendo la cabeza). In Turkish, however, the equivalent literally means “I’m eating my head” (Kafayı yeycem/yiycem). To lose something holds a value judgment either of carelessness or permissible error. To eat something, however, is active, perhaps even an intentional or natural act. Cultural differences in metaphors of the body may reflect differing stigmas but needs further research as Scheper-Hughes and Lock suggested (1987).

All of these describe an embodied conflict or, as Laing describes, a ‘divided self’—a product of Cartesian thought and the focus on the ‘individual’ (1965: 44). The presence of this metaphor across different languages affirms the idea of both a confused picture of the mind-body relationship and unclear boundaries of mental distress/illness. As suggested, the metaphor has a useful function for the speaker in narratives of illness, giving room for expression even in confusion; it may even be suggestive of hope. 

‘Mind’ is an old word—and a wide one, ripe with meaning. If the speaker isn’t sure where their Mind is, what it is exactly, then there is some sense (if only poetically) in its ‘getting lost’ every now and then. 

Bibliography

• Campion, J. and Rocco, S. (2009). ‘Minding the mind: the effects and potential of a school-based meditation programme for mental health promotion’, Advancing School Mental Health Promotion, 2: 47–55
• Earle, J. (1881). ‘The History of the Word `Mind’’, Oxford University Press, 6(23): 301-320 
• Frith, C. (2016). ‘Understanding madness?’, Brain, 139(2): 635–639,
• Giles, J. (1993). The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity. Philosophy East and West, 43(2): 175–200
• Laing, R. (1965). The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness. Penguin Books.
• Rimmon-Kenan, S. (2002). ‘The Story of “I”: Illness and Narrative Identity’, Ohio State University Press, 10(1): 9-27
• Scheper-Hughes, N. and Lock, M. (1987). ‘The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1(1): 6-41 
• Sontag, S. (1991).  Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. London: Penguin Group