On Going Insane
Hello, everyone!
I’ve been away for a bit while putting the finishing touches on my latest novel. Now I am in the arduous process of peeking under rocks and peering inside nooks, crannies and the like for an agent/editor willing to champion it. So, I thought I would take a little break from writing fiction and come back to substack for a while to keep the writing part of my brain from atrophying.
Just a reminder, my novel HELP ME I AM IN HELL is still sitting over there at amazon and if you feel so inclined I’d appreciate it if you left me a review.
As always I’m still reading a lot and I wanted to give a quick plug for this book I just finished called THE COMPLICATIONS: ON GOING INSANE IN AMERICA by Emmett Rensin.
I actually first heard about this on the BLOCKED AND REPORTED podcast where Rensin was interviewed just prior to the book’s release and I’d highly recommend having a listen. The book is one of the most blunt memoirs on mental illness that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them. Mostly I find them to be tales of what I like to refer to as “quaint despair,” which includes authors like Hermann Hesse, Virginia Woolf and Syvia Plath. By quaint despair I don’t necessarily intend to denigrate it. I fully understand the impulse to write about one’s mental illness in a way that is palatable to a reader and won’t isolate the writer from friends and family should they discover the truth about the author’s condition. These kinds of memoirs and novels are great for “reducing stigma” which seems to be what most people care about these days. But they fail to really illuminate the WHAT IT’S LIKE to be insane to those who are unafflicted. Which is partially why Rensin chose to write this book in the first place.
The book is written as a series of essays ranging in style and tone from personal narrative to informational/contextual to philosophical treatise.
It all starts straight-forwardly enough. Rensin describes himself as a very lucky person. This might be a strange statement considering he is a paranoid schizophrenic. But it gets at something much deeper. He is lucky because of how unclear it is what, exactly, separates him from the insane man who gets killed on the street by a police officer, or the insane man who murders his whole family and must spend the rest of his life in prison. He could have very easily become one of those stories, and yet he hasn’t. The reason? Luck. He’s had plenty of opportunities to find himself in such situations, yet he lives on.
Rensin was a weird kid growing up, a little off-putting. Others didn’t really like him but he insinuated himself into various social circles regardless. But then he experienced a psychological break in his teen years which led him to four different psychiatrists, all of whom failed him. Finally he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and put on a regimen of medication that sometimes helps him and often doesn’t.
Over the years he has been beat up, but never shot. He has been arrested, but he always has ended up in the hospital or back at home, never prison. He once broke into someone’s apartment, sure that he lived there and refusing to leave, and the man who woke to find him standing over him in bed did not pull out a gun and shoot him, but merely screamed until he ran away. At nineteen God commanded Rensin to drive his car into a freeway median and die. But his car bounced off the barrier and careened into another car. The damage to the other car was bad. A foot to the right and he could have killed the driver. Had there been a backseat passenger, that person would have died. But when he told police his brakes went out on the icy roads, they believed him.
He once had a friend, Marlon, who was also insane. Marlon killed himself.
Though Rensin was not diagnosed until he was seventeen, up until then there had always been cracks.
Once, when he was eight, he drew stars in the fog of the shower door for hours. Every kind of star. If he didn’t, “the earth would come up through the pipes and swallow me.”
Between the ages of 9 and 13 he rarely spoke. When he did start speaking, he spoke too much.
He became intensely focused on warm car windows and cold chair arms.
His grades slipped every year he was in high school. He spent much of his time aimlessly driving around Los Angeles, a city that “felt impossibly large and very small at once.”
He was often an asshole. Or at least, those closest to him thought he was. He was aloof and confrontational at the same time.
A few months after his friend Marlon committed suicide he came to believe that his thoughts did not come from inside his head.
He began to enjoy stealing things, but only small, insignificant things that held no value.
He went an entire semester at university where he did not leave his apartment.
He told people he wasn’t a real person.
Once, he sat up all night in the kitchen gripping a knife, trying to work up the courage to murder a roommate he thought was conspiring against him. But then morning came and he put the knife a way.
Another time he became convinced he could kill someone he didn’t like with his thoughts, and he tried. He actually tried. This may seem incidental, but it’s not. If he had the ability, that person would be dead now. The only reason he’s not dead is because thoughts don’t kill people. If he had the same notion to kill but with a gun, it’s very likely Rensin would be in prison now. He really did intend to kill the man.
He discusses more broadly what Freddie deBoer has referred to as the “gentrification of disability,” (EVERYONE SHOULD TAKE A MOMENT TO READ THIS) whereby in an effort to “reduce stigma” activists have tried to “normalize” psychiatric conditions in a way that is harmful to those with the severest cases because rather than offering the kind of help and social assistance that would allow these people to live fuller, more fulfilling lives, they instead denigrate psychiatry and instantiate mental illness into the collective culture. Rather than it being a rare form of psychological disturbance, everyone can now claim to have some form of mental illness which they can then go on to share on social media in order to “reduce the stigma” of their condition with no real understanding of what that means to the severest cases, those with delusions that can lead to murder or other violent crime. The issue with being insane (this is the term Rensin uses) is that there is a coherent logic to one’s mental state that is at odds with reality in a way that is very difficult to understand from the outside.
There is a common belief that outside of mundane motives—greed, jealousy, revenge—one must be insane to commit a violent crime. But there is a difference between the insane and the Insane. The insane criminal has an unreasonable response to a real situation. He believes, for example, that his poor luck in love justifies a homicidal rampage. The Insane criminal has a reasonable response to a delusional situation. He believes, for example, that everybody on the street is an alien looking to harvest his organs. Under such circumstances, opening fire is a reasonable response.
What’s interesting about this is that everybody, to some extent, will sometimes experience cognitive distortions. Someone at work will give them a weird look and for the rest of the day this person might torture themselves wondering if they’ve done something wrong. Or you’ll get rejected by a love interest and start thinking you are no good. Maybe your novel gets rejected so you think you have no talent. There are endless examples of this which are even more obvious in people suffering depression or anxiety. Sometimes I get paranoid that I’m going to lose my job. I have no reason for this belief. It is in no way justified. But sometimes the fear just settles in and infects me.
I thought about this as I tried imagining what it must be like to go fully Insane. Sometimes a mild cognitive distortion can feel so much like a fact about the world. Now turn it up to eleven, as Rensin does, and you get a pretty good sense for what this experience might feel like.
Or take it into the realm of the political. If you truly believe in your heart of hearts that the election was stolen and the will of the people subverted, and you care about your country, what other choice do you have but storming the capital? It’s a reasonable response to a delusional situation.
Rensin also struggles with the notion of representation. These days it’s always so important that everyone is “represented.” He writes
The problem of the “representation” of the mad has arisen in an era animated by the increasing expectation that American art be explicitly didactic.
Art must have a message, in other words. A moral message that tells us how to think and feel and demonstrates that we are on the “right side” of things. He uses the film Joker as an example. Reviews he read before seeing it called the film a “paean to empty nihilism.” Another said it’s “not as edgy as it thinks.” It glorified white supremacy and toxic masculinity and the Proud Boys. It was “a rallying cry for incels, with a sexless, entitled, and resentful protagonist.” It would probably cause a mass shooting. Certainly it would inspire copycats.
Rensin writes—
In truth, I didn’t really believe it would be like any of those things, but I was curious to see what kind of movie had transformed so many good millennial liberals into the very Tipper Gores who had once persuaded their parents not to let them buy Eminem records in the 1990s.
Rensin goes on to criticize “the way in which the didactic style has become the default lens of the liberal-minded American viewer.
All movies, all novels, all musicals and poems and television shows are taken to possess an internal, coherent and deliberate politics. The game of critical consumption is to work out what those politics are, then decide whether they’re good or shit. The mad joker must “represent” some cultural tendency, and we are meant to figure out whether we are on “his side” (and therefore the movie’s “side”) or not.
But, Rensin points out, mentally ill people do not possess a coherent ideology.
One of the most fascinating essays in this book comes relatively late, and concerns a convicted murderer by the name of Herbert Mullin, who on October 13, 1972 killed a hitchhiker on the side of the road. Eleven days later he pulled over for another hitchhiker and promptly murdered her, stabbing the woman to death in the passenger seat before dumping the body. Nine days after that he walked into a Catholic church, opened the door to the confessional, and murdered the priest. Three months later Mullin drove to a friend’s cabin to find the friend was not there. The woman in the cabin told him where he could find his friend, so he drove to the place she directed him to and killed his friend and his friend’s wife. He shot them, then stabbed their bodies over forty times. When he was done he returned to the cabin and killed the woman there who had told him where to find his friend. Then he killed her two sons, ages four and nine. A few weeks following that Mullin murdered four teenage campers. A neighbor who witnessed this latest attack called police and Mullin was arrested.
Mullin, it turned out, was schizophrenic. God, he claimed, intended to destroy California with an enormous earthquake, and the only way to prevent this from happening was through blood sacrifice. He pointed out that since his killing spree began there had been no earthquakes in California. It didn’t help that eight days after his arrest a 5.8 earthquake struck Southern California.
What is the difference between Emmett Rensin and Herbert Mullin? In this essay, Rensin seeks to find out. The two men begin a multi-year letter correspondence that culminates in Rensin visiting Mullin in prison shortly before Mullin’s death. Mullin had by then been in prison for fifty years. Society seems clueless as to how to effectively deal with murderers who are mentally ill. Had Mullin received proper treatment early in his life, the murders may never have occurred. Yet treatment is so very hard to come by. What is the difference between these two men? Is one less mentally ill than the other? Not really. It’s just a matter of luck.
“The Complications” closes with a series of what Rensin calls “ghost stories.” These are tales of the mentally ill and mad who have gone missing or ended up dead as a result of their illnesses.
One can tell through reading this book that there is something about Rensin that separates him from the rest of us. He is not quite as coherent, though sometimes he is hyper-coherent. Other times he is tangential, scattershot and pulling at two many threads to make points that could be made in a simpler fashion. But he is also super-intelligent and has thought deeply about the issues he writes about. He is blunt about the fact that just because he has not died or ended up in prison does not mean he won’t. And the possibility of spiraling is ever-present.
