Making Madness: A Journey Through Addiction and Insanity Home

Age seventeen, psychiatrically incarcerated for the first time—coercively and involuntarily drugged, labelled, and bereft of a future worth motioning towards, addictions left eclipsed by a seemingly more pressing matter… psychosis. If only I’d have known someone who’d been digested by the asylum and come out with their dignity intact, spirit alive and well, maybe it’d have hurt less, the dejection of losing it all: my mind, my life as I knew it, and myself.

This intramural cartography is for anyone seeking an honest delineation through mental health and/or addiction issues but feels dissatisfied with conventional prescriptive self-help tales that remain largely superficial. By providing a visceral literary experience that is genuine and raw, this self-discovery memoir invokes cavernous healing by drawing deep-set sufferings into awareness and giving them shape to be dealt with, offering a compass for settling back into our earthly package and finding our feet on the ground.

I travel my lifeline back to conception to reveal how my experience of madness may have been a reasonable response to an insanely disorderly upbringing where the expression of truth, or reality, was persistently distorted by parents who couldn’t help but live a lie. The pain of being raised in a hellish environment as a hyper-sensitive soul led me to develop many destructive coping strategies that helped me survive, to escape; to get me as far from myself as I possibly could. Edges, these were the places where I thrived. So, I’d wander the contours of my being and take a few steps further, sitting myself at such a vast distance from what I am that there was no return in sight. But then I’d remember, re-member, the separation begetting a homecoming that’d provide a way towards possibility and potential.

The matters of mental health and addiction have touched all our lives in some way, whether through our own experiencing or that of a loved one. For those struggling to make sense of the pains that rest in the dark beneath these pervasive issues, here is a rendering that excavates and outlines the sensibilities and emotions that once unburied and named can be healed and held. This story also encounters other affairs that intersect with addiction and insanity, and that buttress the processes of anesthetizing pain, such as eating disorders, exercise addiction, extreme weight gain and loss, self-harm and other ruinous modalities for managing internal expressions of unprocessed, unintegrated hurt. Some bit of you will get a deeper sense of yourself by meeting this piece made in co-creation with God. Here is evidence that you can recover, and that you can return home. Safe travels.