The Russian Patient

Let’s have a look at another painting in relation to ‘madness’ by Edvard Munch, named ‘’The Scream’’.

There are a lot of interpretations of this painting, including the one that accuses the painter of drawing ‘anxiety’.

I disagree (anxiety was just one aspect of his ordeal).

Munch drew this panting after his sister had been committed to a mental asylum, and as he had written in his own diary, he heard a scream, as if from nature, during one of his walks.

This is a master piece in expressionist movement in art, but its significance for me is reflected in perhaps the horror on the face of the main character. It wasn’t good to be committed to an asylum at that time (1893). And this remains the case also now.

You would probably assume that it’s all pink and rosy in the field of mental health where we seem to have found a pill for any possible distress in human nature, but it is not, and especially for those who are assigned such severe diagnoses as schizophrenia, bipolar 1, and schizo-affective disorder.

To simplify it, it is just not good to have experienced any form of psychosis in our society, full stop. It is severely punished.

Yes, you hear the screams of the patients who are administered psychiatric meds injections by force, against their will, derived of their freedom due to some mental health act, and denied of the possibility that maybe the voices in the head are real, that the hallucinations are visions, and delusions are a cry for help in the society based in skepticism, over-diagnosing, and kindness and empathy in decline.

But it doesn’t matter too much what really happens in a psychosis (in the purely bio-medical model of human distress), what matters more is the care, or rather the absence of it, when you have a condition, deemed as inappropriate by the society as such.

You become an outcast, the mentally ill monster, the other, the one they want to forget as some sort of nuisance, while trying to make it (to live) on the prescription of a monstrous dose of an antipsychotic, that actually makes it impossible to enjoy life, let alone work or form a relationship.

And this is the reality of today across many ‘advanced’ countries.

And the patients scream.