Sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the idea that those who study madness may share some of the same tendencies as their subjects, and that ordinary people are increasingly defined by their extreme behaviors.
Jon Ronson's quote suggests that the researchers and professionals involved in studying mental health and madness may themselves exhibit obsessive traits, blurring the lines between the observer and the observed. It also reflects a societal trend where individuals are increasingly judged or defined by their most extreme behaviors, implying that everyone has their 'mad' moments, and that such traits are becoming a significant part of personal identity.
In practice
In a discussion on mental health, one might quote Ronson to emphasize the complexities of studying 'madness'.
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?
Nothing uniquely bad has happened to me in my personal life, but all the regular little bad things have accumulated to make me a neurotic person. And these adventures are my way of trying to make sense of that.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy.
Brains come in different types and they're all normal.
The unconscious mind is decidedly simple, unaffected, straightforward and honest. It hasn't got all of this facade, this veneer of what we call adult culture. It's rather simple, rather childish It is direct and free.
People repeat in adult life emotions they experience in childhood. Many of the people whom I spent the last 30 or 40 years treating at so much per minute wouldn't have needed any treatment at all if they had had the right care as children.
The truth is, bad things don't affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That's true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.
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