Some people say I am crazy. It may be true but then I would be in good company. One in three Malaysian adults, according to a study, has mental issues.
Blame it on the stress and strain of our world going over the edge, the fraying social fabric and the unforgiving rat race.
It all adds up to a worrying unbalanced mental equation as the health ministry recently revealed that 4.2 million out of 14.4 million Malaysians aged 16 and above suffer from mental health.
I see Malaysians greeting this alarming news with a dismissive or hesitant laugh, never mind that many of their countrymen could be losing their mind.
But then, there is madness and there is “madness”. One to be feared, the other to be tolerated.
The madness which is pampered, even coddled is the attribute of genius. The sort which leaves an indelible mark on the world whether in art, literature, science or just dogged contrariness.
There is method in this madness, as pointed out in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Such is the hallowed turf of poets, painters, writers, artistes, scientists and sports icons. Their touches of madness are brushstrokes of the divine.
The pages of history are filled with geniuses tortured by inner demons. Isaac Newton, Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Robin Williams.
And then, there’s Michael Jackson aka Wacko Jacko.
And, right at this very moment, you have people saying that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte must be mad to compare himself to Adolf Hitler in the war against drug traffickers and addicts. Ironically, this good guy, a hero to his people, gets vilified by human rights groups for getting rid of the baddies.
We would go mad if we tried to rationalise all the things around us and in our lives. And then again, there are those who drive you mad.
Some mortals are born flawed only to become greats. In sports, we have Eric Cantona, who in a moment of madness, was immortalised for his kung-fu kick on a stupid fan. But then he is a poet and philosopher, an artist with genius on the football pitch. As such, it was excusable and he was soon forgiven.
And last week, Malaysian fans went crazy over Cantona when the Manchester United legend came here for meet-and-greet sessions with them as an ambassador of communications service provider YES.
There was a time when genius was considered either a stigma or the divine right of kings. The French called it the “malaise le roi”, the insanity of kings. Nero fiddled with his lyre while Rome burned as his empire fell apart.
Then along came Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and an assortment of pipe-smoking types who made a study of the couched mind, on the couch of course, and laid bare a wide range of phobias.
Lo and behold, all of a sudden, it was fashionable in a way to be “mad”. These days, mental health comes with some mind-boggling labels — psychosis, paranoia, schizophrenia, hypochondria, neurosis, monomania, and so on.
It’s all in the book, the shrinks say. The various manias are all explained: eccentricity, paranoid personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, et cetera,
So, for a price, you can get your head analysed and your personality split into certain areas and identified. All victims of sage and the new age. But logically, I think that the world will be all right if more of us use our common sense.
NST deputy sports editor Chan Wai Kong sees life differently after waking up from a coma following a car accident in Vancouver