My Saturday post concerning the shooting of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico reminded me of one of the higher points of my failed bureaucratic career, and how, even when I was a minor government official, I sought to understand the deepest, darkest aspects of human experience: madness, violence, and cruelty.
The year was 2017. I was striving to rehabilitate myself after a period of leave that was needed to recover from years of blacklisting and the usual petty cruelty that we all associate with vicious bureaucrats. My reward for my good intentions? I was asked to stare into the abyss in which the monsters of violence and mental illness hide.
In late January 2017 James Gargasoulas drove a car along the footpaths of the central Melbourne parade, Bourke Street. He killed six people and shocked the state. Moreover, his action was one event in a series of lone-wolf terrorist acts, or grievance-fuelled violence, that terrified the world. Similar incidents occurred in Europe and America. How could governments keep the people safe when the ordinary family car had become a weapon of mass terror?
In addition, the Bourke Street tragedy revealed what people like to call “systemic weaknesses” in the responses of police, mental health services, and courts to violent people with mental illness and other troubles. We recently heard similar cries in Australia following a spate of attacks in Sydney and Perth. Often these “systemic weaknesses” prove to be our ordinary human frailties; but in the Gargasoulas case there were some disturbing questions to ask. Why had the police failed to intervene despite tracking the killer’s movements by air and car for days? Why did the bail justice let him go? Why had the psychologists and psychiatrists allowed another ‘psychokiller’ (as the Herald-Sun so delicately described him) to roam the streets?
The most fearful question was: what is the relationship between mental illness (including substance misuse) and violence? This was the question for which I sought both an answer and practical responses. It is a question that has been thrown up again by the Fico shooting and the recent cases in Australia.
I learned more than I could ever have anticipated in the twelve months I stared into the abyss of mental illness, violence, terrorism, and fixated threat. I believe, as I wrote on Saturday, that we came up with responses (specifically the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre) that offered some “humanly measured care” to problems that have no real solutions. Mental illness and violence create wounds in our societies that need constant redressing.
But I also unlearned some things about mental illness and the stories we tell ourselves about it. Madness, in many personifications, has been a large part of my life. For many years, my starting point to think about its history was Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason (1961, translated and abridged 1965).
Towards the end of 2017, after a year of hunting monsters and refusing to become a monster, I wrote an essay on “Forgetting Foucault”. After more than four decades of deep experience of madness, I finally developed the confidence to say that what Foucault wrote might have been true for him; but it was not true for me. I realised that I knew madness more profoundly than the famous French historian-philosopher did when he was a wild doctoral student in Uppsala in the 1950s.
You can read this essay in my collection, From the Burning Archive, or by being a paid subscriber of the Burning Archive.
You can listen to my reading of the preface and conclusion of Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization on my YouTube channel and from May 27 on my podcast.
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