REJECTED
Psychosis far from being a medical disorder is an act of unconscious socio-political dissidence par excellence. When he demonstrated a new theory of subjectivity (starting from the mathematical question, what's less than +1 but more than -1?) to his then new housemate, and fellow to-be-teacher at a school in Portugal, James, he did not intend to disrupt his worldview to the point that James contacted said school with concerns about Jesse's mental well-being; when Jesse surrealistically created, out of the bricolage in and around his new apartment, an altar to a Christmas tree in the backyard, complete with wooden prayer mats (a perhaps masterful commentary on postmodernist spirituality no less), he did not intend to disturb the neighbours to the point that they forced him to move out of said apartment; when Jesse was moved to a heavily surveilled studio apartment in a startlingly clinical co-living laboratory-like complex, his physiologically co-extensive paranoia that the pipe outlets were releasing gases intended to cause him a heart attack, led to a much more provocatively subversive fleeing, transforming his subject into an unshackled bicycle-bound vagabond: a living critique of metamodernity; when he returned to his old apartment and revealed that through all this he had been time-travelling and spoken with Hitler and Plato et al., a fact seemingly confirmed by the National Republican Guard, he pointed markedly to the authoritarian underpinnings of this social order; when he returned in distress to seek help from his housemate after he believed someone had attempted to murder him, he anticipated the arrival of the police who carted his mind off to be destroyed by the overlords of consensus reality, the psychiatrists; when he exclaimed in horror at the demon chanting painful satanic verses on the bed in the corridor, he alerted to the spiritual opposition to his becoming God; when he screamed in terror as he almost wrestled free from the five armed henchmen it took to handcuff him to a bed when he refused to participate in their rituals, he defended his corporeal authority to the very end; when he shouted with his final words "shoot me in the fucking head, I'm not doing this!" as they tranquilised him, he spoke to the soul extinguishing nature of this activity, that violating one's freedom of consciousness is worse than death; when during his incarceration, he competently explained to the psychologists the nature of his experiences in terms of anti-psychiatry - as breakthrough not breakdown, as expanded consciousness, as ego loss, as a repetitious mystical encounter with God as Self as the Moon - he demonstrated his intellectual sanity, so much so that the chief psychologist, after reading some of Jesse's work, courageously, in the vein of Laing, broke him out of the ward for over an hour, and subsequently pushed hard to get him released; when Jesse unceasingly fought for his release day after day, with a tattoo of liberation squarely on display on his chest, he showed that this was a place of torture not treatment; when he successfully negotiated to be collected by Mormon missionaries, rather than a family member, he challenged the Oedipalized rules of both the hospital and the Church in the name of liberty; when he returned to England and got down on his knees and successfully begged his mother to not make him take the drugs, and subsequently suffered three weeks of brutal withdrawal symptoms, he pointed to the iatrogenic malignancy of mental medication; when he retrained his physical and mental well-being to a condition superior to where he was before all this happened, he reengineered the trauma as transformation; when he openly shared his experiences with the Latter Day Saints without judgment he demonstrated that in the most important ways secular society can be more conservative than the Church; when he joined hearing voices groups he became a part of growing resistance to the monopolisation of madness; when he applied to an MSc in Mad Studies he sought to disrupt the impending territorialisation of the deterritorialising subject posed by the field; when he courageously moved to Taiwan instead of a Philadelphia Association house to continue his journey Eastward, he refused to submit to Spiritual castration.
ACCEPTED
Mad studies seems to present an academic attempt to demadden madness. But what happens to a society when the one remaining thing you are definitely not allowed to be (mad) becomes increasingly normalised in this way?
I am applying for mad studies having had multiple experiences over the past three years that would be considered to be psychotic by western society, but appeared both mystical and politically subversive from my own point of view. As a lifelong student of psychology, these experiences were heavily influenced, structured and understood through a progressive series of lenses. First, in terms of the failed pathologising discourses of psychoanalysis of Lacan-Jung-Freud (in Cuba). Second, in the liberating terms of Laing's breakthrough (in Mexico). And lastly in the radical political terms of Deleuze and Guattari's deterritorialising subjectivity. It was indeed, inevitably, at this point that I ended up the victim of state repression when I was incarcerated by psychiatry in Portugal. I consider myself to be a practical exponent of mad approaches to madness.
I bring a nomadic background literally having lived in seven countries and intellectually in terms of my interest in challenging conventional approaches to the communication of ideas through unintentional meta-mechanistic medium manipulation, such as poetry that contains videos, activities, hidden puzzles etc. The breakdown this causes in the traditional relationship between the creator and their audience is crucial. An essay I wrote, entitled Abstaining From Abstaining, that was recently published in a book in Mexico is one that combines traditional academic rigour with disruptive elements in terms of poetic licence, neologisms and storytelling. In general, I believe that my work is maddening precisely in the way mad studies needs to be if it is to remain deterritorialising.
I'm increasingly interested in the connections between madness and the mystical experience (I'm fortunately am now currently located in the spiritual capital of Taiwan). My view is that madness doesn't just deterritorialise at a social level, or even ontological level, but more deeply represents a meta-ontic threat to an agnostic scientific social order that inevitably responds to such activity with persecution; a contemporary witch hunt type situation. However, this also points to a perhaps irresolvable problem, that madness is only possible precisely because of the limit imposed by said order. In other words, without authority, radical freedom is impossible.