Why Can’t I Section Donald Trump?

I don’t know what the US equivalent is, but in the UK, sectioning is compulsorily detaining someone in a hospital or secure unit because they are seen as a danger to themselves or others due to mental disturbance. Donald Trump is a danger to himself and every living being on the planet! If you ask an online dictionary: what is madness? This is a usual definition: Madness refers to a state of severe mental illness, insanity, or extreme, irrational foolishness. It is characterized by dangerous behaviour, intense rage, or frenzied enthusiasm. It implies a total lack of reason or judgment.

When, as a mad person, I say Donald Trump is off his rocker, I am not saying he is like me. I don’t see narcissism, psychopathy, and painting yourself the colour of a wotsit as madness. It is just being a dick. But more recently I have come to the conclusion that he has some sort of dementia and is exhibiting a very obvious cognitive decline, and dementia is a regular customer of madness.  Where are the clinicians assessing him?  Donald Trump doesn’t know how to do madness with humanity, style or creativity. All he has is the privilege of white older straight rich men to act like disgusting spoilt brats and get away with it. This privilege shows how some people get institutionalised and some become world leaders.

Why can’t I section Donald Trump? Let’s pretend I have the power to section people. I could go up to him, list his irrational, unhinged and dangerous words and actions, and say ‘You need to be sectioned, Donald!” I doubt if I’d get even a few feet of him without being shot dead and then the courts deciding the people who killed me used ‘reasonable’ force.

There is nothing objective and scientific about psychiatry. It relies on value judgements and is always downwards punching. Research shows trauma or adverse experiences have links with psychosis and other mental health labels, but you find no healing on offer, just name calling, power play, victim blaming, and ensuring you will never have justice in court because they will say your mind can’t be trusted. They are part of the system. Psychiatry has been used to pathologise dissent for decades. They say they are reasonable. I say they are delusional. I carry a disloyalty card for that system.

I used to be a mental health trainer/tutor. Big companies hired me to tell the workers how to have better mental health. They expected me to tell them to practice mindfulness, do colouring in, and how to manage stress; what I’d do instead was show how their employers were harming their mental health by overburdening them with work, putting them in toxic environments, and eroding their humanity. I knew my career in that field would not last long. When I taught in universities to trainee clinicians, such as nurses, OTs and psychologists, I gave them a sheet of paper with different statements, such as: I believe in God/I don’t being in God/I believe in ghosts/I believe in horoscopes/I believe in extra-terrestrial life, and so on. The list of statements was quite long. I asked the students to circle what they believed in. No two students had identical answers. I created this exercise to show what is seen as delusion, positioned as one of the main tenets of madness, is not binary experience.  It is a spectrum, the goal posts shift, it’s culturally specific, and that society has more of a hand sculpting it than a ‘diseased’ brain. It is to do with the popularity of the belief, not its reasonableness. You can have an unusual belief but if you are able to share it with many others, you are less likely to be in hospital for it. It is cognitively dissonant for humans to see themselves as dickheads. You don’t need to be told MAGA people are fragile and in complete denial. They still believe Trump is a great man even when he is plotting war on social media, standing next to the Easter Bunny.

I was part of the system in 2014 whilst I was studying for an Occupational Therapy BSc. Clinical placements were part of my degree, and in two of them I witnessed bad practice from individuals and teams. The expectation from me was not just being silent about it, but to also play along.  I did not play along. I reported it. I was ostracised. This brutal dance, this chilling choreography where everybody is making the same posture, allowing uniformity to deform perception, those stepping out on line are the only things that gets noticed. You must only cry at allocated times. Don’t rage at injustice in inconvenient settings. Fill out the forms that go nowhere and act as if everything is ok. Don’t make a fuss, be reasonable. Join the shared hallucination of civility.

Reason can be defined by excluding madness, but I always find reason to be just as subjective as madness. Reason is not neutral or objective. It can be used as a weapon to diminish humanity. One present example are Think Tanks, who view policy just in terms of numbers, bean counting. The calculations are clear, the emotions are removed. The sums say reduce public spending, make disabled and elderly people poorer. Money is saved. But they will not ever know the visceral and tormented experience of freezing to death or not eating to the point your own body is devouring you.  That is a truthful experience that has happened to many people. Reason is less about truth, and more about who gets to decide what is true. Does reason carry all truth, and truth all reason? Reason is part performative, it must be enacted in approved ways. Reason is what power calls itself when it wants to sound unquestionable.

The powers that be, the controlling hands that have planet earth in its violent grip, label themselves ‘sane’ and misnames anything that doesn’t agree ‘mad.’ Sanity needs such a high level of denial, and it needs the function to call people mad to avoid confronting its own fragility and dysfunction.

Sanity just has better PR than madness. Madness is the dumping ground of all things seen as negative, carrying the worst things about humans. But sanity can’t say it holds all the beauty. I know and gently clasp magnificence on a regular basis. It is because I want the world to be more beautiful, that I become broken hearted and my brain becomes a bowl of overflowing tears where the self is drowning. A lot of mad people get told ‘you are just too sensitive’. And some mad people reply, ‘why can’t you bend the world to gentleness, why do you insist we adapt to ugliness?’

Capitalism, neoliberalism causes so much harm. It is part of the reason the majority of people on this planet are in extreme poverty, but good people still play the game. It is a ball game with a grenade, it will blow up in your face eventually, yet you are able to kick it away for now. This is not to say all people labelled sane are idiots, or that all people labelled mad are special. Actually, I say madness does exist, but I say sanity doesn’t exist. Please show me where sanity is. Harmony with damaging structures is a sign of sanity not health. The world is sick; your heart is the sick bucket.

Set the alarm to be exhausted for most of your adult life, neglect your children because there is just no time to parent them, feed slavery and global economic inequality with your nice shoes, and pollute and be polluted by mankind. Microplastics are everywhere: in the food and water you drink, inside your own body, and if you’re pregnant, they will find it in the umbilical cord and placenta, your foetus has to develop with them in your womb. This is insane, but there is no uproar, it is apparently acceptable to the sane world, silence in the presence of harm is maturity. You are not ‘well’, you are functional, you are compliant, you are carrying more microplastics than dignity.

Officials tell people experiencing the violence of bureaucracy to ‘calm down’, ‘be reasonable’, ‘You’re making yourself look bad.’ Be polite about losing your home or going hungry.  If the hungry react with too much emotion or show violence, the very reasoned law system will punish them for it.  First, never call it insanity. Call it policy. Call it stability. Call it necessary. If people resist, detain them—and call it care, of course.

All this is not news. Foucault said “Madness is produced by power.” I say: “Here’s what that production feels like—and I refuse it.”

If you are deemed mad for an age, you can act in a way that is seem as madness without any disruption to the world’s narrative of you. I use that space to create, disrupt and question – and to live life my way. As a mad person I am touching freedom deeper than a ‘sane’ person. A lot of my earlier work was: this is what my madness looks and feels like. More recently, I have shown how the world makes people mad and sanity is bollocks bedecked with fairy lights. When the ‘sane’ gaze looks at madness and it makes sense, the blur between the mad and the sanitised spreads its wings; thoughts and ideas shift. The bird can’t fly yet, but it has now left its cage.  Those in cages laugh at those who want to fly and be free. Freedom is a delusion. It is not reasonable. We are edging into a world where madness makes more sense than sanity.

Why can’t I get Donald Trump involuntarily detained? Because I don’t have the power, and I am not allowed to ever have it. In the States that power belongs to clinicians, law enforcement, or judges, and I don’t see many of them queuing up to assess him. They are the system’s handmaidens and they are scared Trump will make them unemployed and redundant as a human being.  If I was a mad American, these same officials would happily lock me up or shoot me dead for shouting out loud, ‘Why can’t I section Donald Trump?’

They are just doing the sane thing.