When Madness Stares Us in the Face

With a guest list that included Barack Obama, Ban Ki-moon, and Desmond Tutu, Thamsanqa Jantjie was never supposed to stand out. Yet, during Nelson Mandela’s memorial on December 11, 2013, Jantjie—a translator—would emerge as the focus of our fascination. Standing a few meters from the high-profile speakers, Jantjie had been moving his hands in a seemingly plausible routine of translation. Then people began to realize the incredible truth. The translator was doing nothing more than fidgeting and flapping his arms—the movement articulated no coherent thoughts.

Later, Jantjie would claim that he had suffered a schizophrenic attack during which he had heard voices and had seen angels descend to the earth. The next day, the media would reveal that Jantjie had been arrested on at least five occasions—accused of, among other things, murder, rape, and theft. He had avoided jail time because he was mentally unfit to stand trial.

Two days after Mandela’s memorial service, Harvard woke up to the news of a bomb threat. At 8:40 a.m., a HUPD affiliate received an email that read, “science center [and] sever hall [and] emerson hall [and] thayer hall. 2/4. guess correctly. be quick for they will go off soon.”

Exam period came to a temporary halt and the “Harvard community”—as the official communications labeled us—broke into huddled crowds scattered across campus. The suspicion was raised early that this was the work of a student who had panicked under the pressure of exams and had simply snapped. The following day, Eldo Kim ’16 confessed to sending the email to avoid a final exam.

In that frantic month, madness seemed determined to capture our eye.

When we are confronted by mental illness or—as in the case of Kim—by cases that evoke its specter, our reaction tends to take one of three forms. If it seems mild to us, we trivialize it. We compare our situation to that of the sufferer, view them as being alike, and resolve that the difference must be made by our strength and their relative weakness. We ask internally—if not vocalize outright—the question, “Who doesn’t get anxious during finals?”

In more serious cases, where we cannot dismiss the fact of mental illness, we escape its reality by appealing to its absurdity. To buy distance between the mentally ill and us, we contrast the predictability of our lives against the volcanic spontaneity of these events. Slavoj Zizek writes in the Guardian, Thamsanqa Jantjie is the “something unexpected” that makes lives of drab routine worth living. On the “Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Jantjie’s gestures became the Moment of Zen.

Finally, in instances where the outcome is undeniably and obviously tragic, we resign ourselves to performing the subdued histrionics of sympathy. As Eldo Kim awaits a decision on his future, we shake our heads and sigh on his and his family’s behalf. Safe in Annenberg Hall and in the dining rooms we might have shared with him, we are able to pronounce our regret and carry on with our day.

Unfortunately for us, these are not emotions that drive progress. Instead, they seek to distance us from the discomfort and pain of confronting illness.

Nicholas D. Kristof ‘81 proposed that mental health is the systematically neglected issue that deserves more attention in 2014. I argue that reversing that systematic neglect must begin by repudiating the instinctive response of distancing ourselves from the subject of that neglect. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in four American adults suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year. To genuinely appreciate the pervasiveness of its reach and the depth of its impact is to dismiss the instinct to minimize, parody, or pity. To look around us is to realize that the distance we create is only of our mind’s delusion.

The Australian critic Clive James once observed that the language of “community” is crowding out the language of “society.” He writes that the indeterminate language of the former is a “device for glossing over the brutal fact that some poor kid had just been stabbed.” In the same way, mental illness is neither the problem of a community or of some of its members. It is the systematic failure of society. In one of the more poignant moments of his interview with the press, Thamsanqa Jantjie said, “Life is unfair. The illness is unfair.”

When madness stares us in the face, we ought to have the courage to look back. It will not always do us such a courtesy.

Bo Seo ’17, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Straus Hall.