Study Task - Reading and Understanding Texts - Part 2

Summary - What is Madness?

This chapter elaborates on how the human mind deals with traumatic events that we have experienced in our earlier lives, how we have possibly processed them and how this can come out in different ways, such as anxiety and phobias. Darian Leader suggests that we use repression and selective amnesia to process trauma, however, this does mean it can manifest in different forms.   

This is very important to how people with anxiety, especially social anxiety disorder, react to certain situations. Anxiety generally does not appear from thin air, it stems from either one or several traumatic events then the brain tries to analyse this event the best it can, although most of the time the mind contorts the associated memories and creates a defence system formed from fear so that the mind knows to run away from a similarly threatening situation.

As someone who suffers from severe anxiety, it is important to know how it forms and how it affects the human mind in different ways. I will be exploring characters that exhibit the traits and symptoms, as well as creating my own characters suffering from the same mental illnesses.