By Thorsten J. Pattberg for the Saker Blog

Perseveration means getting stuck in life. The brain notices an error. It shuts down and restarts, but the error is still there, so the entire system is sent into safe mode which, since our primordial times as sponges and reef builders goes about as follows: If this works, repeat. Perseveration is endless repetition and became the supreme survival strategy.

Part I. The High

It is observed in those battling with degenerative mental illnesses that they repeat word phrases or that they perform the same actions over and over again – sometimes battling it out for years and decades – as if their brains were afflicted by malware, and they tried to turn it off and on and off and on.

Their minds are often erratic and imbalanced, and their thoughts are racing. If they talk, they talk fast, bird-fast, incoherently and repetitively. And if they are not talkers, they are doers. They act strangely, scripted and, again, repetitively.

At this point, they have become true actors. They act “normal.” They learned their lines by heart, they practice, they write whole scripts for themselves, they read ‘It Works’ a fifteenth time, and if there is a blackout again, they have the script ready to reboot.

Robin Williams was a comedian actor of seemingly incomprehensible brilliance. He was what eugenicists would call a rare mutation or freak of nature. His racing mind seemed to have no limitations, his lexicon and range of voice mimicry knew no breaks or stops, and, even while in company among the other talents, his abnormality was off the charts. Yet all this wasn’t just evolutionary excrescence, it was also highly entertaining, for even during his early career, before he came to the big movie screen, Mr. Williams’ comedic performances bordered on the strange and monstrous.

You just have to re-watch his early shows and witness this rare savant – a walking functional disability. The man was insanity walking around in a square head on a stout neanderthaler‘s body. Robin Williams was not acting on stage. That was really the real him. His acting began when the curtains fell, because normal Mr. Williams was insane.

Robin Williams, when not acting, tried to act funny. On and off, on and off. He battled severe depressions, hyperactivity and manic episodes. When he ended his own life, his last wife together with his lawyers and script writers invented iterates of mental illnesses – from dementia to alcoholism and drug addiction, paranoia and Parkinson disease.

But this seemed all-too-average and almost unworthy of a man of great genius, so the marketing team hired a private surgeon who ultra-x-rayed the decayed dead William-brain, now preserved three months in formaldehyde, and invented the rarest of exceptionally rare new diseases, the Lewy Body Dementia disease.

Yes, that must be it. A story worthy of a rare brain to go out with a rare brain disease. Alas, I am not buying into anything Hollywood says.

There are countless other world-famous actors who were clearly insane. Functionally insane. Philip Seymour Hoffman also offed himself. He was not insanely funny, but insanely tragic. The obese, tortured soul shined through all his film villainous roles, and there were good reasons – just as there were with Robin Williams – that the insane were cast in roles that were written for them.

The most visibly insane actor was Klaus Kinski, the German mutant who played madman Aguirre in the Wrath of God, the psychotic soldier Woyzeck and the cretin vampire Nosferatu. And just as with Mr. Williams and with Mr. Hoffmann, Mr. Kinski too was reported to not have been acting while on stage, but to have deliberately acted when not. He tried to kill himself at least two times, and was on so many calm-down drugs that his brain was wasted at age 50 and his on-off life-support cardiac system called it quits at age 65.

These freaks were insane, genius-level insane, and they were given a stage for a spectacle, and we will continue to watch those madmen and, yes, madwomen too.

Romy Schneider did not act in Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress, she really was that sad, schizophrenic broken flower vase and, just as all casts and crews and friends attested, Ms. Schneider tried her best off-stage to act normal. She was not normal though. She was hopelessly psychotic and crippled on the inside, and offed herself at a young age in Paris.

Carrie Fisher was a young actress when she was Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise. Those unforgettable eyes were diagnosed with severe bipolar mental disorder, a condition that, if found in functional savants, attracts all audiences of the universe. She suffered and miraculously made it to the age of 60 and died from decades of pharmaceuticals, and Hollywood had the audacity to photoshop her face into the latest Star Wars film, you know – to make money from the dead freaks.

Audiences are constantly assured by industry spokesmen that these rare human specimens we see on the screen are well-kept and well-fed. Which I believe of this human zoo. What I don’t believe for a minute, however, is that these freaks “act.” They are what they are, and for our entertainment they are put on a stage.

Part II. The Hidden

Now let us leave the movie-degenerates and dive deep into the general gene pool. There exist millions of non-notables who are dysfunctional and empty inside but seem to perform just fine with a script on their hands: be a police officer, be a nurse, be a construction worker.

When those people return home from work, they must go off-script. And this is when they go off-balance and the terror starts. Without a role in life, without a script, people fall back into barbarism and savagery. They are hurting, they are abusing, they masturbate for hours, they cry for hours, they are overeating, they are fantasizing about rape, revenge, mass murder, they consume garbage, they do the most horrible things to pets and children.

Those of us who understand the human condition, quickly try to fix our brains. We literally read What-to-do books or watch Dr. Phil and find roles and scripts to mimic. We try to act “normal”. And when we find something that keeps us sane, we repeat it – over and over again. We perseverate.

Healthy persons are flexible and do not get stuck on emotions, actions or prescriptions. We see that best in young children who learn and expand. And if a few rare children are inflexible and get stuck, we call it autism. But repetition is what it is. It is perseveration.

I don’t care what the philosophers call it. The “will to live” was popular with the existentialists. The “survival of the repetitious” was hip with the empiricists. The “never give up” we hear constantly from the ideologists. Stop it! “Madness” is good enough for me.

For the mad have to teach themselves how not to act mad. And indeed, this is one of the most fascinating aspects of life in any mental hospital. In a mental hospital, everyone on the face of it acts normal.

There are far more madhouses in your county than prisons, although you probably haven’t noticed either. There is a madhouse on the fringes of every suburb, although you couldn’t tell because they are disguising their business and their names. In fact, a psychiatry rarely calls itself a psychiatry, as for example the ill-famed ‘Psychiatry of Brandenburg’ in the center of Berlin, which attracts unwanted media attention and tourists and gaffers.

No, today’s madhouses name themselves psycho-therapeutic clinics, mental-health centers, neurological hospitals or special medicare or, simply, nursing homes. Yes, not just countless adults but especially the elderly are in constant survival mode, losing brick by brick of their memories’ load, and therefore engage in ever more grotesque but calming repetitions.

Part III. The Low

Each and every one of us will get stuck in life one way or another and eventually; however, sometimes it happens to us during our ascend. And that is truly catastrophic.

If we run into insane episodes during childhood or young adulthood, during our most productive years, during the best time of our lives, when we still ought to have the wind in our sails and the world at our feet – this is truly devastating.

An American drone strike that left Hassan legless and traumatized . A Canadian mother who malnutritioned and neglected her daughter Charlotte so hard, it drove Charlotte into a fatal eating disorder, organ failure and infertility. A horrible marriage with a former hooker ruined Moldovan man Sergei’s three boys and sent them down the path of hustling crime and banking welfare.

Under every family’s front-lawn lurks a terrible secret, a soul-crushing regret or infinite shame over a born aberration that could trigger your bloodline’s downfall. And how many of these miscreations are walking among us?

The island nation of Japan has no shortage of extreme freaks. Akiko Komamura is twenty-seven years old and severely mentally ill. She knows it. Many others have noticed it. It shows. But not immediately, so living in large cities with a million strangers is just perfect for these creatures.

For much of her twenties, while living in Yamagata in Northern Japan, Akiko followed a simple script. She wrote down what to do today or this week, then she simply did it and destroyed the manual because… well, because she was afraid it could be discovered and lead to a suicide case – who knows? Unlike her much more famous Western idols Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a plethora of Eastern actors such as Haruma Miura or Yuko Takeuchi, who both committed suicide just recently, Akiko has still not decided yet when and where to end her career.

If there ever was a name for getting stuck in Japan, it could be Akiko. Her biological father was a daft American soldier, who impregnated her Japanese mother and then left her. Or did she leave him? A lot of Japanese left-over women like her mother work in or around US military bases with all those IQ-80 scalawags around, and try to get pregnant. Then, they abduct the child.

It could be the case. Akiko’s mother was a horrible, horrible narc with a hatred for all men, especially foreign trash. As a teenager she had illegally worked as a croupier in a casino where she witnessed a lot of misery. And that was the problem, she only witnessed the adultery and underage sex and illegal gambling among American occupiers, not the rank and file and glamour of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. She was diagnosed with baby blues shortly after Akiko’s birth, because she apparently couldn’t bear the sight of that crying urusai.

Akiko’s mom was trapped with that hafu or half-born, but determined to make her daughter bilingual. But how? She slept with a handful of white expatriates and one black man from Hawaii, all of whom bragged about how easy it was to get laid in Asia. And with each relationship her disgust for men grew and her demands and psychotic behavior escalated.

Akiko feared her mom’s record of bad decision making and madness runs through her family line – a line of bottom feeders. Akiko was average in school, but special, very special from her looks. She never had to try. She got everything she wanted from the older boys, from older men and even her teachers.

She decided at the age of 17 to become an actor and did acting for the next ten years.

How many interactions do you have in a day – at most? Most of us have very few. And most interactions are fleety. Nobody will know that they just interacted with an insane person. Only close family or colleagues know, but they are far and away, in denial or afraid. Everyone is in denial or afraid of the mad.

Akiko perseverates. She is addicted to antidepressants duloxetine and lexapro, which are distributed in Japan to over a million people. She takes sleep-inducing drugs such as melatonin and ramelteon since childhood, not just for sleep but for getting high, but it is safe to say that, without an American passport, it is impossible to get high-enough dosage for a suicide. She told her new doctor she was thieving a lot and was having disturbing sexual thoughts, so Akiko was diagnosed as obsessive compulsive too. The best treatment of all mental illnesses is, of course, repetition: Keep a journal, go for a daily walk, script your day.

The insane spot the other insane. Because everyone is “on an act.” Akiko knows one midde-aged white Aussie man by the name of John in Yamagata who, he claims, is on the run from Australian courts. She practices her English with him, and he tells everyone he was a famous actor and former mentor of Heath Ledger, the Aussie Hollywood actor who, according to the coroner, knocked himself out by taking every drug against mental illness in the book, “from oxycodone to hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine.”

John the Aussie man, perhaps fifty years of age, also gets by on plenty of tobacco, alcohol, viagra, steroids, amphetamines and benzodiazepines – the latter are psychoactive drugs. He knew at least since he was thirteen years of age, that his “self-perception,” the idea that he had of himself, does not match with what others perceive in him. That is why John the Aussie man changed places often, changed cities and jobs and women. He was tall and rugged and had a coarse voice, and always thought himself as a next-level genius actor, but never got cast beyond as an extra in some local soap opera productions or indie films. Finally, he went guerrilla crazing in Thailand, Vietnam and now Japan, where he could always pass off as foreign actor and English teacher.

He was a text-book case of a chikan or pervert who makes sexual advances toward every Asian woman or girl he meets. So Akiko presses her breasts extra hard against his chest. She never slept with him, but might.

Part IV. No Survivors

John the Aussie man could have been a Robin Williams, a Philip Seymour Hoffman or even a Klaus Kinski, he just wasn’t in the right place. Here in Yamagata, John acted the foreign uncle-figure to everyone, walking up and down the shoutengai cafe street, and was once arrested for urinating against a pachinko place wall but got away with it, probably because he was white and a local attraction. There is no question that this gaijin was demented and crazy as a loon.

He was bed-wetting at the age of seven, dyslexic at the age of eleven, and a bully by the age of sixteen. At the age of forty-one, he suffered a terrible brain stroke. Couldn’t leave the bed, couldn’t move his left arm and leg, felt dizzy and without orientation. He couldn’t read or write in Asia anyway, but now he forgot English words. So he just repeated the ones he still knew, just more often. Doctors put him on even more prescriptions, from blood thinners to pain killers and happy pills. And would you know it, barely a year later and John had his act together again. He was indestructible, and imagine just how many Golden Globe awards he could have cleared, had he lived on planet El Ay.

John the Aussie had two dogs that he claims make up for two children of his first marriage he had to abandon in Melbourne. The neglected crossbreeds, the dogs I mean, are out day and night, chained to a steel pole, in rain and heat, howling and barking in Yamagata. And when neighbors complained, the old creep was out there cursing: “OH, FOCK OFF, Ye’r all mad! Do you hear meh, MAD!”

And Akiko Komamura of the neighborhood, who sat in the corner of her bedroom swiping male Tinder-profiles all night, heard the barks and the madman’s curses from afar, and irrationally found them comforting and helping. It meant John was still hanging in there. It meant John was a survivor.

Sooner or later, however, Akiko’s and John the Aussie’s acting abilities will inevitably decline, and more and more persons will see through their performances, and the insane will withdraw in shame from the world and drop out under more medications.

An unknown number of the insane will end up homeless and evade psychiatric intervention, which in America, Australia and Japan cost a fortune, money that only real movie stars or few experimentally selected welfare people can afford.

The pharmaceutical industry is working hand in hand with psychologists and governments to make it more affordable and unleash insanity on the sane population. Our benign rulers want most of us disabled and persevered.

A global society that resembles the schizoid acting world and its dysfunctional inhabitants: give them their daily scripts of what acting “normal” ought to look like: If you want to survive, if you want to keep on going, do this!

Meanwhile, we as a society are in decay. Our families, our communities and our tribes commit hara-kiri through breeding crazy mutants who almost certainly become substance abusers and drug addicts.

All of those famous and not-so-famous actors in this little tale of madness died of mental illness because they were just that: they were mentally ill. And then they took all those horrible brain-altering chemistry and lethal drugs that helped them to appear normal as long as aesthetically possible.

Keep this well in mind when interacting with idols or strangers, for many will act unnaturally and scripted and, always always, they repeat their lines. Read after me: I too shall persevere…

The author is a German writer and cultural critic.

“It reads like ‘Notes from the Underground’ from an idiot with a split personality.“ –T-Rash

[…] and – hopefully not many – more horrifying tales of madness to come.