To be a person is an activity: like wearing a mask, or, to stretch further, like being water in a container. But 'a person' is just that, a covering or container for something else. A daemon, a whirlwind of impermanent urges and desires-- a screaming mess.
Personhood can decay, revealing the 'ugly' beneath. This is basically what happens to anyone who ends up living in isolation from others. It's a rot by degrees-- a darkening and flattening of affect via lack of use, and lack of consequence over that lack of use. Every drug user and homeless person you can see was once 'a person' and quite sane. They appear insane because their behavior lacks the rational and/or social framework that you, as the observer, use to evaluate their behavior.
A fragment of thought I had while reading this:
https://meltingasphalt.com/personhood-a-game-for-two-or-more-players/
There is a range of broken personhood where one is considered an eccentric. Interesting and entertaining, endearing, like a cat missing a leg. But it's far too easy to miss the mark. On one side you're just normal, on the other side, well, if people are calling you crazy, remember that they have reasons to think so.
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"One of the most dramatic breakdowns of personhood occurs merely by labeling someone as "mentally ill." This starts a downward spiral in which people stop treating the patient as a full person, and as a result she becomes less incentivized to act as one. They may or may not subject her to various indignities (like restricting her freedom), but what's equally corrosive is when they stop holding her to the same standards as everyone else. As a result, she becomes less incentivized to hold up her end of the personhood bargain, further justifying the treatment others are subjecting her to. In this way, the virtuous feedback loop that normally upholds and reinforces personhood — the feedback that coaxes behavior toward ever more integrity, consistency, and good manners — breaks down, and a vicious feedback loop takes its place. When back-ward psychiatric patients start smearing their feces on the walls, it's because they're at the bottom of this vicious cycle, and resort to forms of attention-grabbing and manipulation that lie outside the personhood contract.
Not all labels of mental illness degrade one's personhood, of course. It depends on how severe the illness is. It also depends, crucially, on how frequently other persons (and the patient herself) explain her actions as arising from the illness, instead of arising from everyday reasons and motives. If she breaks a promise and her friends chalk it up to depression, then she's in more trouble than if they simply shrugged and said, "Pffft, what a flake." This accounts for some of our reluctance to share mental-health diagnoses with our broader network of acquaintances and coworkers." ~ from the above article.
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That about sums it up, eh?
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/02/18/a-dent-in-the-universe/
This is also a good read. Leaving it here for now as a reminder to maybe write more on it later.
