The Textual Work of August Walla, mentally disabled artist

[RenegadeHealer]

Hi Ben. I'm a medical doctor who has long had an interest in, and experience treating, mental health issues. I'm not a psychiatrist, but I used to work as a general practitioner in a location where mental health services were not widely available, and so it's something I needed to get good at. I've also been a lifelong "word nerd" and amateur linguist, and so one subject that has always fascinated me is the specific ways language gets distorted by patients with mental illnesses, especially ones like schizophrenia and Alzheimer's dementia, which seem to directly affect the language centers of the brain.

I won't bore you with the technical details, but what I can say is that in all such cases that I've seen, there is indeed a "method to the madness". Grammar, vocabulary, prosody, and word usage can become so distorted that it's very hard to understand. Specifically, it can be very hard to pick out a point or purpose to the speech. But often, if you transcribe and analyze a large amount of the speech of a schizophrenia or dementia patient, there are noticeable themes and intentions apparent. It's just that the way they're worded is odd and not at all straightforward. Schizophrenia and dementia patients are usually not aware that their language is not readily understandable to most people; it does make a kind of sense from their subjective perspective, which is also quite distorted. The "key" to unlocking the confusing speech of a psych patient is usually a friend or family member who knew the patient well, before their mental illness became severe. Without this, it can be very hard to piece together what intentions they were trying to communicate, and of course the dead don't talk.

One theory I've heard expressed by several Voynich researchers is that the VMS was the product of an educated person from a wealthy family, who descended into mental illness. He was sequestered away out of family embarrassment, with as much writing materials as he needed to keep him busy, and the VMS was his solitary life's work. It would be interesting to try statistically analyzing large samples of writing (or transcribed speech) of patients with various sorts of mental illnesses, to see if the statistics were closer to what we see in the VMS than most written language. I'm particularly interested in the writing of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. patients — a condition I have never seen or treated clinically. Of particular interest, the writing of hypergraphia patients is usually voluminious, and the patient feels compelled to write exactly what comes to his mind, even though the writing is usually questionably coherent to others reading it. I suspect that self-made soapmaker Emanuel Bronner suffered from undiagnosed hypergraphia. Take a look at the "preaching" on his soap labels:
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