I used to think that Seneca meant eccentricity. Crazy white hair and all that. But maybe not.
Dementiae: de = without; ment = mens = mind. Without mind. Mens or Bona Mens was the personification of thought, or "right-thinking" in Roman mythology. Mensa wanted to be called Mens (but the similarity to Men's probably led them to shun the idea; imagine the feminists' outcry). The absence of right-thinking. Actual madness. Or, in modern terms, mental problems.
I suppose it is very easy to romanticize the idea of insanity. To imagine a state where nothing is under your control and your thoughts race ahead of you or to harbour the feeling of deep darkness, of perpetual sorrow (like the modern Goths and their make-up). But to be in the thick of it. To feel it clawing at your throat. To hate yourself for being immobilized but not finding the will to move. To be tortured into finding ways of expelling it from the wreck that is your life. Perhaps if I write, sing, dance, work, paint, build...
Seneca also quoted a friend in the same text: liquando et insanire iucundum est, "sometimes it is a pleasure to also go crazy" and frustra poeticas fores compos sui pepulit, "in vain did the sane mind knock on the doors of poetry." So, to him, it is good to be a little crazy sometimes. Perhaps he did mean eccentricity after all. Run around naked on the field sometimes. It does your soul some good.
The keyword here is "sometimes". Choice is absent for true madness.
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