*** All the good stuff in a Chinese mall happens in the basement. You ever notice that? Four stories of empty Jack Jones' and desolate Sephoras, but down at ground level, that’s where the magic happens. The magic, in this case, is the First Trick Art Gallery of Beijing (probably better translated as the "3D Optical Illusions Museum"), situated in the basement of Glory Mall at Chongwenmen and oddly full on a Monday afternoon. The Dianping page for this thing lists a crazy 893 reviews, so I guess there’s a lot of people in this city that are eager to swan dive into the mouth of madness. “This is… this is crazy,” said Kelsey, walking past a painting of a giant levitating filet mignon. And it was exactly that: a celebration of proud delirium, a rollicking turn through the pages of the DSM-V. I now know that words are an insufficient medium through which to illuminate insanity, but I can say this: when we entered these halls, we were as children. When we emerged, we had grown in the knowledge that in this sorry world, everyone gets their measure of pain. Tickets to this tour of anguish and empathy are 55rmb if you pre-book online, and 100rmb if you pitch up in person without an appointment. Kelsey tried to get us the "Couple’s Pass", prompting an apologetic buxing from the ticket girl, followed by a quick definitional briefing on the finer points of heterosexuality. Apologies to my LGBT friends: you’ll need to spring for two adults. * Without further ado! Presenting! An Illustrated (and Annotated) Guide to Mental Madness at the First Trick Museum of Beijing!

Pathological Lying

I have this ex-friend who’s a compulsive bullshitter. If you gave him enough rope to hang himself with and egged him on a little, by the end of the night it was like, “I came out of the womb a sassy, full-grown white woman, but there’s no one left to tell the tale because my obese black parents were killed in a freak accident when the plane carrying all the doctors who delivered me was shot down by Nazi sympathizers in rural Montana. True story.”

Kleptomania

Six months of pouring over the blueprints, and our plan was rock solid. Then two days before the job, Donny brings in this crazy bitch who blows the whole protocol, saunters in waving a gun around casual as you please, opens the safe like it’s a fuckin’ freezer full of gelato and start scooping hundreds into her purse.

Manic Depression

One of my favorite people used to drop this at dinner parties all the time: “Would you rather be invincible but be a disembodied floating head, or would you rather be able to fly, but have an independently sentient miniature duplicate of yourself growing out of your own stomach?” People would always pick the flying thing, and I never got that. So you’d have to sit out a century of immobility while scientists work the kinks out of mobile cyborg skeletons, watching tearfully as everyone you love dies, helpless to embrace them in their final moments. Big deal, ya wuss.

ADHD

You know what I do when I can’t sit still? I bake. I bake like nobody’s watching. I bake like I’ve never been hurt.

Delusions

This is the face of madness, the face of a tortured soul that once cut off an ear and gave it to a prostitute named Rachel. And that’s a Van Gogh in the background. (HAR!)

Anorexia Nervosa

Thinspo!

Alcoholism

You know you got a problem when it’s pushing 4am on a Tuesday, your friends left hours ago, and the only motherfuckers left standing are you and a couple of jaded babies in spit-stained cadre uniforms. Look at them, man, you don’t wanna end up like that. Those guys have washed their tiny hands of this world. Go home, get out of here while you still have something to live for. [Ed's note: Slow Boat's Ladies Night is every Friday night! Human females, 50% off on selected beers! From 10pm!]

Bipolar Disorder

It’s the mania that’s hard to walk away from. You need it, you need the burst of chain-smoking exhilaration that resurfaces as the depression recedes, you need the creative propellant. You want to keep it, just that part. You can’t, though. The upward spiral starts and in a flurried blur, you’re lost in the Swiss Alps singing Freebird while sadistically digging your spurs into the back of an exhausted, dead-eyed unicorn.

PTSD

How fucking jumpy would you be in the aftermath of ninja-based trauma? You’d spend the rest of your life triggered by the unmistakable whisper of swift, noiseless justice.

Multiple Personality Disorder

My other car’s a hot blonde.

Schizophrenia

You don’t know your limits until they’re tested. In your most heroic fantasies, you’d see the steak coming down and your mind would fill with a single radiant pinprick of white-hot purpose, your hands would shake with adrenaline and power and miraculously, the fatal impact would never come.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

You know that sound you hear every time you enter a room, the heavy whoosh of downy wings unfurling and the distant tinkling rain of glitter? Yeah, no one can hear that but you.

Nymphomania

One day, in some tiled fluorescent office in the bowels of Glory Mall, a bunch of small-time bureaucrats sat around a conference table with a notepad and a pen “having ideas”. And someone chimed in with, “Since this is a family-friendly exhibit, we should have one where Spidey’s pissing in the Avengers Mansion and he freaks out over Hulk’s massive green peen,” and everyone else nodded seriously and signed off on that shit.

The Gallery of Nameless Fears

These are ones where you fill in your own. It's like playing the home version! But if you'd like to enter into the sunshine of the eternally-kinda-crappy-but-also-paradoxically-pretty-fantastic spotless mind for yourself, the address is... *** The Trick 3D Optical Illusions Museum or Whatever is at LG/F, Guorui Mall (Glory Mall), 18 Chongwenmen Waidajie, Dongcheng District. Open daily from 9:30am-9:30pm.