Madness and Society

There are two kinds of people in the world; those who are sane and those who are insane. By definition, insanity means “the state of being seriously mentally ill or mad”. People have not always understood madness. Back in history, when mental illness was not fully understood, people looked down on the mentally unstable and viewed them as sick. Because mental illness was misunderstood, people with mental illness were locked away, out of sight of the rest of society. It was not always like this though. Foucault talks about how during the Renaissance, “the madmen were excluded but socially feared or persecuted”. He says that the people of this time saw madness as a “special kind of wisdom about the human condition”. It wasn’t until the Classical period of about the 17^th and 18^th centuries when the people with mental illness were rounded up and locked out of sight. Foucault states that “the mad were thus not only physically confined in isolated institutions and excluded from society, they were also conceptually excluded from the realm of reason and humanity”.

 The main argument thought of Foucault’s work the “History of Madness”, is that madness only exists in society. What he is saying is that madness is only a construct of society. Madness “does not exist outside the forms of sensibility that isolate it and the forms of repulsion that expel it or capture it”. Foucault has an example of how a certain asylum would have their patients practice social etiquette that was appropriate to English tea parties. Foucault saw this as a farce; the bourgeois society imposing their will unto others who are vulnerable.

I got to thinking though about Foucault’s argument and how it would apply today. So of course in today’s world we don’t have those insane asylums where horrible and cruel experiments were done on people, and we do not exclude those with a mental illness from everyday society. But what I am thinking of is how Foucault says that “madness only exists in society” and that it was the bourgeois setting the moral standard. This got me thinking of the “Center” from Lemert’s work. With how it’s those in power who dictates what the culture is and the rest of society follows. It’s the Center that tells us what’s right and wrong, and that we are the mentally stable ones and those who oppose us are mad or insane.

 A perfect example of this is how the people of America in today’s society see people who are Muslim. After 9/11, the government has led us all to believe, by use of media, that those who are Muslim or of Islamic descent are bad. That they are radical, mentally unstable, people who oppose our culture. This idea can go back to what Foucault was talking about with how madness only exists in society. Because Muslims are not like us here in the US, they must all be like those radical, mentally unstable suicide bombers or jihadists. Which goes to show that as a society we look down on people of Islamic descent for no reason, just like those with mental illness were looked down on; because they are not like the norm in society. A norm set by those in power.

Another thing that I took away from what Foucault had to say was that are people actually crazy?? The whole thing would be a subjective decision made by the collective norm of society. It is the people in power saying who is mentally insane, but whatever if it was turned around and the people who we see as "mentally insane" saw us, the "normal" people as mentally insane. It is all based on view point to who is "mentally unstable".This was just a small thought that I had while reading over Foucaults work.