On the day Michael was accepted to Yale—arguably the best law school in the world—he also believed that monkeys were eating his brain.
The line between genius and madness may be thinner than we think.
Thought this was an interesting thought by the author:
If you believe that all mental illness is a social construct, even severe mental illness, and that the only reason why asylums were built in the eighteenth century, as Foucault says, is as a place to put your enemies who you’ve othered by calling mad simply because they swim against the rational stream, then there really isn’t any illness. There’s only power. And the people who have power can call the people they hate ill. Now, there’s plenty of abuse of power. But if illness is real, then that formula deprives people of any form of care, and the only response to a hospital, a mental hospital, or a psychiatric hospital, is to treat it like the Bastille and tear it down. In fact, one of the most devastating passages in Madness and Civilization is about Philippe Pinel, who was the eighteenth-century reformist psychiatrist. He was really the father of humane psychiatry and he’s often depicted in paintings striking the chains from his patients because they were chained even inside the hospitals. And for Foucault, he is the villain. It takes a minute to realize that the reason he’s the villain is precisely because he improved the lot of people in those hospitals. The reforming impulse, the liberal impulse, is dangerous because the only response is the absolute destruction of that system and that world. The system of state hospitals that might have been reformed were instead effectively torn down and they were not replaced by anything equipped to care for the people who had once been in those hospitals.
