Is madness just an idea developed as a consequence of the constitution of a prevailing notion of rationality, as Foucault examined in Madness and Civilisation. The development of Normalcy, an idea of people conforming to certain behavioural traits and anyone not doing so is insane or at least abnormal, may have occurred as the result of capitalism, whereby people had to get to work on time, work for most of the day for others, not argue or fight the system.
This ideal (if it can be called that) of Normalcy effectively eliminated the spiritual, the mystic, and often the artist and visionary. In my work 'An Unknown Power' I connect it the continuing process of domestication.
The madness of Vincent Weiguang Li:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean
Mere construct indeed!
An extreme and gruesome incident doesn't then confirm notions of madness as we are once again establishing that madness exists in particular ways, that is barbarism and destructiveness. Does a single random incident confirm a whole kaleidoscope of ideas? How much do we actually really know on this matter? I've come across strange people who happen to be extremely violent, but that violence cannot be slotted into paradigms of mental illness. Were all the participants in Isis mad, or psychopathic as widely believed, or just opportunists taking a chance to kill, be killed, rape and control women, and at the same time be heroes to many as well as claiming benediction.
The bare statement "madness is a mere construct" is clearly false. Of course there exist some forms of madness that are constructed, according to fashion, stipulation for purposes of treatment and funding thereof, legislative convenience, etc. And the boundaries are constantly renegotiated; cf. the many editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Such fluidity does not detract from there being some uncontroversial unconstructed cases of madness. Sorry, I'm not one of those guys who regards every category as constructed.
RE: Does a single random incident confirm a whole kaleidoscope of ideas?
Of course not. A counterexample to a generalization such as "All A are B" is "Not all A are B" or equivalently "Some A are not B", not "No A are B". Foucaultians would do well to appropriately limit the range of their claims; so doing would do justice to the nuances of what are genuine controversial or borderline cases instead of sweeping them all under the rug of a hasty generalization.
Perception of what is and what is not mental illness has changed over time, but only recently has that understanding been solely in the hands of the medical profession within the parameters of a disease-based understanding. Are you saying Karl that human nature is really subject to categorisation as in the DSMMD and that as human beings we exist within such a dichotomy of mental illness and mental health? That is it: forget all other conceptions on human nature?
@Stanley Wilkin
It is not a dichotomy, it is a spectrum of sorts. There are uncontroversial cases of mental illness at one extreme and of mental health on the other end. In between there are cases that bear more or less resemblance to the uncontroversial mental illness cases, and that is where construction runs rampant. In my most cynical moments, I would say the DSMMD is itself a symptom of mental illness in the mental health professions. However, this is not to deny that there are borderline cases of whatever-you-want-to-call-them that call for management and treatment; categorizing one way rather than another may have good or bad consequences as regards accessing resources and government programs. (I keep thinking of the folks responsible for food catering in US schools meeting government healthy food regulations by getting pizza classified as a vegetable — now that is what I call a constructed category!!)
However, to regard madness tout court as a construct is also pernicious in that it suggests that there is no fact of the matter and constructs can just be changed willynilly. So certain problems are made to go away by reclassifying or "reconstructing" them. Is providing for the mentally ill too costly? Just reconstruct them into a classification deemed to require no special care and turn them loose on the streets.
Karl, we're more on the same page than reading other chapters.
Can we nevertheless look at human behaviour without resorting to mental health ideas? Now I already know your response to that as you go from accepting that there are issues to the worst scenarios in the twinkling of an eye, but lets suggest that 1) it is not a case of mental health or mental illness, which I again suggest is offered by the health authorities, 2) other ideas should get a look in.
Mental health professional paradigms dominant now any discussion of human potentialities -or at least it nips in at some point or another-but what if we try and examine both thinking and treatments afresh? Mental health ideas are immediately succeeded by treatments, they are inseparable, so do you think we can separate and consider the proficiency and appropriateness of treatments?
Most of the most reliable torture methods in the modern world, if not actually invented by psychiatry, were refined by them-waterboarding for example.
What is it for something to be “merely a construct”? What do you mean by madness?
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