A note because I know this can read as anti-psychiatry and thats not where I'm coming from. I take my meds. I see my psychiatrist. I'm not against treatment or diagnosis. Foucault himself wasnt arguing that mental illness doesnt exist, he was mapping how the systems we built around it carry a history that most of us never learn about. I think understanding that history is important, especially for people like us who live inside these systems. It doesnt mean rejecting them. It means knowing what you're standing in. This is information, not a manifesto. Take what's useful, leave what isnt.
So...
I've been reading Foucault's History of Madness and I keep thinking about how much of what he describes I recognise.
The basic argument is this: "crazy" is not a medical discovery. It's has a political history. What counts as madness, who gets locked up, who gets to decide.. all of that changed radically over the centuries, and none of it started with medicine. It started with power.
In medieval Europe, mad people were expelled from towns. Sent down rivers, put outside the gates. Feared sometimes, yes. Seen as prophetic sometimes. But not confined. The Ship of Fools is this image Foucault opens with, boats carrying their "cargo" of fools from town to town. Madness moved. It wasn't locked in a building.
Then 1656 happens. Paris opens the Hôpital Général. One percent of the population confined within months. Not because they were sick. Because they were inconvenient. The mad were thrown in with criminals, sex workers, beggars, the unemployed, blasphemers. There was no diagnosis inside. The register entries were things like "obstinate plaintiff," "great liar," "gruff, sad, unquiet spirit." Character judgments. Moral failures. Thats it.
And then the part that really got me. Everyone knows the story of Pinel removing the chains. It's in every psychiatry textbook as this great moment of liberation. Foucault says no. He says Pinel replaced physical chains with moral ones. The asylum wasn't freedom. It was a new kind of control where the mad person became responsible for their own cure, guilty of their own madness. The doctor replaced the judge who replaced the priest. The authority to define changed. The exclusion didn't.
I think about my own hospitalization alot when I read this. Three weeks involuntary in Porto. The experience didn't damage me through physical harm. It damaged me through disrespect. Through being treated as someone who had lost the right to speak for herself. "Lacks insight" is still the phrase they use, and it does exactly what those register entries did in 1656, it says: you cannot be trusted to know your own mind.
And this is where it gets important for what we're trying to do here. If bipolar pride means anything,,, if this community is going to be more than just a name.. we need to understand the ground we're standing on. The history of how "crazy" was constructed is not abstract philosophy. Its the architecture we still live inside. Involuntary holds, forced treatment, the disclosure trap, the fact that a manic episode can erase your credibility permanently. All of it has roots in what Foucault mapped.
It obviously changes from country to country. In some places forced hospitalization is terrifyingly easy to initiate. In others the law is more careful. But the underlying logic is the same everywhere: someone else decides if you're well enough to be free.
I'm studying this because I need to understand myself. Where the shame comes from. Why the hospital felt the way it felt. Why the word "crazy" still carries what it carries. I dont think you can build a movement without understanding the thing you're moving against. And the thing we're moving against has a 400 year head start.
If you havent read Foucault, I'd say start here. Madness and Civilization (the shorter version) is very readable. The full History of Madness is dense but worth it. Either way what he maps is.. uncomfortably familiar.
Has anyone else read this book?