Abstract
Madness (or mental illness/disorder, depending on one's discourse) is usually understood as something contradictory to natural behaviour, common sense or rational thinking. The aim of this paper is to suggest that if one assumes that the ways humans think, behave and feel are socially constructed, they should also acknowledge madness to be a transgression of social norm rather than something belonging solely to the realms of biology and medicine.
While the former is nowadays a part of wide consensus - at least in the fields of social anthropology and sociology - the latter is still considered a controversial topic better left to psychologists and psychiatrists. This paper attempts to make a claim that madness as a phenomenon is to be researched and examined (also) from the perspectives of social anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines, focusing on the role of social norm in our understanding of madness and vice versa, including the power dynamics behind said understanding.
To support the claim, I'm citing works of the anthropologist and psychoanalyst George Devereux, the psychiatrist and historian Jonathan Metzl, the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann as well as members of the Hearing Voices Network or the Czech historian Jan Tesař who was one of numerous political dissidents in 1980's Czechoslovakia diagnosed with 'antisocial personality disorder' in order to be silenced. These examples - some of which can be rightfully categorised as political abuse of psychiatry - provide an argument for the need to research madness as a part of the socially constructed reality prone to critical reflection and deconstruction.