Madness and the Popular Imagination

My aim in this chapter is to illustrate how images and representations of the ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ are not simply the outcome of poor journalism, which is the standard view, but rather the cultural legacy of ways of seeing ‘the mad’ under new social and psychiatric conditions. The mythology of violence that underpins popular assumptions about the psychiatrically ill suggests that we must confront the cultural legacy of misrecognition in the public sphere. The social consequences of misrecognition, the philosopher Nancy Fraser (2000, p. 113) has warned, are that people are ‘denied the status of a full partner in social interaction, as a consequence of institutionalized patterns of cultural value that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem’. This is not just a philosophical point.