Madness, Art, and Society : Beyond Illness

How is madness made, experienced, and treated? How might art think around – and beyond – psychiatric definitions of illness and wellbeing?

Madness, Art, and Society engages with artistic practices from theatre and live art to graphic fiction, charting a multiplicity of ways of thinking critically with, rather than about, non-normative psychological experience. It is organised into two parts:

• ‘Psychiatrists, Institutions, Treatments’, which illuminates the environments, figures and primary models of psychiatric care, reconsidering their history and contemporary manifestations through case studies including David Edgar’s Mary Barnes and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
• ‘Realities, Bodies, Moods’, which rejects diagnostic categories in favour of a radical openness to the diversity of madness, touching upon works such as Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places, and Things.

Reading its case studies as a form of protest literature, Madness, Art, and Society seeks a more nuanced understanding of the plurality of madness in contemporary art and society, and in so doing, offers an outstanding resource for students and scholars alike.

How is madness experienced, treated, and represented? How might art think around – and beyond – psychiatric definitions of illness and wellbeing?

Madness, Art, and Society engages with artistic practices from theatre and live art to graphic fiction, charting a multiplicity of ways of thinking critically with, rather than about, non-normative psychological experience. It is organised into two parts:

• ‘Structures: psychiatrists, institutions, treatments’, illuminates the environments, figures and primary models of psychiatric care, reconsidering their history and contemporary manifestations through case studies including David Edgar’s Mary Barnes and Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
• ‘Experiences: realities, bodies, moods’, promblematises diagnostic categories and proposes more radically open models of thinking in relation to experiences of madness, touching upon works such as Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places, and Things.

Reading its case studies as a counter-discourse to orthodox psychiatry, Madness, Art, and Society seeks a more nuanced understanding of the plurality of madness in society, and in so doing, offers an outstanding resource for students and scholars alike.