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Where Does Madness Begin?
Why there is a very thick grey line between what we deem sane and what we classify as mad
In most OECD countries today, a clinical psychotherapist tasked by a Court to assess the mental health of someone who’d just drowned an old woman because he was convinced she was a witch, would almost certainly declare the person to be insane and therefore not fit to stand trial. Four hundred years ago, however, a person performing that same act would likely have received the approbation of his community.
So where does the madness lie in this case? With the individual of today, or with the entire society of yesteryear?
We can think of literally dozens of similar examples. Today, a person who tied their neighbors to a stake and burned them because they believed in a fractionally different version of the Christian mythology to that believed by the perpetrator would be assessed as clinically insane. But when England was ricocheting between Catholic and Protestant rulers during the second half of the sixteenth century, such acts were commonplace and few if any invoked the contemporary explanation for inexplicable acts: demonic possession, rather than the then-non-existent explanation of clinical insanity. Burning people was just something that was done in order to ensure that god’s will could be carried…
