Speaking of crazy, I absolutely adore the good people of the Death Panel podcast, authors of Health Communism, for making a point to discuss what we today call "mental health" or "mental illness" as madness.
I have been medicalized and subjected to diagnosis and taxonomic sorting and the objectifying gaze of the psychiatric system from the time I was in kindergarten, and for my part I have never felt recognized or understood by the gingerly language and perception of self styled advocates for "recognizing mental health issues". No, it's in frank discussion of the subjective experience of madness that I have felt I was not alone, not uniquely damaged. Madness is a grand historical phenomenon. You will find madness from the dawn of recorded human experience, and that makes me feel like a normal part of human existence, rather than an aberration.
