The Thin Bleu Line
The Gist
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The Transformation of Mental Illness
Our understanding of mental illness had been so transformed by the romantic representation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where actually the hero doesn't have mental illness. And when I went to visit Michael in his locked ward, I was a graduate student in English literature and you really couldn't be a graduate students in those days without reading Foucault's Madness and Civilization. The idea that Michael was afflicted by a social construct could not have survived three seconds of my visit because he was so obviously suffering from something very physical.
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