'Madness' and Creativity

In this week's readings, I have been covering some familiar territory. However, I still am trying to understand how Foucault's ideas impact a contemporary audience. For example, if the Panopticon Penitentiary never had a guard and prisoners still thought they were being observed is that a bad thing. There is a balance between self-surveillance and societal surveillance. In order to live free of anarchy, we do a 'deal' with the dominant class. How far are we willing to go? Of course, this is a complicated question with no definitive answer.

Just prior to the beginning of photography, Gericault, at the behest of a Doctor of psychiatry, completed a series of paintings depicting different 'types' of madness. (See image at the left)

As I was doing research on the color 'orange,' I found a contemporary psychiatrist that seems to assert that psychiatrists can identify mental illness by the kind of colors, brush strokes, and content a painter uses (Rao, AJP). It would seem that old habits die hard. While we think that some artists live closer to the edges of the Bell curve of behavior, I am not sure that that justifies a label of 'mental illness.'

Now, we have a whole array of 'medications' that are meant to aleviate mental illnesses. Are we 'aleviating' creativity as well? It seems that we endow the contemorary psychiatrist with a great deal of power to deter or determine in this instance.

Rao, Anjali and Matcheri S. Keshavan, "Can Psychaitrists Recognize Mental Illness in Paintings?" American Journal of Psychiatry 143, no. 4 (April 2006):599-600.