A Cultural History of How Mental Disorder is Visualised

How shall we know insanity from sanity?

Making Madness Visible offers a cultural history of the many ways insanity has been visualised, and how such representations have shaped our understanding of mental disorder itself.

From medieval depictions of the fool, to the early modern “stone of folly” and convulsive dances, to the walls of the asylum and modern brain scans, visual tropes have long governed how societies distinguish sanity from insanity. Yet these images do more than illustrate. They define, marginalise, and other. By making madness visible, they mark the insane as aberrant and apart – while at the same time also exposing the instability of those very boundaries.

Tracing this restless history of visualisation, Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia shows how madness has continually troubled borders between reason and unreason, norm and deviance, humanity and inhumanity.

Bringing together visual culture, medical history, and cultural analysis, Making Madness Visible demonstrates that the visualisation of mental disorders has never been neutral. Images have not simply reflected ideas of madness – they have actively shaped its treatment