Who decides on whether someone has lost their "reason"? – the writings of Foucalt

I want to know just who came up with the spectrum of “reason”, of “normal behaviour” of “normal thoughts”? Is it defined anywhere? And, if so, who evaluates it and to what benchmark? Does it change with society’s current “norms”?

Who says that my behaviour, thoughts and emotions are “normal” or not? And what gives any assessor of these the right/credentials to evaluate them and against what scale/spectrum? Who says that the mood swings experienced by someone with Bipolar are “abnormal”? Where’s their evidence?

I have just bought a book: “Mental Health Law policy and practice” by Peter Bartlett and Ralph Sandland, both Professors at Nottingham University. They open their book with this very subject i.e. who decides what the common language of “reason” is?:

“In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.

As for a common language, there is no such thing; or rather, there is no such thing any longer; the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, affords the evidence of a broken dialogue, posits the separation as already effected, and thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made.

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness, has been established only on the basis of such a silence. “ Foucault, 1965: x – xi

Hear, hear Foucault. The fact that one person communicates (albeit imperfectly) their thoughts to another person (who “hears” what they are “able” to hear) who then perceives those thoughts to be markedly contrary to his/her own experience of the world, does not mean that the person communicating their thoughts has “lost their reason”.

Often people find it difficult to articulate what they are thinking, especially if they are not used to articulating their thoughts. They may describe feelings, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, observations in a clumsy, half – illuminating way such that the person receiving the information can’t decipher the exact meaning. This may then come across as lacking in reason. But are they right to then extrapolate from that incoherence the conclusion that the person has “lost their reason”, isn’t “normal”, has “lost their judgement”, isn’t perceiving the world as others perceive it.

The authors of the book state the following:

“If policy has developed through silencing the mad, if it is, as Foucault claims, a discourse of reason about unreason, it then tells us as much, or more, about the reasonable as the mad. For reason to articulate insanity, it must do it with reference to sanity, because this is the only way the border can be understood.

In this way, mental health law and policy can be seen as a mirror, in which we see our own values reflected.”

Therefore, the people making mental health law and policy are basing their policies and law on their own perceptions of reason and reality – how do they know that their view of “reason” is in fact acceptable and representative of “the norm”. Even if it is representative of “the norm”, is “the norm” acceptable?

On the basis of “the norm” being the reason of the majority of people, we would still have black people confined to slavery, women would not be able to vote and it would be acceptable for a husband to rape his wife (a crime which until the 1980’s was not considered to be a crime; or at least, it wasn’t recognised as a crime in any of the criminal law statutes or cases).

Sooner or later, these “norms” have to be challenged and any anomolies resolved. It is my intention to challenge the ideas that law makers and policy makers have about mental illness and I will start in relation to Family Law.

Michel Foucault  (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher, historian and socialogist. He held a chair at the College de France and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Michel Foucault is best known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system. Foucault’s work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and discourse, has been widely discussed and applied.