Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips notes that theatre's tradition of staging madness has been the parallel text to the medicalization of madness, and one that offered a way of listening to distress without needing (as in clinical settings) to find a solution. Anna Harpin's new book demonstrates how art intervenes in madness, not to define or administer or medicate, but to illuminate the lived subjective experience of stigmatized mental states. Harpin refers to ‘madness’ rather than ‘mental illness’ on the basis that the former generates fresh insight (as opposed to static categories); foregrounds interpretation, not punitive judgement; and contributes to the growing field of mad studies (a scholarship that privileges the lived experience of people who identify as having mental distress). Art (as opposed to medicine or social care), Harpin argues, changes the ‘optic through which the subject [madness] is apprehended’ (p. 3). Specifically, art is not concerned with defining what madness is; rather, it foregrounds ‘how madness is made (conceptually), experienced (individually, collectively) and treated (in both clinical and non-clinical contexts)’ (p. 3).
These principles shape the book, as it steps aside from the ‘I know’ of biomedical discourse toward the ‘I experience’ of different art practices. Part One, ‘Structures: Psychiatrists, Institutions, Treatments’, focuses on the representation of sites of psychological power (via texts such as the biographies of R. D. Laing, the live art of the Vacuum Cleaner and Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest). Part Two, ‘Realities, Bodies, Moods’, breaks away from diagnostic structures and delves into a rich aesthetic seam – visual art, graphic novel, photography, film, performance, theatre, memoir – that challenges normative rules of feeling and behaviour. This allows Harpin to question how reality is structured (Anthony Neilson's 2006 play Realism), why women tend to be pathologized (Lee Daniel's 2009 film Precious) and how moods are redefined by art practices (Ellen Forney's 2012 graphic bipolar memoir Marbles). Some readers might be overwhelmed by the sheer diversity of forms, but Harpin makes a virtue of range. Range unmoors the reader from disciplinary cul-de-sacs and encourages, appropriately in this context, free association.
Art, Madness and Society is the first scholarly monograph within the field of theatre and performance to make a full intervention in contemporary debates about mental health. It is calm, eloquent, timely and thoroughly contextualized, and is an example of the kind of ‘aesthetic companionship’ that Harpin values in the works she analyses: the book contributes a scholarly voice to the aim of ‘keeping distress company’ (pp. 186–7). The book offers an important contribution to associated areas of psychology, social care, disability and mad studies. Its engagement with political philosophy is also strong, echoing Wendy Brown's caution that public sharing of ‘woundedness’ is not always, unquestionably, empowering. This is because an identity based in ‘I am’ tends to lock the subject into a fixed identity, defined by their exclusion; this prevents a more critical position of ‘I want’, which implies improved resources and social change. The analysis of Ellen Forney's memoir Marbles is an excellent example of Harpin's approach to such questions. She carefully considers the visual markers by which bipolar registers in the text, and approaches pharmacology debates – ‘if I medicate, will I still be an artist?’ – sensitively. However, she remains cautiously critical of ways in which an ‘overcoming narrative’ plays into a ‘biomedical landscape of cause, cure and self-management’ (p. 188).
Harpin challenges the reader to ask what it means to take care of ourselves and others, ‘stretching toward a more generous embrace of distress and alterity’ (p. 13), but makes clear that care need not come at the expense of criticality. She notes that artworks which ‘sanitize’ non-normative states merely tolerate difference, rather than question the power structures that produce and perpetuate them. I found the appendix with its rich list of primary sources extremely useful; it also strengthens Harpin's thesis that a reading of madness should strive, like the co-presence of performance, to always be with, not about. As Barbara Taylor's psychiatric memoir The Last Asylum (2014, p. xiv) makes clear, ‘Madness is not a disease like any other … The crazy mind is no weak or failing instrument but intensely alive and bursting with inventive energy’. Neither author romanticizes madness – far from it – but Harpin's new book shows beyond doubt that acceptance of the diversity and vulnerability of human psychology is always beyond illness.
