Description
At the surface, madness appears to be the quality of the mentally ill and is constructed by Western Society into a complex and nuanced ideology. Western culture reinforces the belief that madness and mental illness are synonymous, from the television we watch, the images we share endlessly on social media, to the very language we use when we confront someone whom we believe is mentally ill. All previous platforms of communication illustrate our constructed view of the mentally ill. The conflation of the terms madness and mental illness occurs mainly because the visual and non-visual culture of madness is riddled with misunderstandings. Misunderstandings that have spread themselves through both the visual and non-visual aspects of contemporary culture by way of psychiatric photography. This thesis examines the visual culture of psychiatric photography that was used in the diagnosis and treatment of mentally ill patients in English, French and North American asylums largely in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using Roland Barthes’ semiotic theory of mythology as a theoretical filter, paired with a historical context, this thesis will analyze three different case studies of psychiatric photography and will establish the “Who, what, when, where, why, how,” of the visual culture of madness, and how it has embedded negative myths into contemporary visual and non-visual western culture. Once the analysis is finished, a proposed visual timeline of the visual culture of madness and psychiatric photography and its effect on western society’s perceptions of people suffering from mental illness will be evident.
