not many people know that sanity and insanity are legal , not psychological, constructs which are assessed in relative proximity to a consensus reality. and even fewer people truly understand the implications of this fact. sanity is, over everything else, the determination that you are entitled to a privileged legal status, one in which your agency is not compromised and in which your consent matters. the mad must be understood as a politically marginalized class because, among other more abstract reasons, our class is constructed explicitly as such by the letter of the law.
it is no coincidence that the rise of Black radicalism in the US in the 1950s was closely followed by an abrupt demographic shift in schizophrenia diagnoses (typically treated with psychiatric incarceration, powerful sedatives, and a variety of experimental surgeries). which had once been a disciplinary label for inadequate white housewives was now assigned to black men whose politics often so happened to draw the wrong attention. but even now, the idea of a psychotic inmate whose conspiracies are proven true is a stock character - a twee bit of comic relief when aliens are afoot or a too-sincere premise of a syfy original - rather than a literal reality suffered by so many (typically multiply oppressed) mad people.
