Michael Foucault

Torrey and Miller's The Invisible Plague, as you might expect, has some unkind words for R.D. Laing (who argued that insanity was simply a sane response to an insane capitalist world), Thomas Szasz (who denies that schizophrenia is anything but "inappropriate use of metaphors" by the patient), and Michael Foucault.

If you have read a scholarly journal article or book published in the last thirty years, and found yourself wondering, "Am I stupid? Or is this incomprehensible gibberish?" then the odds are good that you have read something either written by Michael Foucault, or by someone who has read too much of Foucault.

Foucault's Madness and Civilization published in English 1965, made the claim that insanity isn't an illness, but an alternative lifestyle, and that mental hospitals were created as a mechanism for oppressing people who were living in that alternative lifestyle. You won't be terribly surprised to hear that Foucault died of AIDS in 1984. From Torrey and Miller, pp. 302-3:

According to his biographers, Foucault was emotionally unstable, made multiple suicide attempts, and, in the view of one friend, "all his life.... verged on madness."

Foucault dressed insanity in hits best philosophical finery: "The symbol of madness will henceforth be that mirror which, without reflecting anything real, will secretly offer the man who observes himself in it the dream of his own presumption. Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever the truth about himself he is able to perceive." Foucault thus had great appeal to a generation that often mistook obscurantism for wisdom.