The Mentally Ill: From Insane to User of Psychiatry

Historically, the negotiation of what it means to be mentally ill has been affected by several divergent factors: questions of security and finance, views on gender and heredity, and medical interventions in the field of psychiatry. The sum of these factors creates certain time-specific imaginaries of mental illness that intersect with different national political agendas, pieces of legislation and changing practices in public healthcare institutions. This article uses literature as a cultural testimony to trace ‘the mentally ill’ as a key political figure in the Danish welfare state from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Contextualizing three passages from novels by the Danish authors Amalie Skram (1895), Tove Ditlevsen (1968), and Hanne Højgaard Viemose (2019), it depicts what can be conceived as three distinct eras of mental illness in the context of the Danish welfare state. In doing so, it follows the broader transition from ‘the insane’ to ‘the patient’ to the current ‘user of psychiatry’ and demonstrates that different imaginaries and articulations of what it means to be mentally ill have been – and still are – part of societal and political discourses. Finally, drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘societies of control’ (1992), I argue that the decentralization of the field of psychiatry that has taken place in Denmark and similar western countries since the late 1970s must be seen as being correlated with a broader social transformation from disciplining citizens in the Foucauldian sense to a new kind of control and subjectification cum-marginalization.