Foucault's nightmare

Foucault was a French thinker. You can read more about him here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

His relevant work is Madness and Civilisation. A simplified version of
the impenetrable text is available on Sparknotes.
http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/madnessandciv/section1.html

Sadly I expect that much of the sense of what he was trying to say is
lost in that translation. I've attempted to read the original which is a
translation in itself and found it to be impenetrable in the detail.

The idea itself is simple: madness is an ever evolving construct of
society and a modern product of a number of changes in society.

My own take on it is that the idea of mental illness is a way to
understand madness and the lesser forms of unreason but it is not a real
thing. It is only what society chooses to call it. Its just as easy to
call them societal illness that developed along with the industrial
revolution and the age of reason. Society promoted the value of
robot-like individuals, those best designed to work as automatons in
factories. Those that worked like computer programs and machines were
considered superior and those not considered worthless. The mad
themselves were spurned by society (and replaced the previously excluded
lepers in fulfilling society's need to exile a group).

The history of mental illness of the history of exclusion and rejection.
The creation of the idea of illness is sensical in that people were
presented in medical settings but much of the illness lay with a society
that was discompassionate and unaccepting of square pegs when it wanted
things that fitted through round holes. The psychiatric system developed
to bash the square pegs into suitable round ones, all in the name of
healthcare. It is compassionate to house the poor, mad and exiled in the
asylums but it created the Great Confinement (the period after the Poor
Law, Pauper's Law or Lunatics Act created the asylum system in the UK)
where the mad were removed from public view (Hanlon's razor yet again -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor) and redoubled the stigma.
The idea of illness may have been a way to side step the stigma using
the protective shield of disability and the privelidge of the invalid
applied based upon a truth that the mad were disabled and somewhat
moreso than some physical disabilities. People seemed readier to change
society to adapt it to the full spectrum of physical impairment so lifts
are installed and wheelchair ramps are available but the rectification
of the mistakes of society's development that created the disability and
illness of madness as well as the perjorative meaning of madness itself
will take more than my lifetime to see through.