The School of Life
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2018–2021
8:17 · 3.9M views · Jul 3, 2015
A School of Life short introducing Michel Foucault, who questioned assumed progress in how society treats madness, medicine and sexuality.
HN recommends it as a simple entry point to Foucault, especially on mental health and institutionalization.
3 comments from Hacker News
And this is quite honestly a good things. Wait before you downvote. Hear me out the current system is horrible and what it determines as insane people is a product of such system. Back in the Middle Ages when we had a different approach to mental health non neurotypical people were regarded as different, yes but not as garbage or plainly wrong just because of being odd. Instead in some cases they were even regarded as wise as a result of this. Think about alchemy for example something like that could only have been tried by very very mentally ill people and if they weren’t so at the beginning their handling of mercury sure made them crazy after a while. Modern society easily ditched the mentally ill. However they can give a lot and if that makes a couple companies in the internet mad so be it. I recommend you watch the following video on Foucault this video it is an over simplification but it will help you understand. I also recommend reading the anti edipous from Delouse and Guatari to get an insight in how the current system hides and destroys the mentally ill in spite of how much they have given to history and humanity. The truth is without mentally ill a people society would be different and thus anti mentally ill sentiment of modernity is but a depravity as non neurotypical variations are for memes(social culture and the academia for example) what mutation is for genes
Yes and no. Check out Foucault. He was a radical philosopher that discussed the treatment of mental health and was a critic of institutionalization. I don't know enough about him to agree or disagree with him, but he is an influential point of view. this video
> ...we should think about how we can help more people become successful. It's like you're purposefully missing the point. What if most of serious wealth and success is decided at birth? What are the logical consequences of that? Let's go extreme: A rich guy wins the lottery. He then tells everyone in town how they could've won if they bought tickets. What's your reaction? > Even poor people today live better than kings in the past. I generally agree with this on quantitative measures of productive or technological progress. Other quantitative measures don't look so great: education, housing and healthcare costs; health (esp. mental health) issues in developed vs developing nations; prison populations in the present vs past. Michael Foucalt has better arguments to make here than I do [1]. 1. this video