My sound piece is about the subjectivity of the categorizations of sanity and insanity in our society. Throughout the piece I reference anxiety and fear while questioning the definition of sanity itself. Fear and anxiety are important because the fear of the “not right,” or worse, being considered to be one of those people, perpetuates the insanity of believing that over 26% of Americans are truly mentally “ill.” While there seems to be an ever-growing amount of definitions for insanity, the qualifications for an absolutely sane person are extremely vague and, honestly, the paradox of the whole thing is that the textbook sane person is just that, vague and seemingly void of conviction or opinion.
I began with searching youtube for certain simple keywords such as fear, anxiety, insanity and sanity. I found that it is a lot harder than I thought to come across people who blog about these things or talk about them. I was very surprised at the lack of an objective definition of sane, and my project began to change a bit when I discovered this. Powerful schools of thought control the public’s view of the ideal person, asking people to not trust their own preferences but to reference an ideal that some institution just decided should be the norm. The backing behind most of the opinions of the doctors I have found on this subject seem to me to be intentionally biased towards assuming that people are more likely insane than not. In the end, I haven’t really come across anything ground-breaking with these findings, but I did become more solid in my distrust for higher authorities at work in the institutions that heavily affect our lives, especially in the field psychiatry.
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