books, society and culture

World Mental Health Day 2026: How was mental health visualised?

Making Madness Visible explores how societies have pictured insanity, from medieval fools to modern brain scans. Alvise Sforza Tarabochia shows how these images not only reflect but also shape ideas of madness, defining boundaries between sanity and insanity while questioning their stability across history and culture. For World Mental Health Day 2026, the author guides the reader through five images from their monograph, exploring how madness and mental health have been depicted historically.