One way to conceptualize madness is as a social artifact that is used as a smothering weapon, wielded by those with power. This can be hard to articulate, but here: the turbulence which permeates all of society is seized upon as it bubbles up within the individual.
Those beginning glimmers of a turbulence in the individual are simply the gradual emergence of a social turbulence through the path of least resistance: where it percolates up through the most sensitive or vulnerable individuals first. The individual is isolated as "mad" and cast out.
This game of whackamole can continue until there are too many moles to whack, when that inner subjectivity coalesces through the relations of the many and through a process of inversion, emerges then as the whole objective state of society, and the "mad" ones appear as prophets.
For example, my doubts in myself as paranoid have largely been allayed by simply looking outward. I only need to look at basic facts of our current existence and instantly think: nope, not paranoid, everything really is fucked. I still have bouts of paranoia, but it is no longer the problem it once was.
So the belief in "madness" in the conventional sense may then be seen as a superstition itself. It is seen as a separate entity of its own which can be captured and then banished. Which is funny - certainly by design - as the "mad" themselves are often perceived as superstitious.
One way to banish superstition is to entertain the recognition that there is only necessity. What must happen, and where must the energy go? In other words, accumulating traumas are inevitable in a society which refuses to reconcile its own collective traumas. Yes, traumas can be isolated and sterilized in individuals in severely limited ways, allowing the greater system to stagger on. But trauma always occurs as a collective relation.
But unaddressed at their base in this way, eventually those traumas continue to build, and accumulate, and sooner or later, they must be released.
