ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a range of treatments including electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomy, drugs, and talking therapies. All three works are, broadly conceived, populist, mainstream, realist works with strong comic registers. The chapter discusses the perceived accuracy or inaccuracy of the procedures and practices portrayed than with the politics of representation in popular entertainment. It shows to understand how the activities of mental health and therapeutic systems are figured in conventional artistic forms to grasp the role of such work in political critiques of psychiatric care. The chapter explores a dimensional, as opposed to categorical, understanding of mental distress alongside a radical reengagement with psychosocial framings of madness. It argues that favour of a model of care that embraces the relational, three-dimensionality of distress. One may detect a tacit assumption in this reading of next to normal that a Broadway musical is de facto a lesser political animal than, for example, a fringe theatre show.
