ABSTRACT
All the Madmen' is the second track from The Man Who Sold the World, David Bowie. The album generally regarded as marking the beginning of David Bowie's hard rock period. In Szasz's opinion, so-called 'mental illness' should therefore lose its mythical identity and be correctly defined as 'personal, social, and ethical problems in living'. It constitutes the initial act of social validation and invalidation, pronounced by the high priest of modern, scientific religion, the psychiatrist; it justifies the expulsion of the sacrificial scapegoat, the mental patient, from the community. In his investigation of fictional images of mental illness during the 1960s, Charles Winick suggests that 'the mentally ill are seen as heroic and intelligent' and that in Kesey's book are 'almost Christ-like, crushed by a capricious society'. Microphone placement is also used to modify vocal timbre; for example, use of close microphone placement without reverberation in the spoken interlude contrasts sharply with the more distant placement used in the choruses.
