I was pleasantly surprised by this article. I was ready for something about how we fear the mentally because they are unpredictable and might do something violent, but I shouldn't have doubted you. Despite how often they are portrayed in pop culture as the perpetrators of crimes, they are much more likely to be the victims. Madness makes you vulnerable and confused and isolated, not The Joker, and I think that is what you are getting at. The fear is not in what they might do to us, but what might happen if we became them. It is easier to project that fear by assigning someone monstrous capacities than to go face to face with the disintegration of what makes us human and connects us to others, where lies true terror.
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That was precisely the point! We may fear a “crazy person” for the violence he or she might inflict upon us, but that fear it trivial when compared to the dehumanizing prospect of our madness.