By Theresa Rézeau
Hieronymus Bosch painted psychological distress long before the digital age transformed visibility into a permanent condition. In The Cure of Folly, the human mind becomes something to be corrected, examined, and performed before spectators. Centuries later, the modern world speaks more openly about mental health, yet still places enormous pressure on individuals to appear functional, productive, stable, and endlessly visible. Visibility itself has increasingly become a psychological condition: one in which identity is continuously performed, measured, and exposed beneath the gaze of institutions, audiences, algorithms, and public expectation.
Mental Health Awareness Week often encourages important conversations around support, care, and openness. Yet beyond the language of awareness lies another question that modern culture still struggles to confront honestly: what happens to the human mind when life becomes permanently performative?
Today, visibility is no longer occasional. It is continuous. Professional identities are curated online. Emotional states are subtly managed for public consumption. Achievement is increasingly tied to presence, responsiveness, and perception. Even rest now appears framed through productivity. We are encouraged not simply to live, but to continuously present evidence of living well.
This pressure extends far beyond social media influencers or public figures. It shapes students, artists, professionals, academics, freelancers, and institutions alike. The modern subject is often expected to remain emotionally coherent regardless of instability, economically resilient despite exhaustion, and publicly optimistic even during uncertainty. Silence itself has become increasingly uncomfortable within systems that reward constant participation.
Bosch’s painting feels unexpectedly contemporary because it exposes the theatrical dimension of psychological correction. The so-called “cure” is performed publicly. Spectators gather. Authority figures intervene. The individual becomes the site upon which society projects its anxieties about disorder, instability, and irrationality. The symbolism is deeply unsettling. The funnel worn upon the head of the surgeon suggests false wisdom disguised as expertise. The extraction itself appears absurd, almost ritualistic. Madness is treated not with understanding, but with spectacle.
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 - 1516), The Cure of Folly (also known as The Extraction of the Stone of Madness), c. 1494.
Oil on panel. Public domain.
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
In many ways, modern visibility culture risks reproducing similar dynamics. Emotional distress is frequently aestheticised, monetised, simplified, or transformed into content. Vulnerability becomes legible only when presented in socially acceptable forms. The language of wellbeing can itself become performative, especially within professional environments that continue rewarding overwork, speed, and perpetual accessibility.
There is also a deeper spiritual dimension to this exhaustion. Human beings were not designed to exist permanently before an audience. Historically, silence, prayer, retreat, contemplation, and solitude occupied an important place within religious and philosophical traditions across cultures. Interior life mattered. The unseen self mattered. Many sacred traditions understood that psychological survival required moments beyond spectacle and social performance.
The contemporary world increasingly erodes those spaces.
Notifications collapse distance between labour and rest. Algorithms reward emotional immediacy. Platforms encourage individuals to transform identity into ongoing narrative production. One is expected not merely to experience life, but to frame it, articulate it, share it, optimise it, and maintain relevance within accelerating systems of attention.
This creates a peculiar contradiction. Modern society is more publicly expressive than ever before, yet many people experience profound loneliness, fragmentation, and psychological fatigue. Visibility has expanded, but intimacy has not necessarily deepened alongside it. To be seen continuously is not the same thing as being understood.
Beneath these broader cultural pressures lies a more painful reality that Mental Health Awareness Week cannot ignore: many people are not merely exhausted, but struggling to survive psychologically. Suicide attempts often emerge not from a single moment, but from prolonged isolation, accumulated despair, economic pressure, trauma, shame, or the unbearable feeling that one’s suffering has become invisible beneath the demand to keep functioning. In cultures increasingly organised around performance and visibility, individuals may appear socially connected while privately experiencing profound hopelessness. The tragedy is that many people become highly skilled at disguising distress precisely because modern life rewards composure. Some of the most psychologically vulnerable individuals continue working, posting, smiling, producing, and responding to others while quietly reaching emotional breaking points that remain unseen until it is too late.
Artists have long recognised this tension. Edvard Munch captured psychological overwhelm in The Scream, where the landscape itself appears to vibrate with emotional instability. Vincent van Gogh painted exhaustion, grief, and isolation not as abstract concepts, but as conditions inhabiting the body itself. Long before modern psychiatry or digital culture, artists understood that psychological suffering often emerges not only from internal pain, but from the pressure of existing within worlds that become spiritually uninhabitable.
This does not mean visibility itself is inherently destructive. Visibility has also allowed many individuals to speak openly about experiences once buried beneath shame or silence. Conversations around trauma, grief, anxiety, and mental illness have become more accessible partly because digital culture disrupted older taboos. That matters deeply.
But awareness alone cannot resolve the structural pressures producing exhaustion in the first place.
A culture that celebrates openness while simultaneously intensifying economic instability, social comparison, algorithmic pressure, and professional precarity risks treating symptoms while deepening causes. One cannot speak meaningfully about mental wellbeing without also speaking about the conditions under which people are asked to live and perform.
Perhaps this is why Bosch’s painting continues to resonate centuries later. It reminds us that societies have long attempted to “fix” the human mind without confronting the environments contributing to distress. The desire to remove the “stone of folly” remains seductive because it offers the fantasy that psychological suffering can be isolated within individuals rather than recognised as part of wider cultural, spiritual, political, and economic conditions.
Mental health cannot be separated entirely from the worlds we build around human beings.
Nor can the human spirit survive indefinitely within systems that eliminate slowness, reflection, uncertainty, grief, and interior silence.
Yet the situation is not entirely hopeless, nor universally uniform. Many people continue to protect forms of private life that resist performance: friendships untouched by metrics, religious practice beyond visibility, long walks without documentation, studios without audiences, conversations that disappear rather than circulate. Some artists, writers, and ordinary individuals still cultivate spaces where identity is not continuously converted into content. These quieter forms of living may appear small, but they preserve something increasingly endangered: the ability to exist without constant self-presentation.
Perhaps the challenge is not to reject visibility altogether, which is neither possible nor necessarily desirable, but to recover boundaries within it. Cultures may need to relearn the value of delayed responses, uninterrupted rest, private reflection, and forms of attention not governed entirely by speed or exposure. The question is no longer simply whether technology connects us, but whether human beings can still sustain an interior life within systems designed to keep them permanently visible.
In the end, one of the most necessary acts in a culture of relentless performance may be the decision to protect a part of oneself from the demand to always be seen.
0 comments