By Theresa Rézeau
The Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516) painted psychological distress long before the digital age transformed visibility into a permanent condition. In The Cure of Folly, also known as The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (c. 1501–1505), an oil-on-panel painting now in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Bosch presents a man undergoing a supposed operation to remove the source of his madness. The patient is restrained in a chair while a surgeon works upon his exposed head and others look on. The scene turns the human mind into something to be corrected, examined and displayed before spectators. Centuries later, the modern world speaks more openly about mental health, yet still places enormous pressure on individuals to appear functional, productive and stable. Visibility itself has increasingly become a psychological condition, one in which identity is continuously performed and exposed beneath the gaze of institutions, audiences, algorithms and public expectation.
Mental Health Awareness Week encourages important conversations around support, care and openness. Yet beyond the language of awareness lies another question that modern culture still struggles to confront: what happens to the human mind when life becomes permanently performative?
Today, visibility is no longer occasional. Professional identities are curated online. Emotional states are managed for public consumption. Achievement is increasingly tied to presence, responsiveness and perception. Even rest is often framed through productivity. We are encouraged not simply to live, but to provide evidence that we are living well.
This pressure extends far beyond influencers and public figures. It shapes students, artists, professionals, academics, freelancers and institutions alike. The modern subject is expected to remain emotionally coherent through instability, economically resilient through exhaustion, and publicly optimistic through uncertainty. Even silence has become 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 takes place before others. Authority figures intervene while the patient becomes the site upon which society projects its anxieties about disorder and irrationality. The scene initially appears to offer a familiar hierarchy: one person is unwell, another possesses the knowledge required to cure him.
Bosch immediately destabilises that hierarchy. The patient sits bound to his chair, his shoes removed, while the supposed surgeon bends over his exposed head. Yet the surgeon wears an inverted funnel, undermining the authority he claims to possess. Most strangely, he does not extract a stone at all. A small flower emerges from the patient's head, while another rests on the table nearby. The absurdity unsettles the entire procedure. Who is actually foolish here: the man being treated, the charlatan claiming to cure him, or the culture that has constructed a spectacle around his supposed disorder?
Modern visibility culture risks reproducing a different version of this spectacle. Emotional distress can be aestheticised, monetised, simplified or transformed into content. Vulnerability becomes acceptable when presented in recognisable forms, while the language of wellbeing can itself become performative, especially within professional environments that continue to reward overwork, speed and perpetual accessibility.
There is also a deeper spiritual dimension to this exhaustion. Human beings were not made to exist permanently before an audience. Silence, prayer, retreat, contemplation and solitude have occupied important places within religious and philosophical traditions across cultures. Interior life mattered. The unseen self mattered. These traditions recognised something contemporary culture is in danger of forgetting: psychological and spiritual survival require spaces beyond spectacle.
Those spaces are becoming harder to protect as notifications collapse the distance between labour and rest. Algorithms reward immediacy. Platforms encourage individuals to transform identity into an ongoing narrative. One is expected not merely to experience life, but to frame it, articulate it, share it and maintain relevance within accelerating systems of attention.
The contradiction is striking. Modern society is more publicly expressive than ever before, yet visibility has not necessarily produced intimacy. A person can be watched, followed, measured and responded to by thousands of people while remaining profoundly unknown. To be continuously seen is not the same thing as being understood.
Beneath these cultural pressures lies a more painful reality that Mental Health Awareness Week cannot ignore. Some people are not simply exhausted; they are struggling to survive psychologically. Prolonged isolation, economic pressure, trauma, shame and despair can accumulate behind an outward appearance of ordinary functioning. Modern life can make this suffering particularly difficult to recognise because it rewards composure. A person may continue working, posting, smiling and responding to others while approaching an emotional breaking point almost entirely unseen.
This is one of the cruellest contradictions of a culture obsessed with visibility. Someone can become exceptionally skilled at appearing well precisely when they are not. The performance of functionality can conceal the very distress that greater awareness is supposed to help us recognise.
Artists have long understood this divide between outward appearance and interior distress. Edvard Munch captured psychological overwhelm in The Scream, where the landscape itself seems to vibrate with emotional instability. Vincent van Gogh repeatedly gave exhaustion, grief and isolation physical form. Long before digital culture, artists understood that psychological suffering does not exist in isolation from the worlds human beings are required to inhabit.
Visibility itself is not inherently destructive. It has allowed people to speak about experiences once buried beneath shame and silence. Conversations around trauma, grief, anxiety and mental illness have become more accessible partly because digital culture disrupted older taboos, and that expansion of openness matters deeply.
But awareness cannot resolve the conditions producing exhaustion.
A culture that celebrates openness while intensifying economic instability, social comparison, algorithmic pressure and professional precarity risks addressing suffering without adequately examining its environment. Mental wellbeing cannot be separated from the conditions under which people are expected to live, work and perform.
This is what gives Bosch's strange operation its continuing force. The Cure of Folly presents the seductive fantasy that distress can simply be extracted from the individual. Locate the problem inside the person, remove it, and order can supposedly be restored. Yet Bosch refuses to give us the expected stone. Instead, the entire procedure becomes unstable. The patient may be the one restrained in the chair, but folly appears to surround him.
That distinction matters because modern discussions of mental health can reproduce the same error in more sophisticated language. We encourage individuals to become more resilient, regulate their emotions, seek support, establish boundaries and practise self-care. All of these can be valuable. But when distress is widespread, the question cannot remain confined to how individuals might better withstand the conditions surrounding them. At some point, those conditions themselves require examination.
Mental health cannot be separated entirely from the worlds we build around human beings, nor can the human spirit flourish indefinitely without slowness, reflection, uncertainty, grief and interior silence.
There are still forms of life that resist the demand for performance: friendships untouched by metrics, religious practice beyond visibility, long walks without documentation, studios without audiences, conversations that disappear rather than circulate. Their value lies precisely in their refusal to become evidence. They allow a person to exist without simultaneously observing and presenting that existence.
The challenge is not to reject visibility altogether. That would be neither possible nor desirable. It is to recover boundaries within it. We may need to relearn the value of delayed responses, uninterrupted rest, private reflection and forms of attention not governed by speed or exposure. The question is no longer simply whether technology connects us, but whether human beings can sustain an interior life within systems designed to keep them permanently available for observation.
Bosch painted a man whose supposed madness had been located inside his head, as though suffering were an object that could simply be extracted. Yet no stone emerges. The certainty belongs not to the patient, but to those convinced that they know where the problem lies.
More than five centuries later, the question is not only how we care for the distressed mind.
It is whether we are willing to examine the world surrounding it.
