"Feigned madness" is a phrase used in popular culture to describe the assumption of a mental disorder for the purposes of evasion, deceit or the diversion of suspicion. In some cases, feigned madness may be a strategy—in the case of court jesters, an institutionalised one—by which a person acquires a privilege to violate taboos on speaking unpleasant, socially unacceptable, or dangerous truths.
Vincent Gigante, American Mafia don, was seen wandering the streets of Greenwich Village, Manhattan in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in what he later admitted was an elaborate act.
Allegedly, Shūmei Ōkawa, Japanese nationalist, on trial for war crimes after World War II.
Garrett Brock Trapnell, a professional thief and confidence man, frequently pretended to be affected by schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder in order to be sent to mental institutions rather than prison for his crimes. This strategy eventually failed when he was brought to trial for aircraft hijacking. He was later the subject of a book by Eliot Asinof, entitled The Fox Is Crazy Too.
Investigative journalists and psychologists have feigned madness to study psychiatric hospitals from within:
American muckraker Nellie Bly; see Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887)
The Rosenhan experiment in the 1970s also provides a comparison of life inside several mental hospitals.
The Swedish artist Anna Odell created the project Okänd, kvinna 2009-349701 to examine power structures in healthcare, the society's view of mental illness and the victimhood imposed on the patient.
Lucius Junius Brutus, who feigned stupidity, causing the Tarquins to underestimate him as a threat until the time when he was able to drive the Roman people to insurrection.
Ibn al-Haytham, also known as Alhazen, who was ordered by the sixth Fatimid Caliph, al-Hakim, to regulate the flooding of the Nile; he later perceived the insanity and futility of what he was attempting to do and, fearing for his life, feigned madness to avoid the Caliph's wrath.
