Crazy Genius or Just Crazy? a google search inspired title

I also noticed an apparent contradiction between the "link to creative genius" stereotype that Price mentions and the wider belief that mentally ill/ non-neurotypical individuals have no place in university life (and, by extension, other areas of society). But I think that the contradiction isn't a product of faulty reasoning on the part of either author, but rather part of common thought around madness, mental disability, etc.

The mad, unstable creative genius (usually male) is a stock figure of American literature, movies, and public discourse. But this character is, by definition, a rarity. He (and I think a whole other post could be written about why this figure is generally "he") isn't like the other madmen. He fits the "supercrip" storyline outlined by Eli Clare, and can be held up as a counterexample to all the other mentally disabled people out there. So "A Beautiful Mind" can be an award winning movie about exceptional John Nash, without explicitly raising questions about the general place and treatment of paranoid schizophrenics in the US today.