>>102755
Well, the line between method acting and feigning madness as a ploy for sympathy and actual "I think I'm rilly a woman guise" is a thin one, and a bit blurry. I do believe a lot of what we see from those people is performance, let's-pretend to get pity, and that most of them aren't entirely serious about their claims. This isn't to say that there aren't an awful lot of bent arrows out there on the loose, too.
I think that some of these people, had they been born a hundred years before, would have latched onto the era's fashionable form of madness and devoted themselves to marching up and down a city streat wearing a "sandwich board" sign that said "REPENT, THE END IS NIGH." If they'd been born two hundred years before, they'd have shouted that foreign spies had concealed sinister equipment within the local fabric mill that was zapping evil thoughts into their heads by means of magnetism and air currents. I think that in each instance it would have been to a certain extent performative, a ploy for attention, pity, public charity for the poor misunderstood madman. I also think that fewer of them would have chosen to act out in such a manner in eras when making grand, melodramatic public displays of craziness was as likely to get you a lobotomy as it was to get you a free meal from the local church. I think an awful lot of them would have kept their craziness to themselves.
