The main goal of this paper is to show the changing nature of the phenomenon of insanity by analyzing (historical) records of insanity, and then exemplify the recent debate on mental disorders. The broader goal of the paper is to philosophically research and evaluate the historical and current psychiatric practice, and to observe the concepts of illness and health, that is, mental disorder as categories with practical consequences that are reflected in the medicalization of life in general. The reflection in this paper is influenced by the author Michel Foucault, who follows (interprets) the phenomenon of madness from the Middle Ages to the time of Classicism, when madness is expressed and unified into mental illness. Foucault claims that psychiatric practice arises as a response to perceived deviance among the European population, therefore the role of psychiatry is first to control and exclude, and then to treat with questionable therapeutics. Therefore, the designation of a condition as a mental disorder depends on socio-cultural circumstances, so the objection about the unclear actual onset of the disease is justified. In its background, the paper implicitly questions the author's theses, such as the conditions in which psychiatric knowledge is created, the way in which it is simulated through language, and the point at which such knowledge stops. The paper uses the term insanity until the birth of psychiatry as a science in the 19th century, when the term was changed to the phrase mental disorder. Today, the valid perspective of biological psychiatry, which dominates the psychosocial field, primarily turns to pharmacological interventions for human conditions in which the boundary is somewhat unclear whether the condition is a pathology or a life problem. Part of the paper is devoted to key psychiatric concepts and challenges such as the relativity of diagnoses and reductionism, which is continued in the discussion of the philosophy of psychiatry. Despite the efforts of modern psychiatry to find objective (etiological) explanations for the disorder, psychiatric diagnoses are still the most problematic moment of psychiatry.