You may have read a while back about the misadventures of Anna Odell, a student at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. On January 21, 2009, passersby notified police that they’d seen a woman sitting on the railing of a bridge in the center of Stockholm. When police approached Odell, she refused to speak. Fearing she would jump, they took her into custody. She put up quite a fight, kicking and biting police, and then, when they finally got her to an acute psychiatric ward, kicking and biting the personnel. Eventually the doctors had no choice but to put her in restraints and sedate her.

It turned out that the whole thing was a class project, one approved by Odell’s academic advisor. She initially refused to comment on her rationale, but a number of commentators guessed—correctly, as it later turned out—that it had something to do with questioning the accepted definitions of sanity, and with demonstrating the power of the political and medical establishments over the individual. You’d think that One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest had never been written—or made into a major motion picture starring Jack Nicholson.

What was remarkable about Odell’s stunt from an American point of view—from this American’s point of view, anyway—was that (a) virtually every aspect of this project from Odell’s tuition, to the salaries of her advisor, the police, and the psychiatrists, nurses, and orderlies at St. Göran’s Hospital, to the cost of her overnight stay