When I was young, crazy people were romanticized as heroes in mainstream culture, like McMurphy in "One Flew Over the Cu ck oo's Nest."

Or Travis Bickle, Robert DeNiro's title character in Taxi Driver.

And ba ck in the old days, from artists we practically demanded extreme kookiness - a Salvador Dali or Ja ck Kerouac or John Cassevetes, if not necessarily a Vincent van Gogh.

But not any more.

I really wonder if this is some kind of cultural corollary to our synthetically mellowed-out era, this age of Prozac and Zoloft and Paxil. Maybe perfect mental health has become a little too prized and maybe too prudently defined.

The mental illnesses of mentally ill characters these days are seldom romanticized at all. Instead, they are either psychopaths, like Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. Or comic figures experiencing very specifically diagnosed medical disorders, like the TV detective comedy Monk, where the whole premise is that the title character has obsessive-compulsive disorder. Or the HBO series Six Feet Under, where a major character has bipolar disorder.

All of which got me to wondering if the pendulum swing in the culture's attitude, from grand and tragic glorification to a named and tidy medical condition, also reflects our culture's current nervous worship of absolutely even-keeled "normality."

There is a standard psychiatric test called the Goldberg Mania Scale. It supposedly measures whether you have manic symptoms - the up side of bipolar disorder -- severe enough to require psychiatric help.

You, the prospective patient, agree or disagree with18 different statements like "I have been full of energy" ... "I have more new ideas than I can handle" ... "I have been more active than usual"

... and "I have been feeling particularly playful."

Now those all sound pretty desirable to me. And indeed, when I took the test I strongly agreed with a lot of them. The only one that sounded insane was number 15: "I have special plans for the world." To that I said no.

But overall, I scored 44 on the Goldberg Mania Scale. A score of just 20 or higher, "suggests the possible need for an evaluation by a qualified psychiatrist." Am I clinically "manic"? I don't think so.

Or has our culture become a little too eager to simplify complicated conditions and pigeonhole and control the natural quirks and zigs and zags of human consciousness and behavior?

Call me crazy, but I think it has.