The study attempts to trace diachronic evidence of attitudes towards madness in literature translated into Greek. It explores three Greek translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher. Foucault’s Madness in Civilization is a theoretical background regarding shifting attitudes towards madness from a historical perspective. In discourse, attitudes towards madness may be manifested through pragmatic phenomena like impoliteness, a pragmatic theoretical framework used for testing the following hypothesis: Using the notions of offensiveness, interpersonal distance and explicit references to mental illness, the study shows that the degree of impoliteness of the first-person narrator towards the mentally ill protagonist decreases in the latest translation, as a result of the disability movement, suggesting that the attitude of the Greek public towards mental illness is becoming more tolerant and inclusive. Α questionnaire distributed to Greek-English bilinguals, of twenty to thirty years of age, confirms the findings, suggesting that representations of mental illness in fiction undergo a major shift towards inclusion and solidarity during the twenty-first century.