Abstract
This article explores autobiographical madness narratives written by people with lived experience of psychosis, dated from the mid-19th century until the 1970s. The focus of the exploration is on the metaphors used in these narratives in order to communicate how the writers experienced and understood madness from within. Different metaphors of madness, such as going out of one’s mind, madness as an inner beast, another world, or a transformative journey are presented based on several autobiographical books. It is argued that these metaphors often represent madness as the negative picture of what it is to be human, while the narrative writing itself helps to restore a sense of belonging and personhood. The value and function of metaphors in illness and madness narratives is further discussed.
Highlights
Madness challenges the mainstream way of being a person in the world; going out of one’s mind is going out of the matrix of normative thoughts, emotions, and actions
A person going through a psychotic episode is deeply convinced by the subjective experience of reality, though it seems unlikely or even bizarre and differs from what is understood by others to be real
The focus of this exploration is on narratives of psychosis, written mostly by people who received the medical diagnosis of schizophrenia and were often hospitalized or treated otherwise
Summary
Madness challenges the mainstream way of being a person in the world; going out of one’s mind is going out of the matrix of normative thoughts, emotions, and actions. I will be using the terms madness, schizophrenia, and psychosis interchangeably, with the following distinctions: the use of the term schizophrenia refers to the psychiatric nosology; the use of the concept psychosis refers to psychological experiences, mostly of delusions and hallucinations; and the use of word madness indicates a more intuitive understanding of the experience, which is connected to social and cultural imagination. Within these narratives, I focus on the writers’ use of metaphors in order to describe their experiences of psychosis. I suggest that these narratives share a common ground, since they often challenge society’s core ideas regarding what it means to be human, in the sense of normative concepts of self and personhood within a certain social context
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