Experience Of Madness Research Articles

‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III)

In this paper I explore Walter Benjamin’s complex thoughts about the concept of experience to illuminate a central paradox when thinking about madness. This paradox concerns the need to hold together constellations of concepts that appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand there is the realm of the psychopathological; a psychiatric thinking of madness as mental illness that refers to suffering, loss of existence, and dysfunction. On the other hand, there is a thinking about madness as a diverse and different experience, as possibility, illumination, and difference. Benjamin’s writings on experience can be particularly fertile here because he acknowledges the contradictions in experience, at certain points emphasising the loss of experience and at other points focussing on the possibilities of a new experience even within a destruction of experience. I will explore three aspects of Benjamin’s reflections on experience and their relationship to an experience of psychosis; the loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that lie within such a loss, the turn towards the object in Benjamin’s account of experience, and finally the concept of the limit-experience. I conclude by considering Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image and apply this idea to the experience of madness.

What’s in a Refusal? Methodological and Ethical Notes from an Ethnography of Mental Health Care in Rural Ghana

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2022 on experiences of madness and practices of mental health care in rural southwestern Ghana, in this paper I propose to take as a point of departure, a specific episode in which the relatives of Fadhila—a girl I had first met at the psychiatric unit, where she was diagnosed as “psychotic”—refused to give consent to record an interview with me. The refusal was motivated by the strict instructions that Fadhila and her family were given by the traditional healer who was taking care of her: among many other things, the girl was not allowed to come close to any electronic device and her family felt it was unsafe to record an interview at their house. The refusal had to do with Fadhila being a “patient” as much as it had to do with another refusal: that of drugs and psychiatrisation. Indeed, the refusal had to do with spirits, the spirits that occasionally possessed Fadhila and were trying to make her a healer, according to her, her family members, and the traditional specialists they had visited. The refusal, however, may also have been a polite, indirect way to “withdraw consent”—to use the jargon of informed consent forms and ethics review committees. Though Fadhila and her family kept inviting me to their place, welcomed me warmly in subsequent occasions, and conversed with me about many things including the girl’s “condition,” that episode pushed me to reconsider the limits of formal consent and the need to constantly question it and re-establish it—a complex dynamic that sometimes the bureaucracy of “ethical clearance” processes in academia may contribute, paradoxically, to erase. Analysing this ethnographic episode in light of the powerful concept of ethnographic refusal introduced by Audra Simpson, I propose a reflection on the ethical and methodological implications of considering people as “sources” in ethnographies of madness and mental health.

SCHIZOPHRENIA AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS IN BRAZILIAN MUSIC

This article proposes to investigate the meanings of madness and the crazy person in five songs that address the theme: Balada do Louco, Maluco Beleza, Hino dos Malucos, Bicho de sete cabezas and Sufoco da vida. The objective is to compare the literary discourses about the crazy and madness with the guidelines in the World Health Organization Report: Mental Health: new conception, new hope of 2001. The analysis of song lyrics allowed the association with the approach of different authors and with the report from the World Health Organization. The songs discuss important problems such as violence in asylum institutions, social medicalization and prejudice. The lyrics also refer to the issue of the patient’s capabilities and establish a fine line between madness and normality. More than corroborating with the perspectives of mental health, through this analysis it is believed that music can be a supporting agent in the process of social awareness as recommended by the World Health Organization. It is noteworthy that this discussion goes beyond the field of mental health also covering the field of culture, debating how society relates to the experience of madness and discussing its implications.

Nuts

The following fairy tale is the creative output from an arts-based autoethnographic inquiry created in partial fulfillment for my Master of Arts degree. Inspired by the doctoral work of Lindsay Eales (2018), my main research objective was to challenge, (re)imagine, and transform conventional dance spaces into spaces that were more accessible for Mad bodyminds. I used artistic processes such as painting, dancing, and journaling to examine my own experiences of madness within and outside of dance spaces. I then took my findings and began writing an autoethnographic creative nonfiction piece in the form of a whimsical fairy tale that sought to deconstruct my personal experiences and reconnect them to other Mad works and texts. In doing so, my fairy tale is not only an imagination of the Mad-affirming dance spaces I wish were available to me throughout my dance career, it is an invitation to imagine Mad-affirming worlds beyond.

Mad hats. A reflection on mad leadership

This paper considers the problem of how Mad leaders might be authentic without resorting to discriminatory identity policing. The paper briefly charts the contemporary role of consumer/survivor/ex-patient/mad activism in mental health reform before drawing on the author’s failed attempt to grapple with authentic mad leadership. Drawing on Mad Studies theory and the wisdom of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, the author argues that the consumer/survivor/ex-patient/mad movement should welcome all experiences of madness, but only those who can exercise authentic leadership should lead the movement. This requires resistance against non-Mad ways of knowing and exercising power and for established power hierarchies to transform to allow authentic mad leadership.

Medicalization, Contributory Injustice, and Mad Studies.

One recent body of work has concerned medicalization and how it can create epistemic injustice. It focuses on medicalization as a hermeneutical process that shapes the conceptual framework(s) we use to refer to some conditions/experiences. In parallel, some scholars with lived experience of madness have started to explore the epistemic harms suffered by the Mad community. Building on this, I argue that the process of medicalization in psychiatry affects the Mad community in a specific way that has been overlooked in the literature on medicalization and epistemic injustice. That is, medicalization can create what is called "contributory injustice." This form of injustice occurs when marginalized communities have been able to create alternative hermeneutical resources, but these resources are dismissed or discredited by the dominant group. I argue that the emerging field of Mad Studies is a victim of this type of injustice when Mad experiences are unilaterally medicalized.

On understanding madness: A paradoxical view

ABSTRACT In this article, I will examine the question why it is so difficult to understand madness. First, I will examine what the third-person approach of psychosis or madness has to offer, and where its limitations lie with respect to its proper understanding. Next I will examine if and how the first-person perspective on madness contributes to our understanding. I will demonstrate that there is a stalemate between third- and first-person perspectives, which on the one hand hinders a free sight on madness, but which is on the other hand exemplary of the problem that is presented by madness. This turns out to be a paradox that haunts both the concept and experience of madness itself, as well as those who try to understand it. In the fourth section, I will unpack some of the operations of the paradox as it is found both in philosophy and madness, both by their producers as by their consumers. In the fifth section, I will tentatively sketch (im)possibilities of escaping paradoxes.

Szaleństwo i rodzina. Obraz relacji rodzice–dzieci w anglojęzycznych patografiach poświęconych chorobom psychicznym

Many English-language illness narratives dealing with the experience of madness address the issue of parent-child relationships and their role in the development of mental disorders and their treatment. These texts closely reflect psychological theories about the aetiology of mental health problems dominant in the time of writing. Thus, the aim of this study is to compare the way family relationship are depicted in illness narratives written in the last fifty years. The article first looks at the pathographies penned during the popularity of anti-psy­chiatry, which blamed faulty parenting for the rise of psychosis (such as Mary Barnes’s auto­biography co-authored with her psychiatrist Joseph Berke, R.D. Laing’s collaborator). Later, it analyses texts which reflect the controversial findings of the so-called recovered memory movement, which claimed the experiences of childhood sexual abuse are often repressed and lead to multiple splitting of personality. The classic example of such a book is Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil. Finally, more contemporary memoirs are presented, such as the works of Elizabeth Wurtzel or Marya Hornbacher as well as books written by parents whose children have been diagnosed with mental illness and who often had to battle prejudice attributing their children’s problems to neglect or cruelty on their part. Comparing these pathographies proves that writers interpret their life experiences according to the prevailing cultural script.

Mapping the Self: Leonora Carrington’s Journey through the Mad Mind in Down Below

This article examines the Map of Down Below as a central element for understanding Leonora Carrington’s Down Below (1944). Carrington’s Surrealist memoir about madness, first dictated in French and then translated into and published in English, recounts her experience of being interned in a mental asylum during the early Francoist dictatorship in Spain while trying to flee from the Nazis in France. The text has often been read as a Surrealist autobiography contesting André Breton’s Nadja (1928). However, and without disavowing this reading, I argue that the way in which Carrington narrates her experience of madness is a means to gather knowledge about the world and the Self beyond the literary and institutional conventions of the time, namely, autobiography and eugenic psychiatry as part of the authoritarian state. Thus, I explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates a form of truth that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian Self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of experiencing—or creating—the Self, while she also challenges both the normative Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing.

Literature and Madness: Madness in the Baroque Theatre and the Theatre of Artaud

This article has been translated into English by Nancy Luxon and published with permission. Michel Foucault, La littérature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud], in Folie, langage, littéature, eds. H.-P. Fruchaud, D. Lorenzini, & J. Revel, pp. 89–109 © Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris, 2019. www.vrin.fr Requests for re-use of La littéature et la folie [La folie dans le théâtre baroque et le théâtre d'Artaud] should be directed to Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, Paris. Literature and madness dominate Michel Foucault’s early writings in the 1960s, and indeed much of his career. In this text, Foucault considers the relation between madness, language, and silence; the difficult frontier between language and literary convention; and the experience of madness within language. He moves from a meditation on madness, to a rare commentary on theatre, stagecraft, and Artaud, and finishes by considering literature’s capacity for rupture. ‘Literature and Madness’ is a translation of a text written by Foucault in the 1960s, and recently published in Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel (Paris: Vrin, 2019, 89–109). This version includes a translator’s introduction by Nancy Luxon and was given a distinct subtitle to distinguish it from a similar lecture with the same title in that volume.

A Memoir of Psychotherapy

In this memoir an experienced psychotherapist describes a fifty-year personal psychotherapy, more than thirty years of this therapy as a patient of Dr. Michael Eigen. The author’s and Michael Eigen’s lived experience of madness and murder is examined for insight into the possibilities of working psychotherapeutically with very damaged psyches and souls. Michael Eigen’s theory and practice are part of the investigation, and questions are raised about what can be enough, if anything, in the successful psychotherapy of people in profound and enduring psychological and emotional pain.

Memoirs of Madness

In the mid-nineteenth century, reformers worked to transform the public's image of psychiatric institutions from the rattling chains of Bedlam to sunny gardens and sprawling hospitals. Many patients and ex-patients in the United States claimed that, to uphold this new image, administrators upkept one sparkling ward for visitors to see and kept poor, intellectually disabled, or behaviorally nonnormative patients hidden and neglected in abysmal back wards. Patient-writers challenged the image of the Potemkin asylum in memoirs that doubled as exposés with a twofold purpose: (1) to show readers the hidden parts of asylum life (including the interiority of people experiencing madness) and (2) to advocate for reform or abolition. This essay looks to one lesser-known patient-memoirist, Isaac Hunt, to ask, How do these writers acknowledge readers' desires for a sensational spectacle without replicating the objectifying dynamics of the Bedlam tour? What roles do disability, madness, stigma, and suspicion play in this encounter? Finally, how does one narrate an experience of madness? While memoirs like Hunt's have historically been framed as "psychotic" or "impaired," this essay argues that patient-memoirists often used literary experimentation to capture the ways that they experienced fluctuations in their sense of time, place, and self while in the asylum.

LOUCURA NO PERCURSO DA DÚVIDA CARTESIANA E A OBJEÇÃO FOUCAULTIANA

No presente trabalho trataremos da questão referente à menção aos loucos feita por Descartes na Primeira Meditação, a partir da reconstrução da dúvida natural até o ponto onde o argumento dos sonhos é exibido. Tal reconstrução servirá de apoio ao nosso intuito principal que é rever a noção de exclusão que Foucault, no livro História da Loucura, atribui à relação entre o argumento da loucura e o do sonho, e sua objeção a não utilização da loucura, por Descartes, como uma das razões para duvidar. Propomos a hipótese de que Descartes não dá seguimento à experiência da loucura, e passa dessa à do sonho em função da maior abrangência que a possibilidade constante de se estar sonhando concede no momento da dúvida dos sentidos. Por fim, delinearemos nossa conclusão de que a relação entre o argumento da loucura e o do sonho não é de exclusão, mas de continuidade.

Omunanamwengu (The Mad One): A Multiple Case Study of Individual and Familial Experiences of Madness Among the Northern Namibian Aawambo

To understand mental illness in cultural contexts, research should focus on locally informed concepts of illness and the lived experiences of such conditions. Understanding mental illness, its prevalence, and its influence on people’s lives in Namibia represents one such context where attention to the lived experience of mental illness remains understudied. The purpose of the current study was to build upon ethnographic findings about mental illness as madness ( eemwengu) among the Namibian Aawambo. To that end, a multiple case study design was used to explore the lived experience of being omunanamwengu (the mad one). Data were collected from four cases that were bound by the experience of mental illness. Within each case, the individual experiencing illness ( omunanamwengu), family members, and both omunanamwengu and family members were interviewed formally (via a semi-structured interview protocol) or informally due to participants’ preferences for not being recorded. Using Stake’s suggested approach to multiple-case study cross-case analysis, each individual case is described and cross-case themes (Development and Symptoms of Mental Illness; Marginalization and Omunanamwengu; Family Roles in the Lives of the Distressed and Eemwengu; Belief in Treatment) were identified. Findings are discussed in light of the role of beliefs in treatment as well as family involvement, the potential influence of discrimination on mental illness, and implications for practice and cross-cultural psychology.

Dewey, Foucault, and the Value of Horror: Transformative Learning through Reading Horror Fiction

Abstract This article advances an account of the nonhedonic values of horror fiction (including film). It is motivated by cases in which consuming horror fosters what theorists of education call “transformative learning” in adult students, brought to my attention through teaching a course titled “Horror Film and Fiction.” Transformative learning refers to the process by which students’ critical consciousness is activated in a way that they examine, question, and revise certain existing perceptions shaped by their experiences. The process is more a shocking and disturbing experience than pleasurable. In this article, I focus on two cases in which two students underwent such a transformation on studying Roman Polanksi’s Repulsion (1968) and Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), respectively. In the first case, the student’s experience of madness is modified, while, in the second, the student’s experience of abnormality is disrupted. To give the transformation in question a philosophical underpinning, I draw on Dewey’s concept of “aesthetic experience” in Art as Experience, Foucault’s concept of “experience book,” and O’Leary’s approach to the value of fiction developed in his Foucault and Fiction and contend that the works of horror effectuated what O’Leary calls “transformative experience” in the students. In the second half of the paper, I extend my account beyond the classroom context by offering a close reading of Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), with the aim of demonstrating that it has the potential to transform the everyday experience of madness of the American readers in Bloch’s times, and probably the experience of normality of the worldwide readers thereafter.

Applying a Mad Studies Framework to Opera: Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites

Multiple readings of madness are examined in Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1957) through the framework of mad studies. Several layers of madness can be found in this work: individual lived experiences of madness, the history of mental illness in France during and after the French Revolution, and the cultural metaphor of hysteria as social degeneration, as articulated by Micale. Close readings of two scenes with a discussion of their musical features are included: the first prioress’s death (act 1, scene 4) and the final scene at the guillotine (act 3, scene 4).

Imagens para além da linguagem?: O anacronismo da hipótese foucaultiana de uma “ruína do simbolismo gótico” em História da Loucura

História da Loucura é um texto marcado pela crítica à tradição dialética que Nietzsche havia esboçado em seu Nascimento da Tragédia. Isto fica evidente quando Foucault diferencia dois tipos de “experiências” da loucura no limiar entre medievo e renascimento: uma experiência trágica da loucura, imperante nas artes plásticas de Bosch e Bruegel, em oposição a uma experiência crítica, que se expressa majoritariamente em textos literários moralistas e cômicos como de Brant e Erasmo. Com base nessa distinção, Foucault propõe que a diferença entre a experiência trágica e crítica da loucura se dá quando as imagens de Bosch revelam os limites da linguagem verbal, acontecimento histórico que chamou de “ruína do simbolismo gótico”. O objetivo deste artigo é ressaltar a anacronia desta interpretação histórica de Foucault, apontando para como a crítica de Nietzsche à tradição dialética de Platão e Hegel contribuiu para a formulação de uma hipótese sem rigor historiográfico.

Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

“What Else about Our Reality Is Actually a Disorder?” Mental Illness as Crisis of Reality in FX’sLegion

This essay examines the ways in which the FX TV series Legion uses mental illness as a metaphor through which to consider the nature of reality. It suggests that, in doing so, Legion not only reproduces stereotypical representational tropes that position madness as shorthand for villainy, but it also follows in the tradition of puzzle narratives that use mental illness to tease plot twists based on the protagonist’s inability to differentiate between delusion and reality. Finally, it examines the tendency in both Legion and other puzzle narratives to employ subjective narration techniques to simulate the perceptual experience of madness for viewers as a central component of the entertainment that they offer.

Was it autoethnography? The classificatory, confessional and mad politics of lived experience in sociological research

This paper will consider the history and politics of autoethnography in relation to the activist scholarship of Mad Studies. As part of ethnographic research about ‘recovery in/from serious mental health problems’ in the UK, I accessed an NHS community “arts for mental health” service as a service-user would do, situating this data in broader socio-political debates concerning the meaning, management and lived experience of madness and distress. This paper examines the framing of this research as autoethnographic and the relationship of personal and/or lived experience to the knowledge produced. I explore the classificatory, confessional and Mad politics of experience, identity and identification, and embodiment for research subjectivities. Employing autoethnographic means, I consider the ways in which I situate myself, and am situated by others, in relation to my research, evaluating the methodological implications of the crisis of representation in anthropology, and the post-structuralist criticism of identity politics. Through an engagement Mad Studies, I seek to move beyond these two established responses to the use of personal experience and autobiography in research.