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"Madness"
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Briefing for a Descent Into Hell: Madness as a Literary Motif in World Literature
The article explores man’s eternal fascination with madness or the presumption that a person acts, behaves beyond the rules of the community, of the norm. The work explores the brief literary history of mania, of divine madness as it appears in antiquity. In the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare depicts the world as a stage and the human characters and their behaviours as important pieces of the puzzle that Freud would later describe in his work dedicated to the human psyche. The article is named after Doris Lessing’s novel, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a novel that imagines the fantastical “inner-space” life of an amnesiac, a man supposed to be mad. Madness and moreover its depiction are mere performances of imagination on our part, because all literary endeavours on depicting madness are attempts to understand a universe, a reality, a pathology so different from our reality or what we consider to be real.
Journal Article
Entre a tristeza e a ira: emoções em disputa nas narrativas sobre o crime de uma mulher (São Paulo, Brasil, 1939)
In 1939, Marília, a thirty-year-old Brazilian housewife, residing in São Paulo, killed her lover, Armando, with an axe and gunshots. She turned herself in to the police and was admitted by her brother-in-law to the Pinel Sanatorium, a psychiatric institution catering to the city's more affluent social groups. The sources for this research include clinical documents—such as a medical report, lab tests, prescriptions, and a letter written by Marília—as well as newspaper articles from São Paulo that reported on the crime. Drawing on theoretical and methodological frameworks from the socio-cultural history of emotions, the history of women and gender, and the history of madness and psychiatry, this article identifies the emotions that surface in the different documents recounting Marília's story. Our primary objective is to analyze these emotions, not to explore their specific meanings, but to understand what they produce. I aim to comprehend how the collection of these emotions, as articulated across the various narratives I examine, operates through shared meanings to construct both an event and a subject: Marília. The different narratives about her life, including her own, and the crime she committed, highlight two central emotions: sadness and anger. This analysis demonstrates that these emotions operate within an emotional framework that defines places, possibilities, and limitations for women, grounded in the perception of their interconnected bodies and minds, social markers of difference, and expert discourses. It also reveals that emotional resistances are persistent.
Journal Article
My Strategies for Dealing With Radical Psychotic Doubt: A Schizo-Something Philosopher’s Tale
A short autobiographical piece on different coping strategies for handling psychosis symptoms.
Journal Article
Uses and Misuses of Recorded Mental Health Lived Experience Narratives in Healthcare and Community Settings: Systematic Review
Abstract
Mental health lived experience narratives are first-person accounts of people with experience of mental health problems. They have been published in journals, books and online, and used in healthcare interventions and anti-stigma campaigns. There are concerns about their potential misuse. A four-language systematic review was conducted of published literature characterizing uses and misuses of mental health lived experience narratives within healthcare and community settings. 6531 documents in four languages (English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) were screened and 78 documents from 11 countries were included. Twenty-seven uses were identified in five categories: political, societal, community, service level and individual. Eleven misuses were found, categorized as relating to the narrative (narratives may be co-opted, narratives may be used against the author, narratives may be used for different purpose than authorial intent, narratives may be reinterpreted by others, narratives may become patient porn, narratives may lack diversity), relating to the narrator (narrator may be subject to unethical editing practises, narrator may be subject to coercion, narrator may be harmed) and relating to the audience (audience may be triggered, audience may misunderstand). Four open questions were identified: does including a researcher’s personal mental health narrative reduce the credibility of their research?: should the confidentiality of narrators be protected?; who should profit from narratives?; how reliable are narratives as evidence?)
Journal Article
Cripping environmental education: rethinking disability, nature, and interdependent futures
In this article, I call for a cripping of environmental education as a necessary move in shifting away from the field’s current conceptions of disability as defect and deficiency, and towards disrupting the structures and processes that operate as normalizing technologies within ableism/sanism. Through an examination of the ways that the field of environmental education has/has not engaged critical disability politics, I illuminate how disability is not often included within environmental education literature. When it is, it is often through the use of disability as metaphor or through recommendations for best practices in accommodating disabilities. More often though within environmental education, disability has operated as a hidden curriculum, underpinning much of the field’s curricular, pedagogical, and even philosophical foundations. Through a cripping of the field these compulsory able-bodied/able-minded assumptions are made apparent. I suggest that by centering crip bodies and minds through cripistemologies, we might enable new ways of knowing, being in, connecting to, and understanding the natural world.
Journal Article
Madness and Idiocy: Reframing a Basic Problem of Philosophy of Psychiatry
A basic question of philosophy of psychiatry is “what is madness (mental illness, mental disorder…)?” Contemporary thinkers err by framing the problem as one of defining madness in contrast with sanity. For the Late Modern theorist of madness, the problem was not one of defining madness in contrast with sanity, but in contrast with “idiocy”—the apparent diminution or abolition of one’s reasoning power. This altered reading of the problem has an important consequence. For what distinguishes madness from idiocy is not the failure, absence, or lack of reason, but its presence—albeit in a perverse and mutated form. For the Late Modern theorist, madness was always, by its very nature, infused with reason. This “infusion” of madness by reason has two consequences for philosophy of psychiatry today: it reframes the project of defining “mental disorder,” and it provides intellectual scaffolding for the emerging movement known as Mad Pride, mad resistance, or mad activism.
Journal Article
Play Me for a Fool: Horror-Inducing Madness from Edgar Allan Poe to The Dark Eye (1995)
Madness often serves as the driving force behind the actions of Edgar Allan Poe’s protagonists, making their psyche a central component of his horror stories. Theme, however, is only one element that contributes to the horror affect/effect in Poe’s oeuvre: his talent for evoking horror through narrative structure and tone (Punter 1996) positions form as another crucial aspect of his poetics. When adapting Poe’s tales for a different medium, authors and artists need to confront both the thematic clusters that Poe favored and the stylistic choices that he deployed in conjunction with his themes.
This contribution explores how the 1995 video game
adapts several works by Poe, focusing on the transposition of madness-induced horror. The game is of particular relevance because it approaches Poe’s stories in four different manners: first, the game adapts three of Poe’s best-known stories (“The Cask of Amontillado,” “Berenice,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”) for interactive gameplay. Second, it features full or abridged versions of Poe’s poems and stories (“Annabel Lee” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” recited, and “To Helen” and “The Premature Burial,” in written form). Third, it constructs a framing narrative which retrieves Poe’s themes, merging several stories, and proceduralizes his horror-inducing style for the video game environment. Fourth, it makes ample use of Poe’s Gothic atmosphere to induce horror and terror not only narratively, but also visually and aurally.
The contribution thus argues that
serves as an all-encompassing attempt to adapt Poe’s madness-related stories beyond the mere thematic dimension, showing that Poe’s innovations can persist across different media.
Journal Article
Reading Through the Viscera: Leonora Carrington's Inhuman Bodymind
Leonora Carrington has long been recognized for her unique artistic vision, deeply informed by Mexican folklore, myth, occult practices, her relationships with Surrealist artists, and her own development of a symbolic and magical grammar. Less attention has been paid to her exploration of the vicissitudes of the body and her theorization of the relationships between body, mind, and environment. This article applies Elizabeth Wilson's concept of \"gut feminism\" to reread Carrington's Down Below from the viscera outward and unearth Carrington's theory of the inhuman bodymind.
Journal Article
The “bull goose looney” as a Totem Guide for Chief’s Writing Himself to Freedom
This paper examines the institutionalisation of psychiatric treatment in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Taking up the work of Michel Foucault, the paper examines how those suffering from mental illness were classified as disruptive and unfit for society, subsequently labelled mad and institutionalised in facilities more akin to semi-judicial structures than medical facilities. McMurphy, having manipulated a transfer for himself from a state work farm to what he perceives will be the less rigorous confines of a mental institution, epitomises the disruptive presence of the madmen, bringing a world of disorder and chaos to the staff and patients of the mental ward. Self-proclaimed as the head “bull goose looney”, McMurphy reflects the counter-culture movements of the 1960s in the United States in his rejection of the rules and regulations imposed upon him by what amounts to a totalitarian system of control. A wild indomitable force of nature, McMurphy becomes a totem for Chief and the other patients, an embodiment of the human spirit the patients have forfeited inside the institutional system.
Journal Article