Abstract

The world of mental health and madness explored in this issue can read like a series of conflicts, of stark choices between alternatives which appear mutually exclusive and often imply, “I am right, you are wrong” : Ill/well, mad/sane, biomedical/psychosocial, local/global, expert/patient, individual/collective, science/anecdote, stigmaphobic/stigmaphilic, insight/delusion, normal/abnormal, privileged/marginalized, and plenty more besides. When those of us who have been diagnosed mentally ill fall on the wrong side of most of those divides and our experience and knowledge is invalidated, psychiatry’s expertise and dominance is reinforced. Engaging with the feature articles in this...