ABSTRACT
We have now looked at how ‘madness’ can be made sense of from the perspective of the person who has the experience, as well as from the position of ordinary ‘lay’ people. It is time now to turn to how professionals working in this field make sense of these experiences. It may seem somewhat odd that we have placed the professional perspectives after first-person and lay perspectives. This is a deliberate choice on our part. We believe that the perspectives that we will outline in this chapter are, generally speaking, given prominence in the literature on madness at the expense of the first-person and lay perspectives, with the implicit assumption that the professional perspectives represent the ‘true’ or ‘real’ way of making sense of madness. This is an assumption that we do not wish to endorse here. Indeed, our explicit position is that the experience of madness can be – perhaps must be, if we are to truly appreciate its complexity – viewed from different perspectives, each of which contributes to our understandings of the experience in different ways. This is not to in any way suggest that the professional perspective is unimportant. After all, we ourselves approach the experience of madness from the positions of being professional clinicians and researchers working in this area. The point we wish to make is that we professionals do not have a monopoly on understandings of madness. Yes, our understandings are legitimate and important, but they are not, as is often suggested or implied, the final, definitive word on what madness really is. With these caveats in mind, let us now have a look at how those in the so-called ‘scientific’ community make sense of madness.
