ABSTRACT
What we have covered over the previous three chapters is a complex and possibly confusing assortment of perspectives on how we can go about the business of making sense of madness. Our expedition over the literature in this field has included ways of looking at madness from first-person, lay and professional perspectives. In none of these areas has our coverage been comprehensive or exhaustive. Nor do these three perspectives cover all possible perspectives one could take to approach the topic of madness: for example, we have already acknowledged that we have largely overlooked a large and important literature on cross-cultural understandings of madness. Despite the limited extent of our coverage, we have nonetheless seen that there are myriad ways in which madness can be, has been, and indeed continues to be made sense of from the different perspectives we have included in our overview of the literature in this area. We’ve shown also that even within each of these broad perspectives – first-person, lay and professional – there is considerable variety in how people make sense of madness. There is no one model of madness on which we can all agree. There is not even one standard word to refer to the experiences that is universally accepted. What should we call it? Madness? Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Does it even make any sense to think of it as an ‘it’ or are we really talking about a disparate group of experiences which some of us just happen to find convenient to lump together under a single unifying term?
