ABSTRACT
One of the central points we want to make in this book is that consideration of the subjective experience of madness has much to contribute to our understandings of madness. Indeed, we would go further than this: our position is that any understanding of madness which overlooks subjective experience will inevitably provide an incomplete and, ultimately, inadequate conceptualization of the experience. This is, we believe, true of much human experience, but particularly true of madness given that it is the individual’s subjective experience (such as hearing a voice, or having a ‘delusional’ belief ) that is at the heart of how we define madness when we use terms such as psychosis and schizophrenia. To try to understand madness without recognizing, acknowledging and incorporating the subjective aspects of the experience into our understandings is an impossible task, doomed to failure.
