ABSTRACT
Rather than capitulate to the sanist tendency toward wronging people with experiences of Madness and distress in our capacity as knowers, I center Madness as a way of knowing, following Fabris (2011), and, attending to participants’ ideas, introduce neurodiversity. In this chapter, I thus center participants’ perspectives as ways to generate new forms of knowledge. I discuss the different ways that these 15 individuals conceptualized experiences of Madness and distress and then consider the language that they used to describe these experiences. As noted in Chapter 2, privilege across different identities mediates experiences of Madness and distress. While sanist oppression affects people with experiences of Madness and distress, having privilege in other identity categories (i.e. being white, cisgender, heterosexual, etc.) may allow a person with these experiences to avoid harms they might otherwise experience.
