Maddening

Abstract

This chapter will explore how feelings contribute to madness. In psychiatry, the bizarre and extreme states of distress experienced by some who receive mental health services are typically described as psychosis, and they are likely to attract a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Like the other functional psychiatric diagnoses, schizophrenia suffers from problems of validity and reliability and — despite over a century of well-funded research using increasingly sophisticated technologies — is not supported by consistent evidence of any biological impairment. When terms such as ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizophrenia’ are used uncritically, they covertly import biomedical assumptions into psychology; they are misleading in the degree of certainty they imply about the character of people’s distress; and their emphasis on presumed biological vulnerabilities can cause relevant relational, social and material influences to be downplayed. For these reasons, some psychologists increasingly use the ordinary language term ‘madness’ to index the forms of distress that psychiatrists call psychosis and schizophrenia (e.g. Bentall, 2003). Nevertheless, to avoid misrepresentation, ‘psychosis’ and ‘schizophrenia’ will still be used in this chapter when referring to or quoting from others who have deployed these terms.