This is an erudite book. Its detail does not make it an easy read at times, but maybe this should be expected of a philosophical text. And the summaries of its argument at various points make clear its logic.
Essentially it makes the case that madness can be grounds for identity. The user/survivor movement in psychiatry generated a particularly radical activism based on social movements such as Mad Pride. The field of mad studies now allows for the counter-experience of those with diagnosed mental illness, creating a challenge to the dominance of biomedical psychiatry. From this point of view, survivor experience must be foregrounded and madness itself is seen as being of value.
The author, Mohammed Rashed, did basic training in psychiatry before moving to research in philosophy and psychiatry. He is less concerned in the book with the resistance to the power and control of psychiatry represented by the ‘mad movement’. Instead, he focuses on its intellectual claim that madness can be grounds for identity and culture.
Intrigued by how madness can be framed positively when it appears so inherently negative, he argues that it can be grounds for identity if it is ordered in some way. He acknowledges that mad narratives can have benefits both for the activists themselves and beyond. Nonetheless, he does accept that in many cases madness lies beyond the limits of recognition. The book's rich philosophical narrative has excursions into Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and the work of Charles Taylor, among others.
The user/survivor movement, of which the mad movement is a part, has been associated with so-called anti-psychiatry. There may be a sense in which madness is an understandable, even sane and creative, response to an insane world. Stigma can be countered by demands for societal recognition of the discrimination against mad people.
I doubt whether the mad movement worries too much about whether its demands can be justified philosophically. But if it did, it could point to this book for a very thorough rational argument in its favour. The implications are that the challenges of the mad movement do need to be taken seriously by psychiatry. From my point of view, the book may not have sufficiently taken on board the protest from people who think they have not been well treated, or have even been abused, by psychiatry. But it provides a very valuable contribution to a neglected area of the user/survivor experience in the philosophy of psychiatry.
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