Abstract

First-person accounts of people labeled mad have become an object of increasing interest for nonsurvivor scholars with backgrounds in psychology and psychiatry. In the early stages of my PhD research, I set out to gain a deeper understanding of this expanding body of academic work in the hope of better situating my own project. My PhD explores the possibility of a model of madness collectively developed by the direct owners of the experiences in question. Although a detailed description of that project, which is still evolving, is beyond the scope of this paper, I want to offer some reflections here on ‘conventional narrative research’ in psychiatry and mental health. I use this phrase to describe studies based on...