Establishing First-Person Knowledge of Madness: Must This Undertaking Elide our Differences?

摘要

It was never my intention to say that published personal narratives of madness should not be at everyone's disposal as powerful resources to "think with" (Frank, 2010, p. 47) or that these texts' reception and consumption—basically their life—should be limited or controlled in any way. What Kelly accurately identifies as my "insistence that survivor narratives be analyzed only together with a survivor who 'owns5 the narrative" (2016, p. 231, original emphasis) refers strictly to the use of personal narratives in psychiatric and mental health research. My paper focuses on the further processing of our stories as part of the official production of knowledge about madness within a field that may be seen as a competitive academic enterprise. I fully agree with Kelly that "public narratives become resources and do work beyond describing a single person's experience" (p. 231). However, despite their value and their vast number, diversity, and availability, first-person perspectives are still far from being resources that inform the dominant understanding of madness and resulting policies.