Madness

Justin Garson's Madness: A Philosophical Exploration offers a conception of madness that infuses hope to those whose lives are touched by it...By successfully marshalling the tools of philosophy, psychiatry, and history, Garson offers new conceptual resources for making sense of madness and loosens the grip of the madness-as-dysfunction model in contemporary psychiatry...Garson's analysis is rich, compelling, and even poetic.

Auteur
Justin Garson is a professor of philosopher at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. In addition to Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022), he is also the author of The Biological Mind: Second Edition (2022), and the forthcoming The Madness Pill: The Quest to Create Insanity and One Doctor's Discovery that Transformed Psychiatry. He also writes for PsychologyToday.com, Aeon and MadInAmerica.com on changing paradigms of mental illness.

Texte du rabat

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In Madness, philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs. The book will be essential reading for philosophers of medicine and psychiatry, historians and sociologists of medicine, and mental health service users, survivors, and activists, for its alternative and liberating vision of what it means to be mad.