Volume 21, No. 2, 2025 Book symposium on Justin Garson’s Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (Forthcoming)

The following is a short synopsis of the book Madness: A Philosophical Exploration. It provides an overview of the book’s core distinction between madness-as-dysfunction and madness-as- strategy, and enumerates four benefits of relying on this conceptual framework: for history, philosophy, Mad Pride, and treatment.

Psychiatric conditions are commonly regarded as mental disorders or dysfunctions of the mind. Yet there is a wealth of historical theorizing about the mind that conceives of these conditions as, in some sense, a matter of design rather than dysfunction. This intellectual legacy is the topic of Justin Garson’s penetrating study, Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022). In this paper, I interpret Garson’s book as a genealogy (in the Foucauldian sense) of the “anti-tradition” that he labels “madness-as-design”. I argue that viewing the intellectual legacy that Garson analyzes through this genealogical lens has two benefits. First, it encourages us to identify other instances of madness-as-design (or madness-by- design), particularly those with an overtly political dimension, such as psychiatric conditions in a colonial context. Second, it should lead us to question the category of madness itself, which turns out to be radically disjointed, particularly since it cannot be unified under the rubric of disorder or dysfunction.

Justin Garson introduces the distinction between two views on Madness we encounter again and again throughout history: Madness as dysfunction, and Madness as strategy. On the latter view, Madness serves some purpose for the person experiencing it, even if it’s simultaneously harmful. The strategy view makes intelligible why Madness often holds a certain allure—even when it’s prima facie terrifying. Moreover, if Madness is a strategy in Garson’s metaphorical sense—if it serves a purpose—it makes sense to use consciously chosen strategies for living with Madness that don’t necessarily aim to annihilate or repress it as far as possible. In this paper, we use our own respective stories as case studies. We have both struggled to resist the allure of Madness, and both ended up embracing a kind of Pyrrhonian scepticism about reality instead of clinging to sane reality.

A central notion in Mad Pride activism is that “madness is a natural reaction” (Curtis et al. 2000, 22). In Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (2022), Justin Garson provides a compelling exploration and defence of this idea through the book’s central concept: madness-as-strategy, i.e., the view of madness as “a well- oiled machine, one in which all of the components work exactly as they ought” (1). This contrasts with the dominant view in 20th- and 21st-century psychiatry, madness-as-dysfunction, which understands madness as a failure of function. The paper provides a critical analysis of the notion of madness-as-strategy as a political tool, pointing out its main virtues and limitations in terms of Garson’s overarching political project: to carve out the conceptual landscape of madness in ways that pay tribute to mad people’s own perspectives. The analysis draws on two central commitments of contemporary neurodiversity theory: a) its relational-ecological model of cognitive (dis)ability; and b) its non-essentialist, sociopolitical critique of the “normalcy paradigm”. I argue that these two insights contribute to both expand the applicability of madness- as-strategy and highlight its limitations as a tool for the political struggles of mad, cognitively divergent, and mentally ill or disabled people. The paper concludes by outlining a way to move beyond both madness-as-dysfunction and madness-as-strategy, toward what I call madness-as-right.

In his bold and illuminating book Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, Justin Garson makes a case for thinking about madness as strategy, rather than as dysfunction. The reader is invited to take away a better appreciation of the historical provenance of madness as strategy, that is, this is not a new idea, destined for the fringes or of interest only to those of a more radical bent. It is rather an idea which has firm roots in the history of psychiatry. Garson’s lens is wide, he is advocating a strategy over dysfunction approach for, at least, anxiety, depression, schizophrenia (and its spectrum disorders), and delusion. In this exploratory paper, we focus on delusion. We discuss what a madness-as-strategy approach might say about delusion, and how that fits with the idea that such beliefs are evolutionarily adaptive. We turn then to explore the implications of this reconceptualization of delusion for epistemic injustice in psychiatry. Our discussions will support the idea that much of the theoretical action lies not in the distinction between dysfunction and strategy, but rather in the distinction between everyday and abnormal dysfunction.

The following provides the author’s responses to the four commentaries on Madness: A Philosophical Exploration, written by Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Eleanor Palafox-Harris and Ema Sullivan- Bissett, Miguel Núñez de Prado Gordillo, and Sofia Jeppsson and Paul Lodge.