Fiction and psychiatry

The role of the humanities in medicine, especially mental health, is now well established. The importance of the subjective experience of people in the clinical encounter; the values and meanings that influence and determine how healthcare decisions are made and responded to; and the degree to which language pervades, structures, limits or enriches communication within the clinical space, are now explicit. This edited book extends, deepening our appreciation and understanding, the ways in which context, history, and politics impact on conceptional notions of madness. Furthermore, it demonstrates the capacity of literary theory to not only reflect but also to refract the realities that underlie behaviours and experiences termed madness. Finally, as if to make the point clear that the role of literature is not merely theoretical, it ends with a section on the instrumental uses of literature in clinical practice. One of the challenges of the postmodern world is the loss of the grand, monolithic narrative that disregards the emic, subsuming it within a supposed universalizing etic. Alan Weber’s chapter, “Layla and Majnun in Historical and Contemporary Conceptions of Madness in Islamic Psychology,” introduces the role of context, cultural as well as religious, in framing potential causes of inner turmoil, perhaps too, prescribing what emotions or beliefs arise in specific situations. Here then is a relativizing dialogue in which translations are inevitable with terms such as melancholia, delusionary disease, excessive love, and depression becoming the currencies that are exchanged to facilitate our cross-cultural understanding. Whether or not these terms cover the same semantic field in both Arabic and English is moot. Weber’s chapter makes it impossible to ignore the competing explanatory claims in mental health and, without saying so explicitly, centres psychiatry as a contested field. Sebastian Galbo’s chapter, “Apartheid’s Garden: Dismantling Madness in J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K,” develops this theme further by examining how politically oppressive systems such as apartheid South Africa can co-opt the power of diagnostic systems to disenfranchise political enemies by labelling them as mentally ill and thus fit for incarceration. In this reading, madness is not a medical condition, but a social construction perpetuated by racist and politically oppressive regimes. 1160111 TAP0010.1177/09593543231160111Theory & PsychologyReview review-article2023