Organized by Paul Lodge and Sofia Jeppsson

Madpeople/service users/psychiatric patients are a heterogenous group. Indeed, there’s evidence both of variety on a neurological level and of quite different phenomenologies even among people with the same diagnosis (e.g., bipolar disorder or schizophrenia) and/or the same “symptom label” (e.g., mania or thought insertion). It should therefore not come as a surprise that different treatments have different effects on different people.

The aim of this workshop is to move beyond a focus on diagnostic categories and statistics (e.g., 60 % of people with diagnosis A are significantly helped by  strategy X). Instead, we want to focus on psychiatric problems from the perspective of those dealing with them, how they experienced the problems, how they figured out ways to cope with or handle these problems, and why, based on the person’s own experiences and interpretations,  these strategies were helpful.

To register please email paul.lodge@mansfield.ox.ac.uk 

LIST OF SPEAKERS AND TALKS (schedule to be confirmed)

Steph Ban (online)
‘Applying a neurodiversity movement lens to living With obsessive-compulsive disorder.’

Michele Desmarais and Fraser Mackenzie
‘Calls: A mad stories project.’

Michael Dickson
‘Intellectual humility.’

Ida Hallgren
‘A fluent mind and a box: Fitting the cycles of life and creativity into a rigid work society.’

Matt Jackman
‘The politics of my experience: From madness to international mad activism.’

Zoey Lavelle and Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien (online)
‘Affective injustice and psychiatric coping’

Paul Lodge
‘Autobiography of a mad philosopher.’

Michele Merrit
‘Rethinking suicidality in the context of suicide-affirmative healthcare: A survivor’s perspective’

Anne O’Donnell 
‘You think too much, that’s your problem.’

Please note:

We endeavor to follow the BPA guidelines for accessible conferences. 

*In the BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Facebook group, I noted that I feel ambivalent about this workshop’s title and promotion of suicide, especially given the situation in Canada with respect to MAiD (which is widely misunderstood).