A new book co-edited by BU’s Dr Francis Biley, seeks to dispel misconceptions about mental health and society’s relationship with ‘madness’.
All of the contributors to the book, entitled ‘Our Encounters with Madness’, have written freely about their own personal experiences without being subjected to analytical commentary which, say the book’s editors, tend to dilute or sanitise true tales.
“This book is all about society’s experience of ‘madness’,” says Dr Biley, Associate Professor and member of the Centre for Qualitative Research in the School of Health and Social Care at Bournemouth University. “That word has been used for over 150 years to describe mental illness. In a professional and a lay sense, it has come to be labelled as a derogatory term but sufferers and service–users more recently use the word as a way of taking control and emancipating themselves from their own condition. Mental health problems are also labelled as ‘diseases’ without any real evidence to support that they are.”
Find out more about the book by visiting the BU website.
Great book well worth the read!