A special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities – Mad Lit – has just been published. The issue features nine articles first presented as part of the first International Health Humanities conference at Nottingham University on the theme of Madness and Literature.
The editors, Paul Crawford, Charley Baker and Brian Brown, write: “We hope that readers find in this selection of essays a flavor of the many excellent presentations at the conference and the dramatic force of Mad Lit.—something that Paul Sayer, the author of Comforts of Madness, highlighted in a telling interview with Charley Baker: “From the time of Bedlam, people have been fascinated by psychiatric institutions and, often morbidly, by the processes and occasional cruelties human beings can inflict on each other. The state of ‘madness’ also infers a mysterious twilight zone of the mind, a condition in which the subject is out of control and anything can happen. Great stuff for a dramatic narrative, and a staple of prose fiction for centuries.” Certainly, within the Mad Lit. element of the Health Humanities research programme and its International Health Humanities Network at Nottingham, we anticipate that research will continue to provide fertile material for academics, clinicians, service users, carers and the wider public.”
Full details are available here.