Madness: A Philosophical Exploration

For most of the time since Hippocrates, madness has mostly been understood as sickness, malfunction or flaw, and the healer's job has been to find what is broken and repair it. Justin Garson questions that picture. He proposes what he calls madness-as-strategy, in which the mind works as nature intended even when behaviour looks strange.

The book is a philosophical recovery project rather than a plain history. Garson reads texts from the classical era through to Darwinian medicine to show that the idea is older than its recent revival. Along the way he sets out a new account of mental disorder, offers a fresh reading of the history of madness and describes an alternative picture of what it means to be mad.

Readers likely to take it up include scholars of the philosophy of medicine and of psychiatry, as well as sociologists and historians of medicine, and mental health service users and activists who have lived experience of psychiatric care. Edition note: published by Oxford University Press in 2022, 312 pages, ISBN-13: 9780197613832.