The Meta of Madness: How the social framing of anomalous experience affects its ontology

This thesis is concerned with the central question: How do the ways that ‘anomalous experience’ is framed, impact the ontology of those experiences? ‘Anomalous experience’ here refers to experiences often described as hallucination, and also to the experiential aspects of what is described as psychosis, or ‘madness’ more broadly. This central question brings to mind a feedback loop; how the social framings of things create, rather than observe, those things. In regards to anomalous experience, this question turns our focus to psychiatry as the dominant institution for framing, and responding, to anomalous experience. I argue that psychiatry’s conceptualising of anomalous experience as pathological, and its interventions in response, can bring about an affective experience of the kind that can actually create anomalous experience itself, through how it relates to people who have these experiences. I draw on the phenomenological work of Matthew Ratcliffe (2017) in particular to make this argument, applying his commitment to the claim that the fundamental structure of our experience is dependent on the social world. The thesis then turns to the question; how could the social world navigate anomalous experience differently, as to not instigate such a feedback loop? I propose a different, non-pathological way of navigating anomalous experience that aims to ‘integrate’ these experiences into the social world, in a way that captures what they are, as well as their phenomenological richness and capacity to be meaningful. I analyse case studies of some (non-dominant) social spaces and frameworks that navigate anomalous experience: Hearing Voices Network groups and the Open Dialogue approach; arguing that they can be seen as examples of this kind of integration. I then draw on Lugones’ (1987) concept of ‘world travelling’ to further explicate the conditions of this integration; namely, a certain kind of interpersonal relating.