Does Madness Really Exist? An autobiographical analysis of psychosis as a response to trauma and not a ‘mad’ state of mind
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The relatively new method of autoethnography as valid research is used in this paper. The method combines a personal and introspective approach with the academic research method. By reflecting on her experience of psychosis, the first author (LF) attempts to show how psychotic symptoms, such as delusions or paranoid perceptions, have a symbolic meaning and could relate to previous traumatic experiences. She uses Winnicott’s concept of the ‘true’ and the ‘false’ self and applies it to psychotic illness. Using auto-ethnographic details of her experiences, she indicates how trauma, and associated falsification of its understanding, led to distortion, i‧e., a false reality, a symptom typically associated with psychosis. A brief comparison is then made of her experience to two other published auto-biographical cases. In light of this self-analysis and careful reading of key psychoanalytic texts, the author explores and explains what, in her experience, may lead people to act in a manner not typical of their true being and how this might explain the rare dangerous behaviour that can occur in some psychotic cases. The understanding of psychosis as ‘madness’ (i‧e., to be without reason) is revealed to be due to lack of understanding of its possible underlying causes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".