Spirituality, suicide, and Mad Studies: rethinking the therapeutic exchange in health contexts

Dominant biomedical explanations of mental distress limit explanations of human experience, the short cutoff diagnosis becomes the pivotal encounter of exchange and narrative about the human being in society. Experts-by-experience and Mad Studies activists continuously challenge these definitions and restrictions in a bid to readdress the imbalance and flawed impositions. This article offers a discussion regarding a place to begin “meeting” a person and co-creating conversations with those who are impacted by the limitations of the biomedical approach as a framework of explanation of their experiences of mental distress. We intend to disrupt such orthodox biomedical views, replacing them with co-produced democratic meanings of madness. In doing so, we challenge the dominant discourse, which is limited to medical treatments of mental distress and suicidal persons.