Roxana Baiasu, Lorna Collins, “Transformative Paradoxes of Sense-Making in Madness”, Iride, Filosofia e discussione pubblica, 1/2025.
At the heart of our mental health vulnerability there is an openness to suffering which can close off meaning and generate a chasm of meaninglessness. However, we suggest, at the core of our vulnerable being there is also a paradoxical possibility, a power which can creatively generate meaning from within the chasm of meaninglessness: a fundamental, existential resilience. We explore how through existential resilience the chasm of meaningless is reconfigured as a transformative, paradoxical chiasm of sense and non-sense. We also touch on another paradox of ineffability and communication in madness. By drawing on insights and methodologies from existential phenomenology, postmodernism, auto-ethnography, and our recent work on Mad sense and creative, transformative philosophy we delve into these paradoxes, which we take to be essential for an understanding of human vulnerability and resilience in general. Our approach, which affirms the transformative power of these existential paradoxes, challenges mainstream views which claim the impossibility of meaning-making and communication in madness.