Dr Richard Gipps - Who gets to call whom mad?

In this talk Dr Gipps expounds certain themes of the final chapter of his book ‘On Madness’ (Bloomsbury 2022) available here www.bloomsbury.com/uk/on-madn....
Abstract:
The madman is sometimes said to 'live in another world’, or to 'live in unreality’, or at other times to be ‘detached from reality’. Such phrases have for some given rise to the question: who gets to say whose world is the true one, or what counts as real? Might all this not just be a power play on the part of those self-appointed clinical policemen of the real: the psychiatrists and the psychologists? Maybe the madman’s world is no less a world, and no less valid, than that of those who like to style themselves ’sane’?
To settle these questions the psychiatrist may be tempted by answers Dr Gipps styles ‘Realist' and ‘Idealist'. The Realist aims to show how general schemes of psychiatric judgement are valid in virtue of how they accurately capture the nature of psychological or neurological reality. The Idealist aims to show how they’re instead validated by the ways that certain groups of people actually do judge. Whilst undoubtedly tempting, neither approach can succeed. (In the talk Richard will show why.) Instead of answering, we do better to dissolve, the question of the general validity of insanity ascription. And we do that by showing how and why the demand for a justification of psychiatric judgement is valid only in the particular but not in the general case. Accepting this, however, doesn’t let the clinician off the hook. Or: it lets them off the philosophical hook only to dangle them on the more important one on which all clinical judgement hangs. For now they must step up with humble boldness as mouthpieces of the fearsome judgement of insanity that's required of them, rather than passing the buck of responsibility onto the textbook, onto the psychologist or neurologist, or onto the consensus of their peers.
Bio:
Richard Gipps, DClinPsychol, PhD; Clinical Psychologist; Philosopher, Senior Research Fellow, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford. Richard lives and works in Oxford, UK, where he maintains a private psychotherapy practice and teaches philosophy and psychology.
Presented for the Speculative Psychiatry Group on 19/10/23.
Many thanks to Dr Gipps for sharing his time and wisdom.