Resignifying madness. A collaborative autobiography

Abstract

This article is partly a collaboratively written autobiography. It has its origins in the life story of Dolors, an active member and participant of the Nikosia collective in the city of Barcelona. Nikosia is one of the first radio stations created by people with psychiatric histories; a communicative and political experience that challenges the medical and social ways of signifying so-called madness by creating networks of care, shelter and refuge in spaces and practices articulated beyond traditional mental health services. Dolor’s testimony can be understood here as an opening to the possibility of re-historicising and re-signifying her life experience initially associated with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Her testimony, constructed from four in-depth interviews reveals the social evidence of suffering, contributes to problematising the impact of psychiatric categories associated with mental suffering, and opens up a reflexive field from which personal experience can be understood as a matrix of other meanings that allow us to recognise and unravel the complex multi-dimensionality of these conditions.