Skip to main content
Psychiatrie en Filosofie

Too Mad to be True IV - Madness and its Expressions

May 14-15, 2026, Ghent (Belgium)  + online

The fourth edition of Too Mad to be True will take place on May 14 and 15, 2026, once again in the magnificent Dr. Guislain Museum in Ghent. This year's theme is Madness and its Expressions.  (Image: 'My visions, as they happen', Lorna Collins.)


Madness has been a privileged object of interest across a broad range of disciplines, including the mental health sciences (psychiatry/psychology), philosophy, mad studies, religion studies, aesthetics and anthropology. In each of these disciplines, madness acquires a different expression and meaning, partly determined by prevailing assumptions, aims, fears and desires: madness as the expression of pathology and explanatory or therapeutic ambition in the mental health sciences; as a real-life thought experiment or as circumscribing the bounds of reason and sense in philosophy; as a site for revolution, political critique and emancipation in mad studies; as (a potential threat to) authentic belief or divine inspiration in religion; as embodying (the limits to) artistic creativity and cultural exploitation in aesthetics; or as a cultural construct that provides a mirror into particular cultures and societies. Alongside, and through, these diverse disciplinary expressions, there is the expression of madness by mad individuals themselves, whose voice is muffled, amplified, transformed and appropriated. In this fourth edition of the Too Mad to be True conference, we aim to interrogate and offer a forum for these different expressions and configurations of madness, inviting submissions around one or more of the subthemes (see here).


Call for abstracts - deadline Januari 1, 2026

Would you like to give a presentation or a (artistic) performance during this conference, in person or online? We invite you to submit an abstract. The deadline is January 1, 2026. We will read your abstract carefully and before February 1 we will let you know whether it is accepted. Your abstract must meet several requirements, namely:

  • The abstract must align with one or more conference themes
  • The abstract must be no longer than 200 words
  • The abstract must have a short, clear title
  • Include a short bio of no more than 30 words with your abstract
  • Send your abstract and bio in Word format to info@psychiatrieenfilosofie.nl
  • Indicate whether you intend to attend the conference in person or online


Prices, registration and ticket sales

The fees for participating in this conference are:

  • Standard: Participation in person + lunch/drinks: € 100,00
  • Psychiatrists: Participation in person + lunch/drinks: € 140,00 (accreditation is being applied for)
  • Students and people with low income: Participation in person + lunch/drinks: € 60,00
  • Online participation (zoomlinks follow later) : € 25,00

Here you can register and buy your ticket.


If you are a donor to the Psychiatry and Philosophy Foundation, you are eligible for a 15% discount on your ticket. You can request the discount code via info@psychiatrieenfilosofie.nl.


Program

We will put together a diverse two-day program featuring five engaging keynote speakers and approximately 50 speakers who will give very different presentations, performances, and perspectives. The full program and a list with all speakers, abstracts and bio's wil be published later on this page.   


Keynote speakers 

Alan Bristow - Paranoid Reading for Paranoid Writing? On the Possibilities of Mad Knowledge

Psychoanalysis has a long and checkered history with respect to its engagement with the written expression of madness; Sigmund Freud’s initial theories of ‘Dementia Praecox’ based on Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs, Victor Tausk’s seminal paper on James Tilly Mathews and his ‘influencing machine’, Carl Jung’s engagement with Babette and lastly, Jacques Lacan’s controversial utilization of the written prose of ‘Aimee’ to name but a few. All of which raise a series of urgent, provocative and eminently political questions relating to the way mad writing, or paranoid text has firstly, been identified to be worthy of any analytic gaze and, secondly, how it comes to be subsequently interpreted. Yet, we also find a series of critiques leveled at psychoanalysis from an array of different intellectual or philosophical positions. Many of which have also had recourse to the written expression of madness to state their case. R. D. Laing’s anti-psychiatry as well Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis, being the more notable examples.  

However, this series of interpretations and attempts to derive knowledge from the written expression of madness also reveals to us something about the paranoid nature of all knowledge acquisition. Adopting the work of Eve Sedgewick and her notion of ‘reparative reading’, as well as Lacan's earliest thoughts on ‘paranoiac knowledge’, I will demonstrate how the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ underwriting many critical reading practices, ones adopted by psychoanalysis and beyond, actually mirror the very paranoid processes they purportedly wish to unearth. By focusing on this taught interrelation between knowledge creation, critical interpretive practices and paranoid modes of reading, I will ask if the analytic gaze has anything left to offer ethical and progressive ways of understanding, or resistance to understanding, mad experience. 

Alan Bristow has been a practicing Psychiatric Social Worker for the NHS in London for the past two decades. He primarily works with those experiencing psychosis subject to legal detention. In 2020 he received his PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London on the topic of mad writing drawing from Lacanian Psychoanalysis, continental philosophy and mad studies. A forthcoming book from Palgrave, Paranoid Knowledge (2025), further expands on these research interests. His forthcoming publications primarily relate to advancing a philosophical critique of digital MH technologies, computational psychiatry and their application for wider clinical practice.

Anna Six - The Illusion of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Training and the Peformance of Pathology

The ‘Clinical Assessment of Skills and Competencies’ (CASC) is the final exam in the UK for membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Comprised of 16 ‘stations’, it is designed to assess a range of practical skills (history-taking, examination, patient management) through very short, simulated patient interactions. The patients are paid actors from a company called Professional Role Players, who are given a patient profile upon which to base their interactions. 

In 2006 Howard Schatz published a photographic book called In Character: Actors Acting. This volume is a collection of close-up photographs of famous actors performing a character note: ‘You are a loser at a bar asking a pretty girl what her sign is.’ or ‘a mathematics genius realizing that your life’s work is based on a flawed formula’. The images attempt to capture the emotional truth of these given circumstances. In this way, the book exemplifies the normative practice of acting in the West as being the imaginative reproduction of decipherable behaviours for an audience. 

While drawn from distinct disciplines and with wildly different tones, these two examples bring together important questions with respect to questions of truth, interpretation, and the apparent legibility of human experience. Both the CASC and Actors Acting rely on a sense that the reliable communication of inner states is possible. Both rely on the notion of the human as, to some extent, decipherable. This paper will trace the role of acting within psychiatric training and examine the role of performance within diagnostic conceptions of illness. The paper will critique the spectacle of objectivity that is at play both in the CASC and within psychiatry more broadly. I will argue that the role of acting and characterisation in psychiatric training make luminous the subjective, interpretative, and descriptive traditions of the discipline that are routinely and vociferously disavowed. In short, the paper will argue that the diagnosis is closer to a structured illusion than a reliable guide to internal realities.

Anna Six is a writer and professor of medical humanities at the University of Warwick. Her critical work explores madness, trauma, and altered states. Recent books and collaborations include Madness in Literature and Visual Culture: Critical Interventions (2025), The Wonderful World of Dissocia (2023), and Madness, Art and Society: Beyond Illness (2018).

Ben Alderson-Day - The Presence of Madness, and the Madness of Presence

Abstract: coming soon


Ben Alderson-Day is a Professor of Psychology and Co-Director of the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. A specialist in psychosis and psychopathology, his works spans psychology, psychiatry, philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. From 2012-2022 he was a member of Hearing the Voice, Durham University's interdisciplinary investigation of voice-hearing (or auditory verbal hallucinations) and in 2024 he became Scientific Chair of the International Consortium on Hallucinations Research. In 2023 his book "Presence: The Strange Science of the Unseen Other" won the British Psychological Society Book Award for Popular Science.


Helene Speyer - Lived Experience, philosophy, and transforming psychiatry

My lived experience has shattered my learned and laboured expertise as a psychiatrist. Years of training and practice built on diagnosis, treatment, and scientific detachment suddenly collapsed when I realized I was also a patient. The frameworks I had relied on to make sense of others, had failed to make sense of me, exposing the limits of psychiatry’s natural scientific worldview and its illusion of neutrality.

In that crisis, considering resigning as a doctor, I reached out for philosophy of psychiatry, in desperation. And it saved me. Philosophy offered both comfort and clarity. It helped me see how deeply psychiatry is shaped by positivist assumptions about truth, causality, and control. Once I could name those assumptions I could question them. I began to understand that what I had treated as knowledge was in fact one narrative among many. This realization cracked open a space for pluralism, a recognition that there are multiple equally valid ways of knowing, healing, and understanding distress. From that point, I saw what epistemic injustice means.

From that insight grew conceptual humility, the awareness that professional expertise can blind as much as it illuminates. Embracing humility changed everything. It turned my focus away from fixing patients toward transforming psychiatry itself.

My current research aims to recreate this reversal for others. I do not wish for any of my colleagues to be suffering to a degree that they need psychiatric care. However, there is invaluable knowledge hidden in having been on the other side of the table. Using immersive virtual reality, I now design scenarios where psychiatrists become the patient, sitting across from a simulated clinician and hearing their own language reflected back at them. The goal is not simulation for empathy’s sake but a genuine epistemic jolt, to let clinicians feel the asymmetry of power, vulnerability, and interpretation that defines every clinical encounter.

Helene Speyer (Copenhagen Research Center for Mental Health, Denmark) is a psychiatrist, PhD, associate professor, and retired magician’s assistant. She explores lived experience, philosophical assumptions, deprescribing, and complexity, developing conceptual competence in clinicians. Her work includes immersive virtual reality interventions that let psychiatrists experience the patient perspective, fostering reflexivity, empathy, and ethical awareness, and promoting pluralistic, humility-driven approaches to transform psychiatric practice from within.

Stefania Pandolfo

Abstract + bio: coming soon

Organisers
Jasper Feyaerts (Ghent University), Bart Marius (director of museum dr. Guislain in Ghent) and Wouter Kusters (Foundation for Psychiatry & Philosophy, e-mail info@psychiatrieenfilosofie.nl)

​​Conference themes: Madness and its Expressions

In this fourth edition of the Too Mad to be True conference, we aim to interrogate and offer a forum for different expressions and configurations of madness, inviting submissions around one or more of the following subthemes: 

1. Madness in the field of mental health   
Madness—and its quintessential expression in ‘schizophrenia’—has been described as the ‘sublime object of psychiatry' (Woods) and of other mental health sciences, remaining at the forefront of scientific inquiry and holding the key to distinguish between normal and abnormal. It is through the definition and clinical management of schizophrenia that psychiatry claims its authority to legislate between sane and insane, reason and unreason. However, both madness and schizophrenia remain profoundly problematic and essentially contested concepts in the practice and theories of mental health care although they attract ever more sophisticated forms of scientific enquiry. 

2. Madness in philosophy
There are several ways how philosophy deals with madness. First, madness may be used to argue against particular philosophical positions (e.g., solipsism or radical scepticism), when it is shown that these would lead to undesirable or unliveable (mad) consequences. Secondly, madness may be considered as the chaotic (mad) background against which sense, reason and order stand out. Madness may then be equated to unreason (Foucault), nonsense (Deleuze) or the outside (Meillassoux). Thirdly, madness may be taken as a concept of science that can be further explained or understood by means of philosophical clarification. Finally, there are authors who seek to highlight the shared origin and character of mad and philosophical thought (Derrida, Kusters, Strassberg). 

3. Madness in Mad Studies
In Mad Studies it is claimed that madness is not a medical illness, but a complex social, political, and cultural experience, and that it may be expressed in and through neurodiversity. Mad Studies challenges the capture of madness by dominant psychiatric and academic narratives and centers the voices of those with lived experience of madness. Rather than seeking to pathologize, Mad Studies explores how madness is shaped by systems of power, including racism, ableism, and capitalism. It values collective knowledge, activism, and alternative understandings of mental health. Through interdisciplinary methods, it examines how society constructs "normalcy" and how mad people resist marginalization, reclaim identity, and create new ways of being and knowing in the world. 

4. Madness in religion 
Madness can be intertwined with religion in various ways. Within religious or theological frameworks, madness can be given a place, explanation, and even a therapy specific to religion (think of something like “possession”, or the activity of praying). Madness can also have a religious character of itself, in experiences such as apocalyptic feelings, revelations, visions, rebirths, often spurring theoretical efforts to distinguish normal, true or authentic religion from its supposedly mad distortion (Saville Smith). In addition, it is also possible to regard religion as a whole, or rather the lack thereof, as insane or delusional (e.g., Freud, Rosenzweig). From a developmental perspective, an episode of religious mad experiences may appear both in a context of a conversion away from, as one towards and into religion.

5. Madness in aesthetics 
Madness and the arts have an intimate and complex relationship. A recurring and contentious topic is the existence of a potentially distinctive mad form of aesthetic creativity, whether it be in writing, visuals arts or other forms of artistic expression. There is the critical debate concerning the designations of Art Brut and Outsider Art, their complex ideological histories, and potentially exclusionary, pathologizing and stigmatizing connotations. Madness also allows to render explicit and critically evaluate different notions of creativity in aesthetic theory, with some forms touching more directly on romantic ideals (emotional, primitive, direct, spontaneous), and others testifying to a more modern or postmodern sensitivity (self-consciousness, alienation, relativism). Finally, there is increased recognition of an aesthetic dimension to mad experience itself (e.g., the sublime character of delusional mood, or of manic creativity), which may be sought after rather than suffered by mad individuals.   

6. Madness in cultural studies & anthropology
In cultural studies & anthropology, madness is not a fixed medical diagnosis but a concept that is culturally constructed and varies across societies, historical periods, and media. In that sense, madness may seem to function as the mirror of culture itself: it shows how different cultures define sanity and insanity, treat the “mad”, and how madness reflects societal and historical norms and truths. Further topics concern the question to what extent particular cultures shape both the expression and experience of madness, and how different cultural configurations can have a normalizing or rather pathologizing impact. Think also of the burgeoning ideas concerning 'AI psychosis' and other instances where media/AI/wider digital environments are understood both as novel and as the latest in the long history of 'culture shaping madness'. 


TMTBT I, TMTBT II and TMTBT III

In 2021: the first TMTBT conference: Philosophies of Madness

In 2023: the second TMTBT conference: the Promises and Perils of the First Person Perspective

In 2024: the third TMTBT conference: The Paradoxes of Madness


Mad caveat
Although madness on this conference is mainly considered on a philosophical and psychopathological level, we cannot forget about madness, on a global, societal level. In the context of global warming and ecological destruction  we therefore ask all conference participants to be aware of their CO2 emissions and reduce them as much as possible while traveling to and from the conference.


Advisory board

Alastair Morgan (Senior Lecturer Mental Health/ Critical Theorist at the University of Manchester, UK).

Angela Woods (Professor of Medical Humanities at the Durham University, UK).

Clara Humpston (Lecturer in Mental Health at the Department of Psychology at the University of York, UK).

Louis Sass (Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, US).

Stijn Vanheule (Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical psychological Assessment at Ghent University).