Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --
'Tis the Majority

Invoking us to question and challenge the boundaries between sanity and madness, the poem that gives title to this book was written by Emily Dickinson some 150 years ago. There is perhaps no resolution to the challenge, and may never be full clarity of the boundaries. Yet we must listen to reach the divine; and we might do well to question the majority.

It is time to shed some light on the dark halls and windowless rooms where women's mental health has been hidden from view. Where are the stories? Where are their voices? In historical and psychiatric records, women's mental health is reduced to verifiable symptoms and causes, devoid of the subjective, absent of the lived experience. When confronted with their protestations and self-representations, our medical system and our societal institutions further pathologize, retrauamtize or silence women. Much Madness, Divinest Sense is a collection of women's stories and essays about mental health and health care. These women--physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, community activists, health researchers, Indigenous women, transgender women, our neighbors, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers who are the recipients, providers and critics of care--break the silence to talk about the polluted, heart-wrenching, stigmatized, messy subject that is mental illness today. As with their first collection, Women Who Care: Women's stories of health care and caring, the stories, essays and poems of women receiving, accompanying, critiquing or giving mental health care are again in this compilation as raw as they are real.

Nili Kaplan-Myrth is a lecturer in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Ottawa. She is a family physician, anthropologist, Fulbright and Commonwealth scholar, and mother of three who has spent her life advocating for equitable access to health care, Indigenous self-determination in health, disability rights, 2SLGBTQ health, and mental health care. She is the author of Much Madness, Divinest Sense: Women’s Stories of Mental Health and Health Care, Women Who Care: Women’s Stories of Health Care and Caring, and Hard Yakka: Transforming Indigenous Health Policy and Politics, as well as numerous academic articles and newspaper articles.

Nili Kaplan-Myrth's profile page

This anthology is co-edited by two feminist health advocates and researchers, Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myrth, MD, CCFP, PhD, medical anthropologist and family physician, and Dr. Lori Hanson, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan. The post-script is written by Dr. Allison Crawford, MD, FRCPC, a psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto.

Lori Hanson's profile page