On the Importance of Suffering

Abstract

Hubertus Büschel, “On the Importance of Suffering”: The coda highlights some central aspects of the entire book and addresses some open questions for future research, such as suffering and vernacular experiences of psychiatry and psychiatric illness. It debates the difficulties of researching patients’ perspectives. It turns to patient art as a source that may be used to better understand patient perspectives. Patient art can be an important source for analyzing “silenced” as well as “marginalized” perspectives or yearnings. It is comparable in some way to voices, but it is a visual source, and one collected under a particular circumstance of curiosity aligned with care. The chapter discusses several examples of patient paintings and drawings from Lantoro Mental Asylum in Abeokuta, Nigeria, collected by Ulli Beier and kept in the Ulli Beier collection in Iwalewa House, Bayreuth, Germany. More largely, it discusses the theme of suffering and whether the theme has been neglected by this volume’s authors.