Out of the Attic: Mental Illness, Psychiatric Disability, and Women Writers disrupts madwoman vs. sane woman paradigms, revealing how social, economic, and cultural systems impact mental illnesses through considering literature by contemporary women writers. Mental illness is a more complicated figuration than a mad subject grappling in a sane world because multiple identifications and social logics play into what we understand as mental illness. Moreover, literature accounts for aspects of mental illness that science cannot.