In seeking to characterize “the prose of suffering,” complex considerations surface in regard to our own understanding of suffering, our motives for engaging in such inquiry and our capacity to understand the social production of suffering – a production abetted in part by the regimes society puts in place ostensibly to mitigate suffering. How is it possible, then, “to do justice to the way others experience the world and whatever is at stake for them”? In this field note we give a preliminary account of an attempt to engage in ethically grounded collaborative inquiry with persons with chronic psychiatric impairments – a group that experiences significant marginalization in many societies.