This chapter is a writeup of two focus groups that formed part of the 2022–2023 project New Understandings of Hamlet funded by The British Academy. In these groups, people with lived experiences of neurodivergence, mental illness, and suicidal ideation read some passages from Hamlet together along with two facilitators (two English Literature academics, Laura Seymour and Sarah Gaspard). There was one rule for interpreting Hamlet in these groups: the ultimate authority is lived experience, rather than what literary critics or the facilitators had to say. In these groups, we found that when we draw on lived experiences we can gain new insights into “Shakespeare’s madnesses” that we cannot access when we rely solely on what we might think of as the more “traditional” literary criticism which elides these experiences. This chapter describes how we set up the focus groups, in the hope that readers might be inspired to try a similar project.