1st Edition
Mad Studies Reader Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health
The last few years have brought increased writings from activists, artists, scholars, and concerned clinicians that cast a critical and constructive eye on psychiatry, mental health care, and the cultural relations of mental difference. With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice in mental health discourse, the Mad Studies Reader brings together voices that advance anti-sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm.
Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, the Reader draws on the perspectives, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference. Voices from these groups confront and challenge standard approaches to mental difference. They advance new structures of meaning and practice that are inclusive of those who have been systematically subjugated and promote anti-sanist approaches to counter inequalities, prejudices, and discrimination. Confronting modes of psychological oppression and the power of a few to interpret and define difference for so many, the Mad Studies Reader asks the critical question of how these approaches may be reconsidered, resisted, and reclaimed.
This collection will be of interest to mental health clinicians; students and scholars of the arts, humanities and social sciences; and anyone who has been affected by mental difference, directly or indirectly, who is curious to explore new perspectives.
Introducing Mad Studies
I. Innovative Artists
Introduction
1. “National Association for the Eradication of Mental Illness” and “Taking Care of the Basics”
Icarus Project
2. Mad Studies and Mad Positive Music
Mark Castrodale
3. Woody Guthrie’s Brain
Issa Ibrahim
4. The Invisible Line of Madness
Sabrina Chap
5. Cry Havoc: The Madness of Returning Home from War
Stephan Wolfert
6. Betty and Veronica
Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey
7. The Uses of Depression: The Way Around is Through
David Budbill
8. Inbetweenland
Jacks McNamara
9. Sometimes/I Slip
LD Green
10. The Mystery of Madness through Art and Mad Studies
Ekaterina Netchitailova
11. Mad Art Makes Sense
Lorna Collins
12. Are You Conrad?
Sophia Szamosi
II. Critical Scholars
Introduction
13. Theoretical Considerations in Mad Studies
Erica Fletcher
14. Obsession in Our Time
Lennard Davis
15. A (Head) Case for Mad Humanities: Sula’s Shadrack and Black Madness
Hayley Stefan
16. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Notes toward a Mad Methodology
La Marr Jurelle Bruce
17. Commercialized Science and Epistemic Injustice: Exposing and Resisting Neoliberal Global Mental Health Discourse
Justin M. Karter, Lisa Cosgrove, and Farahdeba Herrawi
18. ‘Structural Competency’ meets Mad Studies: Reckoning with madness and mental diversity beyond the social determinants of mental health
Nev Jones
19. The Neoliberal Project: Mental Health and Marginality in India
Zaphya Jena
20. Child as Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Goverance, and Epistemicide
China Mills and Brenda A. LeFrançois
21. Beyond Disordered Brains and Mother Blame: Critical Issues in Autism and Mothering
Patty Douglas and Estee Klar
22. Enacting Activism: Depathologizing Trauma in Military Veterans Through Theatre
Alisha Ali & Luke Bokenfohr
III. Concerned Clinicians
Introduction
23. Mental Illness is Still a Myth
Thomas Szasz
24. The Emergence UK Critical Psychiatry Network: Reflections and Themes
Patrick Bracken, Duncan Double, Suman Fernando, Joanna Moncrieff, Philip Thomas, and Sami Timimi
25. Crisis Response as a Human Rights Flashpoint: Critical Elements of Community Support for Individuals Experiencing Significant Emotional Distress
Peter Stastny, Anne m. Lovell, Julie Hannah, Daniel Goulart, Alberto Vasquez, Seana O’Callaghan, and Dainius Pūras
26. Sanism: Histories, Applications, and Studies So Far
Stephanie LeBlanc-Omstead and Jennifer Poole
27. On Being Insane in Sane Places: Breaking into the Cult of Sanity
Noel Hunter
28. Therapy as a Tool in Dismantling Oppression
Gitika Talwar
29. Decolonizing Psychotherapy by Owning Our Madness
Debbie-Ann Chambers
30. Creating a Cultural Foundation for Spiritual Emergence
Katrina Michelle
31. The Establisment and the Mystic
Marilyn Charles
32. Re-thinking Psychiatry with Mad Studies
Bradley Lewis
IV. Daring Activists
Introduction
33. The Ex-Patients' Movement: Where We've Been and Where We're Going
Judi Chamberlin
34. The Icarus Project: A Counter Narrative for Psychic-Diversity
Sascha DuBrul
35. Ending Coerción
Alberto Vásquez Encalada
36. Language games used to construct autism as pathology
Nick Chown
37. The Black Wisdom Collective
Kelechi Ubozoh
38. Mad Resistance/Mad Alternatives: Democratizing Mental Health Care
Jeremy Andersen, Ed Altwies, Jonah Bossewitch, Celia Brown, Kermit Cole, Sera Davidow, Sascha Altman DuBrul, Eric Friedland-Kays, Gelini Fontaine,Will Hall, Chris Hansen, Bradley Lewis, Audre Lorde Project, Maryse Mitchell-Brody, Jacks McNamara, Gina Nikkel, Pablo Sadler, David Stark, Adaku Utah, Agustina Vidal, Cheyenna Layne Weber
39. Black Resilience in the Face of Bullshit: Wellness & Safety Plan
Adaku Utah
40. Demolition, Abolition, and the Legacy of Madness
Leah Harris
41. A Brief, Critical History of Mental Health Services in Uganda and introduction to Contemporary Human Rights Organizing and Reform
Kabale Benon Kitafuna
42. Letter to the Mother of a “Schizophrenic”: We Must Do Better Than Forced Treatment
Will Hall
43. With the Launch of Mad in Denmark, a Global Network for Radical Change Grows Stronger
Robert Whitaker
44. Defunding Sanity
Rajvi Mariwala
45. Making the Case for Multiplicity: A Holistic Framework for Madness & Transformation
Jazmine Russell
Biography
Bradley Lewis is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a background in the arts and humanities. He is associate professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and he is on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities. His books include Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry; Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Encounters; and Experiencing Epiphanies in Literature, Cinema, and Everyday Life (forthcoming).
Alisha Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. Her research focuses on the mental health effects of oppression, including violence, racism, discrimination and trauma. She is the co-editor of the book, Silencing the Self Across Cultures (Oxford University Press) as well as the co-editor of The Crisis of Connection (NYU Press).
Jazmine Russell is the co-founder of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts (IDHA), a transformative mental health training institute and host of Depth Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of mad studies, critical psychology, and neuroscience, with experience working both within and outside the mental health system.
"The Mad Studies Reader brings the world of mental health together with the world of critical intellectual scholarship and activism. It is invaluable reading that works out the central problem of sanism in the way we treat mental differences. I have no doubt it will be an instant classic and a "go to" resource for people in the mad pride movement, disability studies, health humanities, narrative medicine, arts for health, critical mental health, and anyone interested in the complexities of today’s mental health concerns."
Danielle Spencer, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University and author of Metagnosis: Revelatory Narratives of Health and Identity
"In the relentless quest for liberation, echoes have resonated through time—voices of scholars, storytellers, and activists narrating the tale of defiance. The Mad Studies Reader stands as a testament within the tapestry of social justice movements embroiled in this struggle for emancipation. For me, its arrival marks a critical juncture, a turning tide where the silenced voices of society's marginalized find amplification. Mad people being recognized as bearers of transformative wisdom capable of reshaping our world."
Vesper Moore, Activist and host of GET MAD! podcast devoted to transformative mental health, mad pride, and disability justice
"So many questions: Do medical models want to eradicate mental illness? What is anti-psychiatry? Could depression be poetry? What does epistemic justice look like for mental health? Does capitalism fuel mental illness? In response to these questions and many more, The Mad Studies Reader is what our futuristic-politocized-neurodivergent-justice-fueled-(re)educational process needs to look like."
Jennifer Mullin, PhD, Psychotherapist and author of Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing your Practice
"A groundbreaking cornucopia of art, activism, and critical thought. Required reading for artists, students, scholars and anyone interested in mental health."
Jussi Valtonen, PhD, Novelist and psychologist, They Know Not What They Do
