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, this 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.
Part I. Innovative Artists
Introducing Mad Studies
- "Icarus Wing," "National Association for the Eradication of Mental Illness," and "Taking Care of the Basics"
Icarus Project - Mad Studies and Mad-Positive Music
Mark A. Castrodale - Woody Gunthrie’s Brain
Issa Ibrahim - The Invisible Line of Madness
Sabrina Chap - Cry Havoc: The Madness of Returning Home from War
Stephan Wolfert - Betty and Veronica
Emily Allan and Leah Hennessey - The Uses of Depression: The Way Around Is Through
David Budbill - Inbetweenland
Jacks McNamara - Sometimes/I Slip
L. D. Green - The Mystery of Madness through Art and Mad Studies
Ekaterina Netchitailova - Mad Art Makes Sense
Lorna Collins - Are You Conrad?
Sophia Szamosi - Theoretical Considerations in Mad Studies
Erica Fletcher - Obsession in Our Time
Lennard Davis - A (Head) Case for a Mad Humanities: Sula’s Shadrack and Black Madness
Hayley C. Stefan - How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Notes toward a Mad Methodology: From "How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind:
Madness and Black Radical Creativity"
La Marr Jurelle Bruce - Commercialized Science and Epistemic Injustice: Exposing and Resisting Neoliberal Global Mental Health Discourse
Justin M. Karter, Lisa Cosgrove, and Farahdeba Herrawi - "Structural Competency" Meets Mad Studies: Reckoning with Madness and Mental Diversity beyond the Social and Structural Determinants of Mental Health
Nev Jones - The Neoliberal Project: Mental Health and Marginality in India
Zaphya Jena - Child As Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide
China Mills and Brenda A. LeFrançois - Beyond Disordered Brains and Mother Blame: Critical Issues in
Autism and Mothering
Patty Douglas and Estée Klar - Enacting Activism: Depathologizing Trauma in Military Veterans
through Theatre
Alisha Ali and Luke Bokenfohr - Mental Illness Is Still a Myth
Thomas Szasz - The Emergence of the UK Critical Psychiatry Network: Reflections and Themes
Pat Bracken, Duncan Double, Suman Fernando, Joanna Moncrieff, Philip Thomas, and Sami Timimi - 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 - Sanism: Histories, Applications, and Studies So Far
Stephanie LeBlanc-Omstead and Jennifer Poole - On Being Insane in Sane Places: Breaking into the Cult of the Mental Health Industry
Noel Hunter - Therapy as a Tool in Dismantling Oppression
Gitika Talwar - Decolonizing Psychotherapy by Owning Our Madness
Debbie-Ann Chambers - Creating a Cultural Foundation to Contextualize and Integrate
Spiritual Emergence
Katrina Michelle - The Establishment and the Mystic: Musings on Relationships between Psychoanalysis and Human Development
Marilyn Charles - Rethinking Psychiatry with Mad Studies
Bradley Lewis - The Ex-Patients’ Movement: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going
Judi Chamberlin - The Icarus Project: A Counter Narrative for Psychic Diversity
Sascha Altman DuBrul - Ending Coercion
Alberto Vásquez Encalada - Language Games Used to Construct Autism as Pathology
Nick Chown - The Black Wisdom Collective
Kelechi Ubozoh - 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, and Cheyenna Layne Weber - Black Resilience in the Face of Bullshit: Wellness and Safety Plan
Adaku Utah - Demolition, Abolition, and Inherited Legacies of Madness
Leah Harris - A Critical Overview of Mental Health-Related Beliefs, Services and Systems in Uganda and Recent Activist and Legal Challenges
Kabale Benon Kitafuna - Letter to the Mother of a "Schizophrenic": We Must Do Better Than
Forced Treatment
Will Hall - With the Launch of Mad in Denmark, a Global Network for Radical Change Grows Stronger
Robert Whitaker - Defunding Sanity
Raj Mariwala - Making the Case for Multiplicity: A Holistic Framework for Madness
and Transformation
Jazmine Russell
Part II. Critical Scholars
Part III. Concerned Clinicians
Part IV. Daring Activists
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
