Main description:

Presents examples of Mad Studies in action; initiatives that have been taken, what they have achieved and what can be learned from them

Offers examples and insights from the perspectives of those who have (had) those experiences, and will also explore ways of supporting people oppressed by conventional understandings and systems.

Comprised of 31 chapters written by leading experts, activists and academics

Contents:

Introduction

Part 1: Mad Studies and political organising of people with psychiatric experience

1. The international foundations of Mad Studies: Knowledge generated in collective action

2. Reflections on power, knowledge and change

3. Shifting identities as reflective personal responses to political changes

4. A crazy, warrior and "respondona" Peruvian: All personal transformation is social and political

5. Reflections on survivor knowledge and Mad Studies

6. Speaking for ourselves: An early UK survivor activist's account

7. Fostering community responsibility: Perspectives from the Pan African Network of people with psychosocial disabilities

8. Using survivor knowledge to influence public policy in the United States

9. The social movement of people with psychosocial disabilities in Japan: Strategies for taking the struggle to academia

10. Re-writing the master narrative: A prerequisite for mad liberation

Part 2: Situating Mad Studies

11. A genealogy of the concept of "Mad Studies"

12. How is Mad Studies different from anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry?

13. Mad Studies and disability studies

14. Weaponizing absent knowledges: Countering the violence of mental health law

Part 3: Mad Studies and knowledge equality

15. The subjects of oblivion: Subalterity, sanism, and racial erasure

16. Institutional ceremonies? The (im)possibilities of transformative co-production in mental health

17. "Are you experienced?" The use of experiential knowledge in mental health and its contribution to Mad Studies

18. De-pathologising motherhood

19. The professional regulation of madness in nursing and social work

20. The (global) rise of anti-stigma campaigns

Part 4: Doing Mad Studies

21. Why we must talk about de-medicalization

22. Imagining non-carceral futures with(in) Mad Studies

23. Madness in the time of war: Post-war reflections on practice and research beyond the borders of psychiatry and development

24. The architecture of my madness

25. Re-conceptualising suicidality: Towards collective intersubjective responses

26. De-coupling and re-coupling violence and madness

27. Upcycling recovery: Potential alliances of recovery, inequality and Mad Studies

28. Bodies, boundaries, b/orders: A recent critical history of differentialism and structural adjustment

29. Spirituality, psychiatry, and Mad Studies.

Part 5: Inquiring into the future for Mad Studies

30. Taking Mad Studies back out into the community

31. Interrogating Mad Studies in the academy: Bridging the community/academy divide

32. Madness, decolonisation and mental health activism in Africa

33. Navigating voices, politics, positions amidst peers: Resonances and dissonances in India

34. 'Madness' as a term of division, or rejection

35. Afterword: The ethics of making knowledge together

36. Postscript: Mad Studies in a maddening world