Mad Studies is an interdisciplinary field focused on looking at knowledge production and political action that critiques and transcends psych-centered ways of thinking, behaving, relating and being. Mad Studies also takes a critical look at the paradigm in psychiatry of mental illness and  how this often erases the narrative of metal heath service users, consumers, survivors, and ex-patients and how psychiatric care is linked to oppression, isolation, humiliation, and denigration of specific groups.

Mad Studies

While antipsychiatry, C/S/X and Mad pride movements were already active at this time and there was involvement of people of color in these movements often the leadership of these movements in the 1970s and the few decades after that were all white activists. Often Black people and other people of color were not considered leaders as often.

Why the Black Panther was a Connection for Those Confined in Institutions rather than Existing C/S/X activist movements 

Price reclaims "mad" and "crazy" not as insults but as rhetorical indicators that expose discrimination. Her goal is to apply Disability Studies (DS) theory to transform "thinking about thinking in the classroom"—reframing how academia understands cognitive difference. She gets inside the heads of the anxious, the shy, and the awkward, treating neurodiversity as a critical resource for higher education rather than deviancy to be eliminated. Moving beyond familiar diagnoses like Autism or ADD, Price analyzes cognitive disabilities we cannot yet name, opening new directions for understanding diverse minds in academic spaces.

Transforming How We Understand Academic Thinking

The term m/Mad has been reclaimed by people who have been pathologized, psychiatrized and defined as 'mentally ill'. Many m/Mad people push back on the language of mental illness because of how it des not take into account how systemic and symbolic violence by the state and psychiatric systems can lead to the categorization of poor individuals, LGBTQ+ individuals, and people of color. m/Madness as a term originally created in the activist sphere has given rise to Mad Studies.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Schalk uses Margaret Price's defintion of mental disability. Price defines mental disability as a category of disability that includes intellectual, cognitive and psychiatric disabilities, mental illness, m/Madness, and a/Autism, along with brain injury or psychiatric survivorship. This term was created to enable coalition.

Schalk's Definition of Mental Disability

Castrodale, Mark (2015). Book Review Mad matters: a critical reader in Canadian Mad Studies. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research (2015).

Book Review of Mad matters: a critical reader in Canadian Mad Studies

m/Madness

Mental disability - in the extent that diagnosis has existed as a way to define mental disability - has always had diagnosis interplay with racism. Schalk notes that Jonathan Metzel's work "The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease" traces the socio-political circumstances that lead to the American Psychiatric Association changing the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia - a change that lead from schizophrenia being a condition considered a common and benign diagnosis predominantly given to white housewives to a violence mental disability assoicated with Black men in civil rights activism.

Diagnosis criteria for mental disabilities construct norms of abledmindness that are muilt on what white male middle class norms assume is appropriate behavior, approaptiate eotions to have, and approproate ways to address and express said emotions.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After