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.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

We know the Black Panther was delivered to people in some prisons as a means of connection, education, and empowerment. There is also evidence that it was delivered to those in psychiatric institutions with the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola having its own chapter of the Black Panther Party. The Letters to the Editor from Crockett and Anderson also suggest that the paper was distributed near some prisons hospital wards. The Black Panther as highlighted in Anderson's piece was essential for folks developing their own critical perspective on their own confinement in mental hospitals. 

The Black Panther as a means of Community among those confined in institutions

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.

m/Madness

Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478027003

Black Disability Politics

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

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

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.

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