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Introducing Mad Studies Robert Menzies, Brenda A Introducing Mad Studies Robert Menzies, Brenda A. LeFrançois, and Geoffrey Reaume “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked. “Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.” “How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland The madness about which I’m writing is the madness that is more or less present in each one of us and not only the madness that gets the psychiatric baptism by diagnosis of “schizophrenia” or some other label invented by the specialized psycho-police agents of final phase capitalist society. —David Cooper, The Language of Madness (1978) As for the term, Mad Studies, it has emerged from a collective assemblage of enunciation, from a multitude of voices. Like Nietzsche, through whom some of those voices spoke, it is a destiny. —Richard Ingram, Personal Communication (2011b) Beginnings Mad matters, and so does the study of madness and psychiatrization, and so too does Mad Studies.1 The matter of Mad Studies—and that Mad does matter—is the express purpose of this reader; we explore here the various ways to take up the matters of “psychiatrization,” “madness,” the oppression and agency of Mad subjects, and the battle against psychiatry and psychiatric discourse as a way to introduce Mad Studies as an emergent field of study that matters. This is not to suggest that the matters cov- ered in this reader are wholly new. On the contrary, many of these matters have been raised conceptually, and through actions of resistance within activist circles, within the academy and amongst radical practitioners since the very beginning of organized psychiatry in Canada and abroad. However, this reader represents the first text to consolidate Mad matters within a Canadian context, which we have done under the 1 MadMatters.indd 1 13-04-02 3:21 PM 2 Mad Matters new umbrella of “Mad Studies.” It also combines the more established understand- ings of Mad matters, including antipsychiatry approaches and long-standing psy- chiatric survivor narratives, with an exciting and burgeoning form of activism and conceptualizations, emanating from a new generation of people in Canada engaging in a variety of forms of radical and Mad activist scholarship. In 1981, Toronto activist-survivor Mel Starkman wrote: “An important new movement is sweeping through the Western world.… The ‘mad,’ the oppressed, the ex-inmates of society’s asylums are coming together and speaking for themselves. The map of the world is dotted with newly formed groups, struggling to identify themselves, define their struggle, and decide whether the ‘system’ is reformable or whether they need to create an alternative community” (Starkman, 1981; see Chapter 1). As Starkman proclaimed in 1981, so too this book proclaims over 30 years later the radical reclaiming of psychic spaces of resistance against the psychiatric domination of Mad people as a collection of chemical imbalances needing to be corrected in a capitalist system that prizes bourgeois conformity and medical model “fixes” above all. This book, in contrast, prizes the decades-long resistance of activists and allies in Canada who have sought to provide an alternative to Big Pharma and profiteers in the psychiatric system and academy who make a living labelling and medicating that which they cannot imagine or tolerate. Mad Matters therefore is part of a wider current that is helping to promote “Mad Studies” inside and outside post-secondary institutions. It is also intended to tap into the desire for “an alternative community” that Starkman wrote about, where people can get a sense of who they are and what madness is about without being automatically pathologized with a mental disease as happens in so many other spaces. Mad Studies in this sense incorporates all that is critical of psychiatry from a radical socially progressive foundation in which the medical model is dispensed with as biologically reductionist whilst alternative forms of helping people experiencing mental anguish are based on humanitarian, holistic perspectives where people are not reduced to symptoms but understood within the social and economic context of the society in which they live. As such, antipsychiatry is included within Mad Studies as contributing much to our understanding of the nature of psychiatric thought and practice by helping to reveal the inner workings of a profession that has dominated interpretations of madness but which, over the past 50 years, has had critics from within and without assail its presumptions, criticisms which continue today. In this respect, we are not locating “Mad Studies” as originating solely within the community of people deemed Mad, but also as including allies, social critics, revolutionary theorists, and radical professionals who have sought to distance themselves from the essentializing biological determinism of psychiatry whilst respecting, valuing, and privileging the Mad thoughts of those whom conventional psychiatry would condemn to a jumble of diagnostic prognostications based on subjective opinions masquerading as science. MadMatters.indd 2 13-04-02 3:21 PM Introducing Mad Studies 3 Moreover, the field of Mad Studies is relevant to a range of interconnecting social movements as well as a range of academic disciplines. These areas of thought and action circulate through this collection, precisely because of its interdisciplinary nature, its wide yet focused scope, and its importance in Canadian social policy as well as the activist community. This reader represents a collection of chapters in a growing field with interconnections across a host of disciplines and reaching out into the activist community in Canada and internationally. The importance for all forms of activism must be underscored; that is, Mad Studies is vital in informing Mad politics as well as anti-poverty organizing, queer politics, race politics, anti-colonial resistance, diaspora, and the various human rights movements, such as women’s rights, children’s rights, disability rights, and trans rights, among others. Furthermore, Mad Studies is reaping the benefits of its new and ongoing partnerships with other marginalized groups. In learning from our intersecting experiences of both oppression and resistance, through our identification with groups whose organized existence also threatens current forms of social dominance (LeFrançois, 2012), Mad politics can only strengthen its abilities in challenging psychiatry whilst also supporting wider resistance struggles. The inspiration for this book comes from our encounters with the rich and innovative body of critical writing on madness, human rights, and the “psy sciences” that has been flourishing in this country over recent years. Across a range of institutional and cultural contexts, activists, psychiatric survivors, academics, journalists, and dissenting practitioners have been challenging the conventional biological paradigm of “mental illness”; exposing the systemic and symbolic violence that lie at the core of the psychiatric system; constructing radically creative ways of thinking about matters of the mind; linking the struggle against biopsychiatry with other movements organized around gender, race, disability, social class, culture, and generation; building a critical community that now spans all regions of the country; and practising mental “difference” and recovery as liberating ways of expressing our humanity and engaging in political debate and practice. In this book, we showcase an original collection of work that has emerged from these exciting trajectories of engagement, and we represent Canadian critical Mad Studies as an emerging, and increasingly vital, field of study and activism. Historical Legacies The contemporary Mad movement came into being during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, an especially turbulent period in the history of the psy sciences, and in the ever-shifting relations between psychiatry, society, the individual, and the state. The post-WWII years had ushered in a powerful new wave of therapeutic discourse and practice in advanced liberal democracies worldwide. The mental health indus- try had undergone a quite spectacular rebirth, successfully asserting its domain over MadMatters.indd 3 13-04-02 3:21 PM 4 Mad Matters ever-widening spheres of public and private life in what Robert Castel and his col- leagues would later describe as the “psychiatric society” (Castel, Castel & Lovell, 1982). Buoyed by an arsenal of new biogenetic theories and somatic technologies (among them, the first generation of so-called “antipsychotic” neuroleptics, and brain-scanning devices such as x-ray computed tomography) (Schrag, 1978), and liberated from its long- established institutional confines by a wholesale collapse of the asylum system amid the “community mental health movement” (see Shimrat, Chapter 10), psychiatry was in the process of flexing its disciplinary muscles as never before. From its first release in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) was already well en route to becoming North America’s prime mental classification sys- tem—the go-to definer of mental pathology that it is today (Caplan, 1996; Kutchins & Kirk, 1997). If in the 1970s we had yet to become a Prozac or Ritalin Nation, Valium, Librium, and the tricyclics were flooding our marketplaces and synapses as epidemics of “depression” and “anxiety” were ominously declared (Greenberg, 2010; Lane,
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