#mad movement

[madlovers-au]

I've been thinking about creating a blog about madness, lived experience and critical perspectives on mental health for a while, and I've finally quit procrastinating it.

I'm looking for people to follow, feel free to like or comment on this post and I'll check out your blog, or let me know some tags I should follow.

In Solidarity & With Love x

[devinsturk]

Mad Out Loud (my essay from Tinfoil Hats: Stories by Mad People in an Insane World)

Tinfoil Hats: Stories by Mad People in an Insane World is a collection of writing edited by Phil Smith and published by Autonomous Press. I wrote the following essay in 2020, and it was selected for the anthology, which was published earlier this year in 2023. Tinfoil Hats: Stories by Mad People in an Insane World is available for purchase in both e-book and paperback formats. As always, thank you for reading. — Devin S. Turk

The translucent pill boxes. The laminated hospital bracelets. The safety levels. The strip-search. All the hours spent staring at the carpet in therapy offices, trying to justify my life through words that don’t feel like they fit right. These things have happened to me. Even now, grasping at gut feelings and whisps of my memory to form these words is like trying to capture the vastness of the ocean in a bucket. I have been articulating myself over and over to what feels like little avail. I tell curious and well-meaning people that “no, those aren’t my pronouns” or “actually, I am Autistic.” I explain, explain, explain that referring to me as “high functioning” is an ableist aggression (before attempting to teach people what the word “ableist” means), that I am neither a man nor a woman, and that many things in my life — from my gender to my medical history — are “kind of a long story.” I explain, rinse, and repeat in conversations with friends old and new, with family, with strangers, and with health professionals. I noticed this cycle of articulation first with my transness, then my Autism, followed by the reckoning of such a combination. Now, finally, I see this urgency embedded in my quest to articulate something I have come to know as “Madness.” (continued on my Medium blog!)

[devinsturk]

They warned me of becoming a “professional patient.”  Interesting, I thought, chewing on this new diagnosis, this label beyond all labels, this phrase meant to shame me into submission. I spit it out.

How sly a way to say I know too much.

[traumata-heart]

Madness, Meaning and The Mad Movement. Why should you care?

Matthew Jackman, founder of The Australian Centre for Living Experience

[withasmoothroundstone]

A really interesting discussion of the psychiatric consumer movement, the survivor movement, the mad movement, and what it means to be crazy, and to experience insanity, in a society where it's thoroughly medicalized and stigmatized.  And they raise a question really interesting to me:  What would it be like to go crazy in a society that was actually prepared to deal with it in a reasonable way.  

The usual LLF-related content warnings apply, including that if you're uncomfortable with crazy people calling themselves crazy, you probably  should read with caution or not read at all.

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"For 33 years, our social change movement leaders have seen themselves as embedded in a number of social change movements that might be seen as following the dream of Martin Luther King. For instance, one of the first constituencies psychiatric survivors identified with was prisoners working to reform the prison system. For many years, psychiatric survivors tried to be included in other social change movements such as women’s organizations, labor, and even environment. This was often frustrating, since even progressive groups tend not to have a deep understanding of our constituency, our issues, and our goals.

However, several breakthroughs did occur with the disability movement. The path to this victory is chaordic: There are people in our movement who accept their psychiatric diagnosis ... and there are those who do not believe in their labels, or consider their labels to be their only disability. The disability movement itself is diverse, big and experienced enough to see past these differences, because they themselves have a deep chaordic edge on being pro and con medicalization, themselves."

- David W. Oaks, Executive Director, MindFreedom Support Coalition International

Mad Movements: Chaordic Paths in Mental Health Activism Toward a Revolution of Empowerment 2004

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"...psychiatry never made me feel better.  There was no good side for me, partly because I'd had a good life before I got psychiatrized.  But for many people who felt they had benefited from hospitalization and psychiatric treatment, the kind of attention they got from professionals was the most positive they'd ever had.  I met people who came from backgrounds of hideous neglect or abuse and people who just didn't have anything really good in their lives who found a refuge in psychiatry.  People who'd always been told they were bad, and then suddenly were told they weren't bad at all - just sick.  It's strange, thinking about all the psychiatrized people who are told they're sick but still believe they're bad.  I'd been brought up being told I was great.  I didn't believe that I was, but it made me feel worse, not better, to be told I was sick."

-from Call Me Crazy: Stories from the Mad Movement

Irit Shimrat, 1997

[fuckyeahmadpride]

"Twice a week we had 'T.C.' - therapeutic community meetings.  These were ordeals - talking in front of a whole room of people about your problems and feelings.  Attendance was compulsory, and if you didn't speak up voluntarily, one of the doctors was sure to put you on the spot with a pointed questions.  The doctors talked a lot about how we were 'a community.'"

-from On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System by Judi Chamberlin, 1977

this is from Chapter 2, The Making and Unmaking of a Mental Patient