Mad matters: a critical reader in Canadian Mad Studies

For anyone with an interest in matters of madness or mental and emotional distress, this edited collection is a must-read, for it is fundamentally challenging of the systems, structures and traditions that surround ‘mental health’ in Canadian society today. Although many of the arguments presented are written from a Canadian context, the sustained and forceful critique of mainstream understandings of ‘mental health and illness’ that this book presents will have resonance across the western world. The book’s 23 chapters are written by a range of authors, all of whom have their own perspectives; together, these chapters present a rich and diverse venture into the critical terrain of Mad Studies. For readers unfamiliar with this emergent field, the book’s glossary offers a brief explanation of Mad Studies:

An umbrella term that is used to embrace the body of knowledge that has emerged from psychiatric survivors, Mad-identified people, antipsychiatry academics and activists, critical psychiatrists, and radical therapists. This body of knowledge is wide-ranging and includes scholarship that is critical of the mental health system as well as radical and mad activist scholarship. This field of study is informed by and generated by the perspectives of psychiatric survivors and Mad-identified researchers and academics. (337)

Many chapters are written by people with direct experience as recipients of mental health services (psychiatric survivors and Mad-identified people); others are written by academics and allies with personal or professional interest in this area.

Having survived psychiatry myself, I was keen to read this book and I was not disappointed. The different chapters captivated, tested, stretched and excited my imagination. For someone who has spent many years pondering upon what it means to be labelled ‘mad’, this book was a revelation. So much of what I read resonated with my own experiences as a recipient and survivor of psychiatry in the United Kingdom, and the process of reading and reflecting on each of the book’s chapters enabled me to make some sort of sense of my own experiences in a way that reading other books has not. Whilst I would argue that it was the cumulative effect of reading all of the chapters that facilitated this, several chapters particularly stood out. Shaindl Diamond’s ‘What Makes Us a Community? Reflections on Building Solidarity in Anti-sanist Praxis’ and Bonnie Burstow’s ‘A Rose by Any Other Name: Naming and the Battle against Psychiatry’ both have a clarity that helped me to think through survivor issues I have puzzled over for many years. For anyone unfamiliar with the politics of mental health and the movement of psychiatric survivors, these two chapters provide very helpful insight into survivor politics and language. I also found Maria Liegghio’s ‘A Denial of Being: Psychiatrization as Epistemic Violence’ particularly helpful because it conceptualises the communication of madness or distress as ‘a way of knowing’ and the denial of such ways of knowing, or more particularly of their knowers, as epistemic violence.

Erick Fabris’s chapter ‘Mad Success: What Could Go Wrong When Psychiatry Employs Us as “Peers”?’ tells the story of Ranji a patient in psychiatric hospital who seeks support from the Patients’ Council to reduce his medication. It is a shocking story for many reasons: the relations of power that play out within the story; the improvement in Ranji’s health as his medication is reduced; and his subsequent death in a fire. Irit Shimrat’s ‘The Tragic Farce of “Community Mental Health Care”’ is also shocking in its graphic exposure of the impact of mental health praxis on the lives of individuals, as documented through their care team records. David Reville’s ‘Is Mad Studies Emerging as a New Field of Inquiry?’ and Kathryn Church’s ‘Making Madness Matter in Academic Practice’ discuss the development of Mad Studies at Ryerson University. The authors illustrate the challenges that Mad Studies presents to the academy and ways in which these can be overcome. By documenting their experiences, Reville and Church tell an inspiring and hopeful story of Mad Studies that provides a road map for those of us who may wish to develop Mad Studies elsewhere.

Other chapters challenged and expanded my thinking: for example, Lilith ‘Chava’ Finkler’s survivor analysis of discriminatory planning decisions regarding minimum separation distances between group homes for psychiatric survivors and Rachel Gorman’s incisive discussion of Mad identity and its potential pitfalls. Both of these chapters enabled me to ‘change my mind’ about the mad matters they discuss.

As someone who has survived psychiatry, some readers of this review may feel that I am biased in my assessment of this book and indeed that the book itself is dismissive of the perspectives of mental health professionals. Those readers may wish to start with Chapter 15, ‘Removing Civil Rights: How Dare We?’ by psychiatrist Gordon Warme. Warme’s balanced and careful assessment of the practises of psychiatry spells out the complexities, arrogances and dangers of his profession. The clarity, brevity and weight of this chapter, juxtaposed with the range of other perspectives contained within the book, provides an important and incisive critique of psychiatry and its impacts.

I have spent many years thinking about matters of madness and distress and what it means to be diagnosed and labelled as mad. From the outset, I rejected medicalised understandings of my distress but my failure to accept psychiatry’s diagnoses and prognoses was attributed to ‘lack of insight’ on my part; a symptom of ‘my mental illness’. Had it been available at the time, this book would have fuelled and inspired that ‘lack of insight’! As it was, I struggled to grapple with hegemonic understandings of ‘mental health and illness’ which were so all-encompassing and all-consuming that it was difficult to get a grip on any kind of meaningful critique. This book, however, enables the reader to get a firm grip on multiple and multifaceted critiques and analyses that, chapter by chapter, identify and begin to dismantle the edifice which is psychiatry. There should, in my view, be a copy available in every psychiatric ward, community mental health service and survivor organisation in the English-speaking world; it should also be translated and distributed internationally.

Kathy Boxall
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
[email protected]
© 2014, Kathy Boxall
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.856676