Alisha Ali et al., "Mad Studies Reader: Interdisciplinary Innovations in Mental Health" (Routledge, 2024)
55:23 Share

With the Venmo debit card, you can turn the spa day that your friends paid you back for into concert tickets that you can earn up to 5% cash back on. Where a spa day with the girls becomes concert tickets. Visit venmo.me slash debit to learn more. The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Terms apply. Dosh cash back terms apply.

I can say to my new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, hey, find a keto-friendly restaurant nearby and text it to Beth and Steve. And it does without me lifting a finger. So I can get in more squats anywhere I can. One, two, three. Will that be cash or credit? Credit. Galaxy S25 Ultra, the AI companion that does the heavy lifting so you can do you. Get yours at Samsung.com. Compatible with select apps requires Google Gemini account results may vary based on input check responses for accuracy.

This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again. You fix the problem. So why wait to hire the people your company desperately needs? Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Clayton Gerard. My pronouns are he, him. And today I'm here with Bradley Lewis, Alicia Ali, and Jasmine Russell, editors of the new Mad Studies Reader, Interdisciplinary Interventions in Mental Health.

With particular focus on accounts of lived experience and readings that cover issues of epistemic and social injustice and mental health discourse, the Mad Studies reader brings together voices that advance anti-Sanist approaches to scholarship, practice, art, and activism in this realm.

Beyond offering a theoretical and historical overview of mad studies, this mad studies reader draws on the perspective, voices, and experiences of artists, mad pride activists, humanities and social science scholars, and critical clinicians to explore the complexity of mental life and mental difference.

confronting modes of psychological oppression and the power of a few to interpret and define difference for so many. The MAD Studies reader asked the critical question of how these approaches may be reconsidered, resisted, and reclaimed. So thank you all so much for being here with me today. Before we dive into the conversation about the collection, I wanted to pass it to each of y'all if y'all would be willing to just introduce yourself for the listeners.

I can start. I'm Bradley Lewis. Brad Lewis. I teach interdisciplinary arts and humanities at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

And I've been interested in the interface of sort of cultural diversity, politics, arts, spirituality, how those can affect things that we think of as bodily or medical or psychiatric or mental health. Now, to sort of get outside the usual boxes and think about it in some more complexity, I'm also a practitioner. I'm trained in psychiatry before doing arts and humanities and

So I do a little bit of practice as well. Hi, I'm Alicia Alley. I'm so happy to be here. I'm an associate professor in Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. A lot of my research really focuses on that interface between the experience of trauma and the experience of being labeled with a mental health problem like depression or PTSD and what it means to a person to carry that label with them over their life course.

A lot of my work is on trauma in military veterans. And in particular, I'm interested in the ways that we can use arts and humanities as a way of treating mental health problems like the effects of trauma. And I'm Jasmine Russell. I'm the co-founder of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, which is a transformative mental health training institute. We bring together people with lived experience and those with professional training to

I've also worked previously in the mental health system as a crisis counselor and later as a peer specialist, specializing with working with those who experience what gets labeled as psychosis. I am also the host of the DepthWork podcast, where I get to talk to really cool, amazing leaders and people in the field. And I'm also an interdisciplinary scholar of med studies, critical psychology, and neuroscience. I'm

I'm currently at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and looking at the mind-body connection in psychology and psychiatry. Awesome. Thank you all for those introductions. It's so fascinating to hear about the different vantage points and perspectives that you bring to this work and this conversation. So I'm really excited to be discussing this new book that y'all edited, Autopsy.

also just because it's an amazing book and has such interesting and important essays and contributions. So I'm really excited, like I said, about diving in. But just to start off, would you mind talking a little bit about how this book came about for y'all and how y'all came to be editors and what that process was like?

You know, it's funny is that when you think back, you realize an edited collection always takes way longer than you expect it to take. And so it's sort of casting our minds back now. I mean, for me, I kind of realized that I had reached the point in my career that the work I do is as important as who I do the work with.

And so for me, first and foremost is, you know, collaborative projects are all about who are the collaborators. And I really couldn't have asked for two better collaborators just in terms of ideas, but just from like that basic human perspective, like what does it feel like to work with the people you're working with? And so this has been just a wonderful experience for me.

The other thing that I was thinking back on, Brad, you would remember this is Brad and I have been colleagues for years here at NYU, and we had variously guest lectured in each other's courses and saw a lot of overlap in terms of what we were doing in the classroom. And so Brad was teaching a

course related to topics of mad pride. I was teaching a course related to women's mental health issues and just looking at the intersections where, you know, the mad pride movement sort of gave birth to this idea of mad studies as an academic discipline in a similar way to how

women's studies grew out of the women's movement and the feminist movement. And so kind of being intrigued about what that process can and should look like and the obstacles in sort of creating an academic discipline because mad studies had existed before we even had the idea of doing this book.

And so for me, it was really interesting to put these ideas together. And then, you know, in terms of thinking about who another collaborator would be, you know, Brad had the idea of the book. And then as soon as we talked about it, we both thought of Jasmine because she not only brings a unique lens, but also really.

Her work as a practitioner, I think, cuts across so many boundaries, so many divides that a lot of us are trying to break down. So in my mind, that was sort of the genesis of all of this. Yeah, I could just add to just like Alicia's saying, a real buzz, you know, sort of in the last few years is

around sort of breaking out of mental health as usual. Disability studies has, you know, I've been working in disability studies for a long time, and it's exciting to see, you know, at first they call cognitive, psychic, mental, you know, neurodiversity, disability, sort of entering into that world more and more solidly. And the activist community, you

being really sort of energized by some of the real problems with the pharmaceutical industry and so many people, myself included,

you know, my students have lived experience and we've had trouble with the mental health system as usual. And, you know, that became a source of conversation. We even started, you know, sort of mutual aid groups on campus and things. So it was just like, I mean, the time is right to break out and you could just feel it in the, because I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time, but not the energy and the sort of buzz and the excitement that's been happening in the last few years.

Yeah. What I also love about the reader is that I think it's a very, very quick and easy way to get exposed to a lot of different perspectives and people from different roles.

You know, I've split my time between clinical roles, academic roles and activism. And in all of those spaces, I've repeatedly heard people, you know, looking around and saying, like, who else is thinking about this and talking about this? And it turns out there's a whole long lineage of folks who have been. And so, yeah, the idea for the reader, I think, really came out of wanting to bring so many of these perspectives together. And I was really honored to hop on board.

Yeah, there's so many people concerned about this, but they often get sort of cut off from each other and isolated. And so like, you know, the reader is like, hey, do you know these people over there? And you people, let's sort of get to know each other across different locations, whether it's activists, artists, scholars, even critical clinicians. Yeah, I think a lot of it, I get into this mood sometimes where I'll say it's all deliberate, like it's sort of divide and conquer, because

to build a powerful movement, we all have to listen to each other and we all have to learn about each other's work. And so, you know, bringing people together, it shouldn't be as rare as it is, but this book has been sort of one of my rare experiences where I found that that happened in a really substantive way. Yeah, that's awesome. I really appreciate how y'all are speaking to like the divisions between the people that are working on this stuff and the lineages, but how the reader kind of

brings these different groups and perspectives together. I certainly experienced these divisions, as you've talked about. Originally in college, I was like, oh, I want to study psychology and psychiatry, but it didn't feel right with the cognitive aspects. And then my own

lived experience. And then I got into disability studies. And then through disability studies, I found mad studies. And then even in this reader, I've been exposed to so many different perspectives of people making interventions into this whole arena. So it's so awesome to hear all

all of you talk about, like the different ways in which you came to this kind of work, and then also the different works that are highlighted in this reader. But to actually dive into some of the substance, I wanted to quote a little bit of your introduction. You make the statement, well,

Mad studies does not rest on the binaries of pro-psychiatry versus anti-psychiatry, nor on the related binaries of truth versus myth, right versus wrong, or good versus bad. Instead, mad studies rests on questions of democracy and interpretive choice. Can y'all discuss how such binaries have impacted the experiences of people that have been labeled mad, mentally ill, and so on and so forth?

And why are questions of democracy and interpretive choice important focal points for MAD studies? Great question. Well, I mean, I think a little history is helpful. You know, the protest against sort of the sort of problematic aspects of the mental health system, which often involve violence.

control of difference and some forms of oppression of difference, often across other forms of difference, gender, race, sexuality.

Sexuality. I mean, those have a long history and they really hit the ground in the 60s and 70s. And some of the early sort of thinkers used the term anti-psychiatry. And so that means that there was pro-psychiatry and there was anti-psychiatry, Thomas Saw's.

It was really big and really powerful rhetoric and hit a lot of... Had a big tent of people concerned. One flew over the cuckoo's nest. It was 75, I think, and, you know, won, like, several Academy Awards and was, yeah, yeah, right? And... But the trouble there is it sort of does create this polemic, this binary, this right, wrong, truth, myth, good, bad, you know, and that...

hold up with the sort of complexity of thought, you know, more broadly that, you know, we divide the world up to try to make sense of it. But the binaries also cause a lot of sort of constraint and make it trap us in ways of seeing things. And so mad studies is really interesting

It's not sort of focused on sort of who's right, but what are the questions? What's the conversation? What are the differences of opinion? How can we talk with each other about this? How can we open up?

some negative capacity, not to glom onto certainty, but to create a space where a lot of people can talk about the complexity and then people can start to find different ways of inhabiting that complexity that work for them, their friends, their community.

You know, I think when we contemplate this idea of the importance that binaries serve, like that heuristic function, it helps us to think about the world in a simple enough way that it feels comfortable. And so being able to feel uncomfortable about these different dichotomies that we reside in is so important.

It's challenging, but it's very helpful. You know, as academics, we rely on labels and then we use labels and then we have, we use the power of the label to kind of define whose ideas matter and whose ideas can be dismissed.

And so this is so important for us and sort of why we even did this book is to let's make it all messy. Let's say, you know, this is privileged in some context and this other thing is privileged in another. And so it allowed us to include

Right.

And what that means is that if you're in the global south, you even see your own experience of normal, abnormal through the lands of the colonizer, which means that your experience, you can't even define your experience in your own way. And so it really has been such an exciting endeavor for me to think about all these complexities, as Brad said, and just like the work of

of walking our way through it and trying to find, you know, what is it that matters if we're going to move forward with this as a movement? Yeah, I also think that the focus on choice between different narratives and explanatory styles is really crucial because anytime we want to perhaps draw really rigid lines in the sand, we're always wrong about someone's experience, right?

And so I think people tend to find now that both ends of any spectrum, but especially, you know, pro-psychiatry, anti-psychiatry spectrum can be incredibly alienating. Both sides can be very dogmatic and quite rigid. And so I think it's also good to have some critical awareness around, you know, your own critique or your own, you know, narratives and frameworks that you're drawing on.

And when you've been exposed to a lot of different stories of people kind of, you know, across the spectrum, you really start to honor that mental health is a really, really like mental health, mental differences is super complex. And when we talk about consent and what it means to kind of consent to mental health treatment, you can't consent to something if you aren't aware that there are other options. Right. So I think the Mad Studies reader really tries to illuminate a broad spectrum of options.

Yeah. And it shifts the question. I mean, I think, you know, the mental health world is privileging science and science privileges truth and ontology questions and they have their place. Evidence-based has its place. But, um,

It also closes out a lot of people that aren't formally defined as experts. And that really is the people that are in the tops of mainstream academy, often funded in many ways by pharmaceutical industries. And so MAD Studies is really about shifting the question from who is right to who gets to participate.

who gets to decide, who gets to sit at the table, who gets to help create alternatives. And so that there you're privileging this diversity of including people who are key stakeholders in the process, all of which, you know, these huge textbooks don't include anybody with lived experience, right? That's

That's just wrong. You know, it's just wrong. You know, take any difference group. Would you want somebody outside the difference group to define what they need? No. And it's so complex. I mean, like, I have therapists. I fire therapists. I protest the APA. I talk in the APA. Like, we're, you know, like, I'm APA, American Psychiatrist.

Yeah.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Yeah, I really appreciate that. And just like the messiness and complexity that y'all are talking about. And that is definitely true with my experience, just trying to learn about these things, but also just like how important it is to think about like the knowledge structures and the way that it's constructed and kind of, Alicia, as you had mentioned, the like needed provincialization of a lot of these laborers.

lineages of knowledge making and research and everything else. It's so important. And I really do want to kind of follow along this thread of the different perspectives and disciplinary approaches that have created knowledge and labels and these kinds of things.

treatment plans and whatever else around the subject of mental difference and complexity and such. So thinking of the, even the subtitle of this book, which is interdisciplinary innovations and mental health, um,

In the introduction, y'all discussed the various disciplines and interpretive communities that approach these complexities of mental life and mental difference. Would y'all be willing to just detail a little bit more for listeners some of the typical approaches around these experiences and how MAD Studies is different or offers different pathways for approaching these topics?

Yeah.

We're going to see it through the lenses that we've been familiar with, right? And depending on our backgrounds, identities, disciplines, interpretive communities, we're going to focus on different aspects of it. You know, one community might focus on it as a pathology versus as a gift or focus on neuroanatomy as compared with structural oppression.

And it also makes me think of how generationally, you know, I'm a millennial. I grew up with seeing pharmaceutical ads on TV, you know, and seeing the rise of like using terms like my serotonin is low or, you know, using like neurobiological terms.

which, you know, is neither here nor there. It's just to say that we, you know, if you see a mental difference or a mental health concern as a problem of the mind, maybe you'll go see a psychologist. But if you see mental difference as a problem with the brain, you're going to see a psychiatrist versus a problem of living. Or if you see it as an expressive gift, you might resonate with more artistic communities. And

I think that we're in this landscape where, as Brad alluded to, we really want to get rid of the ambiguity. We want to land on a particular way of seeing things. We want to kind of reduce any type of uncertainty in this. And for us, you know, in the Mad Studies reader, it's really important to open up multiple ways of viewing. And even those who, you know, might lean on or

describe like pluralistic explanations or blending of approaches, there's still often this trend towards reductionist tendencies. And I think MADS studies is different in that it situates these perspectives across a whole kaleidoscope of choices, none being hierarchical or better than the other. And I

think, again, most importantly, mad studies really begins with lived experience and values lived experience as highly as any other way of knowing. Just to chime in there with what Jasmine's saying, even the word mad, I think it's important to think a little bit about because one of the problems in this domain is just using language because anytime you start to use language, you start to shape and structure things. So mental illness is

already out of the blocks is mental health, mental illness puts us in a sort of normal pathological frame. And some people live that and lots of people don't, right? And so the word mad, what's fascinating about that is, and it takes a little getting used to, and it's a little bit like crip or queer, where you take something that has been low and make it high, you flip around and

you know, what's been denigrated to make it celebrated, right? We need our sensitive ones, you know. We need people that aren't happy with how the normal's going. You know, we need our people yearning for a world beyond the status quo. We're in war. We're in environmental destruction. We're in huge inequality. Lots of us are beaten down and burned out. We need people's...

And some of those people channel that sensitivity into art, into spirituality, into political change. And so madness flips and sees how you can see what's good about sensitivity, not go take your medications, go see your shrink, but like, yeah, we need sensitive people, right? We need our politicians who are sensitive when you're artists or something, our spiritual seekers.

We need our people who are yearning. So it flips it, but it also undoes the binary. It troubles the binary. So you're in a word that's ambiguous. It flips the usual priorities. It undoes the binary. So it's a word. Once you get used to it, it's fun. But at first, it's like, well, what?

It's a lot easier to start with. And I think it also speaks again to that discomfort that we have with just being okay with feeling unhappy or understanding that it's just part of normal living to feel unhappy.

angry to feel unhappy and not to medicate it away. In psychology, there's a theory of emotions that we call the communicative theory of emotions, which is that emotions are there to alert us to and communicate to things. So something like anger serves a purpose of alerting us to something that needs to be addressed and needs to be changed. And so if we medicate away people's anger, then that impetus to fight for justice and change

is sort of chemically neutralized. And when we do that, you know, it feels like everyone's just doing better and happy and get along along, but it leads to the sort of superficial existence that everyone is talking about now. It's like, well, how can we be authentic? How can we connect? It's like, well, all these barriers that serve so many sort of practical functions really get in the way of justice if people aren't allowed to just, you know, feel those feelings. Yeah.

We start with art, we lean into art, and one of the things about art is it takes us to a world where things are complex, so often anyway. And, you know, Jax McNamara, who did our cover, you can't see, it was amazing. But Jax talks a lot about lilies and urine approach to art. The world's complex, our lives are complex, there's lilies, there's urine, and

Sometimes we want to take medications. Sometimes we want to protest the pharmaceutical industry. We have to sort of really open up this complexity. And even within our own personal experiences, my chapter in the Med Studies Reader really focuses on this element of utilizing and embracing multiple frameworks, even at the same time, even in the same experience. We might want to...

automatically like pit one against the other, but we don't have to, you know, we don't have to choose between them. They can coexist together and we can be constantly fluidly leaving out of different frameworks and perspectives. And I think that can make our lives a lot richer and certainly our understanding of mental health a lot richer.

Yeah, I really appreciate that and how much y'all have talked about just like the framing and reframing how sometimes there's violence and framing in itself just in what can't be contained, but also the different opportunities and like advancements that can be made with different framings just because of, um,

how they can open up different pathways. One of the things that I've really appreciated about mad studies is the conversation around sanism, which I hadn't really been

been aware of much before entering into different conversations in mad studies, but it's a very important consideration in the book and there's different chapters and essays on it. Could you talk a little bit about just what sanism is and how...

it is challenged by some of the interventions in the book and why it's important to name something like Satanism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great question. You know, I think Satanism, it's an argument can be made that it's at the, it's at the linchpin of mad studies, right? Because, um,

If Mad Studies is against anything, it's against prejudice, it's against discrimination, it's against subordination. So it's anti-sanism. That's its anti. And sanism is, again, carrying forward selfishness.

Some of the sort of concerns that have already been expressed, everybody knows about this idea of stigma and that there's a problem in the mental health world that mental illnesses, quote unquote, are stigmatized. But there's several problems with that. One is that's gotten normalized into this idea that mental illnesses are an illness like other illnesses and diabetes comes up.

But again, we're way out the blocks of determining that it's an illness. We're talking about a difference. We're talking about diversity. We're talking about complexity. We're talking about something to change the world. We're talking about something that we want to put the covers over your head. So stigma doesn't work from that point of view. Stigma also doesn't work because it tends to be too individualizing. It makes it seem like people have individual cognitive distortions as opposed to

systematic, structural oppression, denigration, exclusion, inequality. And the other thing is that it quadrants off the prejudice and subordination in this domain,

relative to what's going on in gender and race and sexuality. And so we have feminism and we have anti-racist movements and we have, you know, sort of all kinds of sexuality movements. And we need to under, and disability ableism has done a lot of work there to sort of see this discrimination as part and parcel of,

of this combination of other discriminations going, not something that's somehow off to the side and different and not relevant.

Yeah, I think it can also help us to see the commonalities across movements because so often different movements are pitted against each other, you know, especially when it comes to actually like doing the work of change because the resources are always so limited. And so different communities are pitted against each other in terms of like the doling out of the small amount of resources that are there. And I think, you know, a lot of times like Brad is talking about

The fact that in psychology, we talk about cognitive distortions and you're thinking about things wrong. And in the feminist movement, a critique of that idea has really been important around things like violence against women, because for so long, you know, I was trained in violence.

in Canada, University of Toronto in the 1980s, where there's on the one hand, there's like this burgeoning, what at the time we were calling the psychiatric survivors movement, people like Bonnie Burstow, who's, you know, an activist, but also a scholar and had like a foot in the world of the sort of mad pride movement, but then also in the feminist movement. And so this cross-fertilization of ideas, which I think Mad Studies has helped to really grow in

is useful because it allows us to think about people's actual lives. So if we read a textbook, as you were saying, Clayton, like this whole cognitive idea didn't sit well with you because as a human being, you felt that there was something missing. And also maybe even a misrepresentation of reality when we, when we reduce people down to just like, you know, like irrational thoughts or, you know, cognitive distortions. And so, you know,

in the feminist movement within psychology, that's one of the areas that we've been able to understand in a deeper way when we listen to clients themselves who say, I was depressed, I was miserable. And someone said, go see a therapist.

And that therapist helps you to understand that you're thinking about things wrong. And so you talk about how your cognitions might be irrational or inaccurate in the space of therapy, but then that woman is sent back out into the world that caused the problems that brought her there. So she's in an abusive relationship and we say, well, we know because we're the experts that you're actually feeling bad because you think about things.

things wrong. The message is, you know, you're wrong, not the world is wrong or not abuse and violence are wrong. And so

I feel like when we are able to have these cross-fertilizing conversations, all of the different sub-disciplines and all the different movements can benefit. Yeah, plus one to what both of you said. I think also distinguishing sanism as a specific experience, as connected to, but naming it even within ableism, I think is so crucial. It can also help us understand how, you know, like...

how people are treated in the mental health system as well, how the mental health system, especially public mental health systems, can really, you know, harm the people that they're attempting to serve. And I think sanism can be also like language, ways that we can use to describe that kind of oppression within and outside of the system.

It doesn't have to be sanus, just like it doesn't have to be the medical system, but it's slippery territory because to pathologize can get very slight slippery into denigration. And the people that need to know about us the least, I suppose, and need to know about us the most,

I think it also allows us to sort of reflect critically on, as you were alluding to, Brad, the value that people see in psychiatric labels in terms of understanding the value of the mental health system.

understanding their own experience that so many people walk around the world feeling unhappy and miserable. They go see a clinician. The clinician says like, here's this big book called the DSM that lists out what you're experiencing. And you could say to yourself, well, if something's there in this book and it's a bonafide label, I'm not the only one experiencing it because enough people have to be living with it for it to be called something and included in

in this big manual. And so there's some people find solace in that and find solace in that reductionistic idea that the problem resides in your brain because that makes it a real illness as opposed to people saying like, oh, you're just, you're just imagining this, you're making it up. And so, you know, that right there is also what I find to be really fascinating, slippery slopes. Like certainly the work that I do with military veterans, they're,

they feel that there's a lot of them talk about this really useful shorthand. If people are wondering, why are you acting like this? Why are you being like this? Instead of taking 20 minutes to say, well, here's a bad thing that happened to me when I was young. I enlisted in the military and other bad things happened. Then since coming back, a whole bunch of bad stuff has happened. And that's why I just jumped and reacted that way in that moment when most people wouldn't. All they need to say is,

sorry, it's my PTSD. And people sort of nod and say, okay, I get it. So they see the benefits of that shorthand where it's like, oh, it's my PTSD. But then at the same time, I think a lot of them talk about realizing, I am not my PTSD. I just rely on using that label that people say, okay, okay, okay, I get it. And so again, there's always numerous sides to all the usages of these labels. And just one quick...

And choice needs more big books, like there's the big book of diagnoses, but there needs to be big books of sort of political inspiration, the big book of spiritual sort of muses, the big books of, you know, gender oppression. We need a lot of different books to help us think about this. And so...

Right now, it's really building alternatives. They can't just exist in theory. They have to exist in real space for people to have actual choices.

Since you're new to H&R Block, we'll look at your returns from the last three years for any money your last guy might have missed for free. I could get money back from last year? You could. We'll find any mistakes. Could have really used that two years ago when I dated that mistake for five months. Don't leave money on the table. Switch to H&R Block and get a free second look review. Second look is included at no additional cost with the purchase of tax preparation. Results vary. All tax situations are different. Fees apply if you have us file an amended return.

Hi, this is Javon, your Blinds.com design consultant. Oh, wow. A real person. Yep. I'm here to help with everything from selecting the perfect window treatments to... Well, I've got a complicated project. No problem. I can even help schedule a professional measure and install. We can also send you samples fast and free. Hmm, I just might have to do more. Whatever you need. So the first room we're looking at is for... Shop Blinds.com now and save up to 40% site-wide. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Okay.

Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. I really appreciate the different details.

details and complexities y'all brought to the concept of sanism and just like how important it is to consider when we're talking about mental health, mental illness, you know, treatments, different, um, art expressions or spiritual expressions, those different things. I'd love to also though, zoom a little bit out and talk about the project as a whole again. Um, it's such an amazing book, as I've mentioned with so many different perspectives and, um,

The interdisciplinarity is very fascinating, the different topics, some are very theoretical, some are very like artistic, some are very activist driven. Could you talk a little bit about how you brought the contributors into this project and what that process was like to collaborate with so many people to bring this collection into being? Yeah.

Oh my gosh, yes. I mean, this book is, I think, over 600 pages, 45 chapters, and many more authors than that because many were written collaboratively. And it's a big book. And it was amazing. I mean, it was so amazing to work with so many people, quite a project to get that many people together and to organize ourselves. But I

I think in the beginning, we really asked ourselves which perspectives, which topics, which themes tend to get less airtime or really haven't gotten their moment in the spotlight. We wanted, we knew we wanted a whole wide breadth of story, narrative, art, research, practice. And also that we wanted global perspectives, speaking to the theme of cross-movement organizing and

And it's tough because we can't, I mean, it's 600 pages, but we can't fit everything into the book. We certainly haven't. There's so much more beyond the reader itself. But I just, I really love all of the contributions that our contributors gave. They also gave recommendations for other folks.

that we've reached out to. So it was a really quite collaborative process. And we also wanted people to feel free to write on the themes and the topics that they were most passionate about. And so people brought in some really amazing, really interesting stuff. And yeah, in the end, it's become quite a collection.

The other exciting thing is how, you know, a book like this almost takes on a life of its own and there's sort of a ripple effect. So there's contributors who didn't know about each other and then they see connections in their work with other people. And then it feeds just like this sort of growing community. And it's been a really beautiful thing to see because I do feel like so many people work in isolation and feel like, you know,

am I the only one who thinks this way? Am I the only one who's frustrated in this way? And so by having contributors recognize, do you think about this thing in the same way that I do? And yet I'm coming from it from this perspective. You're coming at it from another perspective. I think that's part of the whole purpose of doing this book, really. Yeah. Just to tag that. Cause I mean, in disabilities, you know, done really good work to say some of the key problems that,

With the normal approach is you take our differences, you individualize it, you pathologize it, and you medicalize it, right? And so it makes you quadrant it up. And I think they're really compelling when they say as much trouble as pathologizing and medicalizing can cause, it's the individualizing that's the worst. We feel like we're the only ones that...

We're having some issue with life, you know, and fitting in and functioning. And like, that's just so it's so it's so divides us and isolates us and blame ourselves. So the individualizing really has to has to sort of be center of what one of the problems with the norm is.

Yeah, thank you for speaking to that. And I'd also love to talk a little bit about how you've organized the project. So as we've mentioned, this is a very like mammoth book. How did you break these out into sections? How did you decide what features you wanted to really focus on and emphasize? I really appreciated how, Alicia, you mentioned like the community aspect of even just looking in the contents of the book. I was like,

seeing names that I recognize, but also names that I haven't seen before. And I'm like, oh, this is a whole new world of writing that I can dive into. So I'd love to just hear a little bit about how you structured this book to speak to different fields and perspectives, but also to highlight certain core things that you wanted to really make sure had a resonance in the book.

Yeah, I think one thing that, you know, on the one hand, it happened organically just by virtue of having those intersecting themes that you were just talking about. And then also very deliberately, you know, it's important for us to remember this is, you know, this is a book from a scholarly press. It's from an academic press. And that's a really big deal because it sort of gives that, you know, feel as we will about it gives that stamp of legitimacy saying, hey, this is a real thing. Yeah.

It's not something that is sort of over here in the corner and not given that sort of limelight of saying, in the academic realm, this is a bona fide area. This is bona fide discipline. And so we were...

given that very deliberate in terms of how we structure even the format of the different sections. So we have kind of equal sections for artists and activists, clinicians and scholars. And so very often in an academic book, it'll be either, you know, justice scholars or like scholars and like clinicians and then maybe sort of, you know, like a nod to artists, if that, a mention of activists,

in that, if that. And so I feel like structuring it the way that we did kind of sends the message that all of these four subgroups are on equal footing and should be. And I think

think it also represents just how integral each of these groups is to the movements, but also just to the academic discipline of med studies. So we were deliberate in trying to send that message. And then as we were populating all four of these different groups, it was exactly what you were saying, Clayton, like, wow, there's a lot more overlap conceptually and just in terms of

and the approach that people use than one would expect between, you know, clinicians, scholars, artists, activists. And I think it's...

It's because it is an area where we are invited to connect with how we feel about these ideas as opposed to separating off the ideas from the emotions behind it. And so to me, that was one of the most exciting things about being involved in the work of this book.

Yeah, I mean, how many academic books? I think there's been a little bit more of a push to bring in maybe some lived experience, maybe some activist perspectives. But especially, I think I was most also excited about the fact of bringing artists in too, which, you know, props to Brad. I think you're really a big proponent of that. And bringing in the art, like it just, it gives you a whole different perspective

like mode of being with the work. And so to have all of these perspectives side by side, it, it just like really contributes to the value and the way that people are internalizing these ideas. Yeah. And I love what both of you were saying. And like the,

The art frees our mind, allows us to think outside the usual boxes. And the academic part, you know, legitimize it.

And none of it would have been possible without the activists. And all of us have been schooled in activism. I got started in this because of the protest outside and the people outside complaining made a lot more sense than the people inside to me. I got involved with Mind Freedom, later the Icarus Project, Jasmine's Ida, you know, like all of these sort of, you know, movements to change the world added the energy to

That sort of fuel, both the scholars, the critical clinicians, there's a few and we found some. There's that we need more. And the artists who are already thinking outside the usual lilies and urines of life.

Yeah, I love that. And as this conversation is wrapping up, because we can only talk about the book for so long, otherwise we'd just be here for days. I did want to kind of provide an opportunity to reflect a little bit on the time in which this book is coming out. So I have

And now we're recording this in mid-March of 2025. And there's a lot going on, you know, in the U.S. where some of us are located, but also just across the globe. So I wanted to see if you would have any thoughts that you would like to share about what you hope readers will take away from this book, especially in such a fraught, you know, social and political moment.

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, right now there's a lot of pushback and backlash against diversity politics. And

In that way, it's an odd time to come out with, look, there's more diversity politics issues and they intersect with all these others and they're interactive with all these others. But it just feels like a blip. That's going to be a long conversation and struggle and back and forth. And so we're in a moment of that struggle and that conversation. And this is part of that conversation that needs to and will continue on.

And it's at the heart of a lot of the other diversity issues that we have. But it's also fascinating, too, that concern with over-medicalization, over-treatment, abuses of the health care system, that creates strange bedfellows, strange political bedfellows. And you can get lots of people left and right and center, mid-center, mid-center.

None of us all have the same point of view about it all, but all recognize that there's a problem with the way in which we turn this over to experts that have been good for themselves, but questionably good for everybody else. And we need to sort of kick those tires. And that's coming from both sides of the spectrum. Yeah, I agree. This idea is sort of like,

strange bedfellows because, you know, when you're working on a book, you start talking to people about, oh, I have this idea. We're going to put it in a book. And so when, you know, when you start, when, when you start talking about, you know,

demonizing the pharmaceutical industry and saying, look at all of these things that are happening. People's lives are destroyed through over-medicalization and over-medicating. And then a pandemic happens and people's lives are saved because the pharmaceutical industry is the hero, literally the hero. It's like,

what am I supposed to think and feel now? I don't know. And then talking about the fact that, you know, you know, in this moment saying like, we really want to understand like that the pharmaceutical industry is that it's a profit driven industry and let's, let's problematize what, what that means and look at it critically. Then people say, Oh, we get it. You're, you're anti-vaxxers. Okay. We get it. And so it's, we're wherever it,

direction you go in, there's always these complexities. And a good thing about doing this kind of work is it allows you to sort of situate yourself in those complexities and it forces you to think about, well, what are my values? What do I really believe? And how might that intersect or not intersect with the values of the communities that I work with? Because not everyone thinks about this work.

in the same way. And so that's another exciting thing about getting to work on this book is seeing that people who come from very, very different backgrounds and experiences, not only in terms of lived experience, but simply geographically, ideologically, all of those things, that there is common ground even amidst pretty glaring differences. Absolutely. Yeah.

I think it's a really interesting time where much more nuanced conversations are really needed while, you know, the mainstream media across all the whole political spectrum is really flattening conversations, especially about pharma, especially about mental health and health in general.

And what I really hope people take away from the reader is just also that, you know, the mad movement and surrounding movements are gaining traction and should be taken seriously and legitimized. People are mobilizing and there are people who have been doing this work for generations across decades. Like I said in the beginning, there's a long lineage and

And I hope that the reader really contributes not just to exposing people to these ideas, but also, again, like legitimizing them and helping to evolve more across movement organizing. Yeah, I mean, just one word there, too, like legitimizing these movements because –

a lot of us have trouble thinking critically about something that has the stamp of medical science on it. And,

And as medical science can be helpful in many ways, but as science studies has taught us for years, it's a human process. It's a cultural process. It's open to, you know, all the things that humans are open to in terms of political interests and political bias and blind spots and all those kinds of things. And so, yeah.

Yeah, we've got to get more people involved who are looking at it from more perspective. And that's already there. And this is, as Jasmine was saying, it's legitimizing this. We're adding to the legitimacy it already has. I suppose, you know, just chiming in there.

Yeah, I love that. Well, thank you all so much for joining me today to talk about this reader. And thank you also for all the work that it took to bring it about, because I know, especially with a book like this, it is no small undertaking. And then also, obviously, to all the contributors who made the book what it is. Thank you all so much and for being willing to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Lovely to talk to you.