The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies

By drawing broadly on international thinking and experience, this book offers a critical exploration of Mad Studies and advances its theory and practice.
Comprised of 34 chapters written by international leading experts, activists and academics, this handbook introduces and advances Mad Studies, as well as exploring resistance and criticism, and clarifying its history, ideas, what it is, and what it can offer. It presents examples of mad studies in action, covering initiatives that have been taken, their achievements and what can be learned from them. In addition to sharing research findings and evidence, the book offers examples and insights for advancing understandings of experiences of madness and distress from the perspectives of those who have (had) those experiences, and also explores ways of supporting people oppressed by conventional understandings and systems.
This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of Mad Studies, disability studies, sociology, socio- legal studies, mental health and medicine more generally.

Peter Beresford OBE is Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia, UK and Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, the national disabled people's and service users' organization and network. Jasna Russo is a long-term activist in the international psychiatric survivor movement. She is Visiting Professor at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, Germany where she lectures in Research Methods as well as in Critical Diversity and Community Studies. Together with Angela Sweeney, Jasna Russo is a co-editor of Searching for a Rose Garden. Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies (2016).

Introduction Part 1: Mad Studies and political organising of people with psychiatric experience 1. The international foundations of Mad Studies: Knowledge generated in collective action 2. Reflections on power, knowledge and change 3. Shifting identities as reflective personal responses to political changes 4. A crazy, warrior and "respondona" Peruvian: All personal transformation is social and political 5. Reflections on survivor knowledge and Mad Studies 6. Speaking for ourselves: An early UK survivor activist's account 7. Fostering community responsibility: Perspectives from the Pan African Network of people with psychosocial disabilities 8. Using survivor knowledge to influence public policy in the United States 9. The social movement of people with psychosocial disabilities in Japan: Strategies for taking the struggle to academia 10. Re-writing the master narrative: A prerequisite for mad liberation Part 2: Situating Mad Studies 11. A genealogy of the concept of "Mad Studies" 12. How is Mad Studies different from anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry? 13. Mad Studies and disability studies 14. Weaponizing absent knowledges: Countering the violence of mental health law Part 3: Mad Studies and knowledge equality 15. The subjects of oblivion: Subalterity, sanism, and racial erasure 16. Institutional ceremonies? The (im)possibilities of transformative co-production in mental health 17. "Are you experienced?" The use of experiential knowledge in mental health and its contribution to Mad Studies 18. De-pathologising motherhood 19. The professional regulation of madness in nursing and social work 20. The (global) rise of anti-stigma campaigns Part 4: Doing Mad Studies 21. Why we must talk about de-medicalization 22. Imagining non-carceral futures with(in) Mad Studies 23. Madness in the time of war: Post-war reflections on practice and research beyond the borders of psychiatry and development 24. The architecture of my madness 25. Re-conceptualising suicidality: Towards collective intersubjective responses 26. De-coupling and re-coupling violence and madness 27. Upcycling recovery: Potential alliances of recovery, inequality and Mad Studies 28. Bodies, boundaries, b/orders: A recent critical history of differentialism and structural adjustment 29. Spirituality, psychiatry, and Mad Studies. Part 5: Inquiring into the future for Mad Studies 30. Taking Mad Studies back out into the community 31. Interrogating Mad Studies in the academy: Bridging the community/academy divide 32. Madness, decolonisation and mental health activism in Africa 33. Navigating voices, politics, positions amidst peers: Resonances and dissonances in India 34. 'Madness' as a term of division, or rejection 35. Afterword: The ethics of making knowledge together 36. Postscript: Mad Studies in a maddening world