Who is included in the Mad Studies Project?

Dolphin

Dolphin

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I’ll leave it to others to find if there is anything interesting in this.

From: Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks


Source: The Journal of Ethics in Mental Health
Preprint
Date: July 2018
URL: http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/23384/
http://www.jemh.ca


Who is included in the Mad Studies Project?
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Helen Spandler, Dina Poursanidou
- University of Central Lancashire


Abstract

Mad Studies is an emerging new critical project. As such, its purpose and future direction is open to debate. In any new project, questions emerge regarding its boundaries; who is inside and outside, included or excluded? This paper explores questions of who (and what) is (or should be) included in the Mad Studies project. For example, we explore the place of those who are not 'Mad positive' or anti-psychiatry; the extent you need to be Mad identified to do Mad Studies; and the potential inclusion of a number of related conditions, experiences and perspectives (such as neurological diversity; chronic fatigues syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis ME/CFS; and psychedelic drug use). Whilst we do not argue that Mad Studies is exclusionary, nor that it should be all-inclusive, we do think it could be more attuned to potential exclusions, especially because these are often based on unhelpful binary oppositions (physical/mental; social/medical; psychiatry/anti psychiatry etc). Therefore, we make the case that Mad Studies could more explicitly interrogate underlying assumptions, not only of psychiatry and the 'psy' professionals, but also of pre-existing 'critical' approaches to madness. If so, it could be a truly ground breaking project.
 
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I'd never heard of Mad studies, so I've been doing some internet exploring. So far I've come across this.
Here's a quote:
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.
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and another:
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.
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I guess the inclusion of ME/CFS might be because we are also fighting against oppression.
 
I worry that this is a case of more and more complicated words getting everyone confused. I think there may be some important and far from obvious things to say about ME and words like psychiatry and psychology but my suspicion is that even those words are too jargonised. It may be better to try to work out what is causing what somewhere in the brain - if it is.

What is a radically socially progressive foundation?

What is a 'medical model'?

And so on.
 
This looks potentially interesting, but I worry that our views will be taken out of context. Patients are not opposed to, or somehow outside of conventional biomedical models. Likewise, when patients say CFS is "not psychological" they are not invoking mind-body dualism, they are not suggesting that psychology is not important, they are saying the condition is not primarily initiated or primarily perpetuated through cognitive of behavioral mechanisms. It is that simple.
 
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