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Mad Pride
The Mad Pride Anthology is a revolutionary series of 18 autobiographical stories about people's experiences of mental distress. The book hopes to be an inspiration to mental health activists in the United Kingdom.
224 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 11, 2024
A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FROM (ENGLISH) PARTICIPANTS IN THE MOVEMENT
This 2000 book contains the writings of 24 authors, writing such essays as "The Need for a Mental Patients' Union," "A Story of Prejudice," "Turning the Asylum Into a Playground," "An Uphill Struggle, But It's Been Worth It," "Towards a Critical Madness," "Psychosis as a Revolutionary Weapon," "True Stories from the Archives of Survival," etc.
The Introduction states, "Mad Pride is set to become the first great civil liberties movement of the new millennium. Over the last century, great strides forward were made by those asserting their rights and self-determination in the fields of race, gender and sexuality, but 'mental health' issues failed to keep pace. This is set to change... This collection documents some of these wilder fringes of the user movement.
"The writings which follow are written from perspectives concerned with reclaiming the experience of madness and the language surrounding it. Mad Pride itself is a group which promotes raves and rock concerts as a means of spreading the word, and while it does not wish to take part in the endless debates around terminology which have already wasted so much of the user movement's time, it asserts that language can be subverted and that words derive their meanings from the contexts in which they are used. Neither Mad Pride nor this book claim to reflect a full-developed political philosophy, but each addresses some of the issues that will arise as we sharpen our visions...
This book... celebrates madness largely from the perspectives of users who refuse to be ground down. It asserts the rights of 'mad' people without pleading for them, in the belief that we should not push meekly for minor concessions, but instead change the world into a fit place for us to live in. What follows, then, is writing boasting about the wild things the authors have done while they've been losing it..." (Pg. 7-8)
Just to give a brief "taste" of the riches found within this volume, Esther Leslie's essay "Mad Pride and Prejudice" ends with this observation: "The question remains: what traces can be found of all this in contemporary psychiatric methods and theories of remedial treatment: occupational therapy, drugs, lobotomies, ECT, 'talking cures,' 'care in the community,' sections? One thing is certain, madness has a history. Its history inflects in tandem with the needs of the powerful. Madness is the rulebook's cracked mirror.
"Sometimes madness has an affinity with freedom, with rejection of the norms of society, its constrictions and codes of conduct. Freedom was the Great Idea of a revolutionary bourgeois class. The philosophers and the literati and the politicians exalted freedom, in the name of shattering aristocratic rule. But as they rolled back their own revolution, liberty remained only an empty phrase, partial and tangled in contradiction. Instead of universal freedom, universal conformity became the rule. the mad must still insist on that freedom, and find ways of grabbing it." (Pg. 81-82)
This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the Mad Pride movement, the psychiatric survivors' movement, and anti-psychiatry movement, and other advocates of "mind freedom."
This 2000 book contains the writings of 24 authors, writing such essays as "The Need for a Mental Patients' Union," "A Story of Prejudice," "Turning the Asylum Into a Playground," "An Uphill Struggle, But It's Been Worth It," "Towards a Critical Madness," "Psychosis as a Revolutionary Weapon," "True Stories from the Archives of Survival," etc.
The Introduction states, "Mad Pride is set to become the first great civil liberties movement of the new millennium. Over the last century, great strides forward were made by those asserting their rights and self-determination in the fields of race, gender and sexuality, but 'mental health' issues failed to keep pace. This is set to change... This collection documents some of these wilder fringes of the user movement.
"The writings which follow are written from perspectives concerned with reclaiming the experience of madness and the language surrounding it. Mad Pride itself is a group which promotes raves and rock concerts as a means of spreading the word, and while it does not wish to take part in the endless debates around terminology which have already wasted so much of the user movement's time, it asserts that language can be subverted and that words derive their meanings from the contexts in which they are used. Neither Mad Pride nor this book claim to reflect a full-developed political philosophy, but each addresses some of the issues that will arise as we sharpen our visions...
This book... celebrates madness largely from the perspectives of users who refuse to be ground down. It asserts the rights of 'mad' people without pleading for them, in the belief that we should not push meekly for minor concessions, but instead change the world into a fit place for us to live in. What follows, then, is writing boasting about the wild things the authors have done while they've been losing it..." (Pg. 7-8)
Just to give a brief "taste" of the riches found within this volume, Esther Leslie's essay "Mad Pride and Prejudice" ends with this observation: "The question remains: what traces can be found of all this in contemporary psychiatric methods and theories of remedial treatment: occupational therapy, drugs, lobotomies, ECT, 'talking cures,' 'care in the community,' sections? One thing is certain, madness has a history. Its history inflects in tandem with the needs of the powerful. Madness is the rulebook's cracked mirror.
"Sometimes madness has an affinity with freedom, with rejection of the norms of society, its constrictions and codes of conduct. Freedom was the Great Idea of a revolutionary bourgeois class. The philosophers and the literati and the politicians exalted freedom, in the name of shattering aristocratic rule. But as they rolled back their own revolution, liberty remained only an empty phrase, partial and tangled in contradiction. Instead of universal freedom, universal conformity became the rule. the mad must still insist on that freedom, and find ways of grabbing it." (Pg. 81-82)
This book will be of great value to anyone interested in the Mad Pride movement, the psychiatric survivors' movement, and anti-psychiatry movement, and other advocates of "mind freedom."
October 14, 2023
a great collection of stories by mad people. no punches pulled as its unexpurgated. As a UK collection, it includes cultural references to the NHS and the UK mental health system.
July 31, 2025
An interesting telling of individuals living with mental illness by those struggling.
March 16, 2008
This book is essentially a collection of informal essays and personal pieces that come out of the tradition of zine making. Because of the number of authors and variety of pieces the flow is definitely disjointed. Read this book for the first-hand insight it offers into mental illness and the continued mistreatment of the ill by the mental health industry that is specific to Britain in this collection, but which exists world wide.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews