The Mad Studies Reader is Out and Powerful!

Come taste from the fruits of mad knowledge...

About 12 years ago, I returned to college after having dropped out as a teenager. My friend Brad Lewis—a psychiatrist and philosopher—was mentoring me for college credit. I was immersed in critical theory, diving into the works of Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault. I still remember Brad comparing critical theory to LSD: “You only need a little, and you’re never the same.”

It was a good time in my life. I lived in the attic of punk house in South Berkeley. with 12 other people and made enough money as a landscaper to work part-time and study and write the other days. I was coming out of a period where I’d been hospitalized for a psychotic breakdown and ended up living and working in a yoga ashram for a year, an experience which left me wanting to go back to school and try to make sense of modern world history and Eastern and Western politics and spirituality.

Around that time Brad encouraged me to write an academic article about my experience working with the Icarus Project, which was super cathartic and healing because I had left the project to go crazy and had burnt some bridges along the way. I have such a complicated relationship with The Icarus Project. I feel like it saved my life, gave me purpose and direction, brought together many of the people I still call my good friends, and helped to birth other organizations that still exist. But as a mad person, sometimes I cant tell what was real and what was all in my head, like I made the whole thing up. There were years when there was almost no information about The Icarus Project on the web, which exacerbated this strange feeling of lonely delusion.

Thankfully books like the Mad Studies Reader come out, heavy and official, filled with so many different people’s narratives and visions, and it helps remind me that I’m not alone, that I’m part of a larger movement that does very much exist, and is continuing to grow and evolve. The editors decided to organize the book into four sections: innovative artists, critical scholars, concerned clinicians, and daring activists. It’s a creative way of framing an anthology. In an early chapter of the book they use a bunch of Icarus Project art and my journal article ends up in the Daring Activist section, between Judi Chamberlin and Peruvian Disability Rights lawyer Alberto Vásquez Encalada.

Jazmine Russell and Alisha Ali and Brad and everyone else: I’m so proud of all the folks that made this book happen, I’m so grateful to be connected to you all. It’s hard for me to disentangle it in my mind from the birth and growth of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts. I hope this book travels far and wide and is read by many people. I flip through the pages at all the deep content and think of my old mentor’s words: “You only need a little, and you’re never the same.”

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