I am a writer, life coach and activist in the mad movement. I work with people who have lived experience of psychiatric services and their families, friends and allies. Together we cultivate mad pride, discover purpose and build community.
As a psychiatric survivor myself, I perceive that we need a new way of responding to crisis and breakdown – one which cherishes the experience, for all its difficulty, and listens carefully for what it teaches us.
We are witnessing a paradigm shift, in which the certainties and assumptions of the mainstream worldview (reductionist, rationalistic, patriarchal, individualistic, human-centric) are coming apart and giving way to different understandings of the world. It is a painful process – whether it takes place in our personal lives, or across society and culture in a global and environmental context. Madness sits at the cutting edge within this process of transformation; it invites us to think differently.
I envision a world in which those experiencing such transformation are held through it gently, and valued for what they offer in the form of mad knowledge and expertise – rather than feared, shut down, silenced, labelled and marginalised as persons of little or no worth.
I have been exploring these matters for decades, and consider this to be my life’s work.
A further note: I personally identify as mad, in order to reclaim ownership of a derogatory label and to signal my position that we might frame madness as a political issue as much as a personal one. I operate through a lens of mad pride, by which I recognise the learning offered to us by lived experience.
juliamacintosh.online 