The most interesting aspect of Mad
Pride: A Celebration of Mad Culture is its title.  It draws connections
between the liberation of oppressed people and movements such as black pride,
the uncovering and celebration of women’s history, and gay and lesbian
cultures.  With all these liberation movements, distinctive styles and
stereotypes that had previously been devalued and scorned were self-consciously
celebrated and held to be valuable.  The women’s movement took words like
"bitch," "hag," "witch," and "shrew"
and analyzed the sexist ideologies behind those words.  It also reclaimed some
of those words, with women proudly proclaiming themselves to be those things. 
Similarly, gay culture has taken words such as "queer" and
"fag" and used them for themselves so that they have largely lost
their negative connotations.  Some parts of African American culture have also
reclaimed derogatory names used for black people, although to what extent this
has succeeded in stripping them of their pejorative meanings is at least open
to debate. 

So it is notable when a book does
not simply provide an excuse for the strange behavior and bizarre ideas of
people with mental illness, but actually attempts to show that these have
value.  It locates people with mental illnesses as an oppressed minority with
much to contribute, and you would expect it to argue that much of the reason
that the activities of the mentally ill have been undervalued is that society
is narrow-minded and intolerant.  Indeed, this has already happened in the art
world with the acceptance of art brut and the widespread critical
approval of a great deal of art by people with mental illness.  One would
expect a book with a title like "Mad Pride" to examine words like
"mad," "crazy," "lunatic," "psycho,"
"nutter," and phrases such as "not right in the head" and
show how these serve to oppress people diagnosed with mental illness.  One
would expect the book to make the argument that people with mental illness are
often highly creative and add to the richness of human experience.  One might
also expect it to look at parts of culture that are already highly valued and
say that they can be seen as part of the culture of madness.

Mad Pride does contain
contributions with those aims.  Most of the pieces are highly personal, and
most are autobiographical.  A few seem to be some blend of fiction and
fantasy.  There are 24 chapters, mostly by men, and all based in the UK or
Ireland.  Some pieces, such as Esther Leslie’s "Mad Pride and
Prejudice," are more theoretical, going into history and philosophy.  Many
are written from a socialist or anarchist perspective.  Many of them assume
familiarity with British political life, using abbreviations and referring to
places, institutions, and politicians unknown to non-Britains.  Some pieces
express particular anger towards Tony Blair’s government.  But the book is a
very mixed bag, and to be honest, it is quite a struggle to get through all 208
pages of text.  The writing is so idiosyncratic and local that it is hard to
gain much from it.  Compared to the feminist collections of personal narratives
of the 1960s and 1970s that were driven by the conviction that the personal is
political, Mad Pride seems much more random and lacking in cohesion.  It
is an interesting book to dip into, but it will need to be supplemented by much
more writing and political action if we are going to achieve any widespread re-evaluation
of mad culture. 

Links:

• Mad Pride Web
  Site
• Chipmunkapublishing

© 2004 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring,
Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities Division and Chair of the
Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology
Online Review.  His main research is on philosophical issues in
medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Memoirs, Ethics