Barter Street
London
What is mental health? Can we make sense of psychosis? What’s the connection between mental health and concepts including race & evolution? Explore these questions, among others, through the lens of philosophy at the 2023/4 London Lectures.
Mad Knowledge and Relations: Living the Impossible
Two researchers from across an ocean engage with the question: is Mad life possible? Constrained by everyday mentalism, and controlled by various forms of psychiatrization of our biographies, we ask – can we live the lives we dream rather than dreaming that we live? Jasna looks at the processes of knowledge making on what is considered madness and our ability to address each other in the second person, as you and me. Erick revisits a life of activism, from mutual aid to identity politics, and asks if Mad culture is possible in our time.
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About the speakers
Jasna Russo is a long-term activist in the European movement of survivors of psychiatry. She is professor of emancipatory approaches and collaborative methods in Social Work at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Jasna worked on numerous research projects, including largescale international studies. She co-edited Searching for a Rose Garden. Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies (2016, PCCS Books) as well as The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (2021).
Erick Fabris cofounded Mad Pride Day in Toronto with West End Psychiatric Survivors after being locked up in Vancouver in 1993. In 2000, he rallied against psych coercions, and later used these experiences to research and publish Tranquil Prisons: Chemical Incarceration Under Community Treatment Orders (2011, University of Toronto Press). Erick started Mad Canada Shadow Report Group (which champions the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Canada) and since 2014 he’s hosted open monthly hybrid events called “Crazy Talks.”