This Mad Studies collection centers madness as lived experience — as story, memory, rupture, resistance, and world-making. It approaches madness not as pathology to be corrected, but as a site of knowledge produced through survival, struggle, creativity, and refusal.

Mad Studies emerged from psychiatric survivorship, user/refuser movements, Mad Pride activism, disability justice, and global resistance to coercion. At its core is the insistence that those who live madness must also theorize it. This collection seeks writing that captures how madness is felt in the body, narrated across generations, shaped by culture and country, and negotiated within psychiatric, colonial, and neoliberal systems.

We invite contributions that dwell in the personal without reducing it to confession. How does psychiatric diagnosis land in a family, a community, a language? How is it resisted, reclaimed, or reworked in everyday life? What does recovery, refusal, or transformation look like from the inside? We welcome collective biography, autoethnography, testimony, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms that honor storytelling as theory.

Particular attention will be given to voices often marginalized within Mad discourse itself — queer and trans Mad lives, Global South movements, Indigenous and community-controlled initiatives, diasporic and migrant experiences, rural contexts, and those living at intersections of race, class, gender, and displacement. We are especially interested in how local stories illuminate what global mental health frameworks frequently overlook.

This collection aims to build an archive of lived experience that is analytically rigorous yet deeply personal — one that demonstrates how telling one’s story can be an act of theory, resistance, and collective imagination.

As editor, I will support contributors — particularly community and emerging writers — to shape their lived narratives into powerful, accessible scholarship while preserving their voice, cadence, and integrity.