Mapping ‘Mad’ Identities

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with 'mad' identities, the senses of self, of who one is and is not, of what one can and cannot do, possessed by people who are mentally distressed (people with mental health problems, many of whom will have received the designation of 'mentally ill' at some time in their lives). The terminologies involved here are controversial, and we should say at the outset that we adopt the term 'mad' as a strategy of reappropriating a word usually regarded as prejudicial and mocking: in part to distance ourselves from medical-psychiatric accounts which unthinkingly mobilise the concept of 'mental illness' as if it reveals the complete truth of mental distress, and in part as a recognition of the potential use to which people could put 'mad' as a basis for collective campaigning in the political arena.1 The underlying motivation for the chapter is a concern for the difficult and often dangerous circumstances which confront many mentally distressed people, particularly those who are discharged from hospital into the 'noise and clatter' of the city, and we believe that rather more should be known about the differing responses of different individuals-whether, as the poem above suggests, they shrink into a sad 'insignificance' or assert a pleading 'craziness'—when seeking to cope with a world which seemingly has little time or money to care. Inquiring into these responses necessarily means thinking about how these particular human 'subjects' are constituted, how their identities are influenced from without (by the material twists and turns of a social life over which they may have little control) at the same time as they are negotiated from within (more or less consciously, with greater or lesser elements of resistance, imagination and even delusion).