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Please reference attached Reaume material in post 1. What is the relationship between mental illness and disability history? 2. How has mental illness been portrayed in disability history? 3. What is the stigma surrounding mental illness? 4. How did Judi Chamberlin impact the mental health movement? 5. What is meant by “mad people’s history?” 6. Are the historical perceptions of mental illness still present today? Why or why not? Judi Chamberlain: Her Life, Our Movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGT4xJXgmoE Watch: What They Don’t Tell You About Mental Illness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieXB-BGxYwg Watch: There's no shame in taking care of your mental health https://www.ted.com/talks/sangu_delle_there_s_no_shame_in_taking_care_of_your_mental_health TEACHING RADICAL HISTORY Mad People’s History Geoffrey Reaume If the publication of my case is dangerous, so is likewise silence. — William Belcher, 1796 This course has opened my eyes to a whole new perspective that I had never considered previously. — “Mad People’s History” student, 2000 The comments by a mad person shunned during his lifetime and the thoughts of an undergraduate student reading his words two hundred years later offer a perfect example of how mad people can open eyes and minds to new learning experiences that are both intellectually stimulating and socially responsible toward some of the most discriminated against members of society, past and present.1 This course is all about breaking the silences that William Belcher, and so many other mad people, endured and attempted to break while they were alive, and which later generations have an obligation to continue to break when teaching the history of madness. The history of psychiatry has traditionally been analyzed from the perspec- tives of doctors and policy makers. Even critical studies, such as Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1965) or David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum (1971), while seminal interpretations in their own right, give no serious attention to the voices of mad people who make up the background to their studies.2 A few books devoted exclusively to the perspectives and experiences of mad people have been written by Dale Peterson and Roy Porter.3 However, for the most part, his- Radical History Review Issue 94 (Winter 2006): 170–82 Copyright 2006 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 170 Reaume | Mad People’s History 171 torians of psychiatry have not been particularly keen on taking seriously the views of the very core group of people without whom this history would not exist. This striking lack of intellectual curiosity is one reason, among many, to ensure that a course like “Mad People’s History” is taught. Ignoring this history constitutes a form of historical disempowerment of a group of people who were, and many of whom still are, disempowered in their own lives. This is a course in which the views of mad people, past and present, are both welcome and deliberately privileged over the views of doctors and policy makers who so often oppressed them. This course also provides a critical discussion of this history — there is no pretense at objectiv- ity or evenhandedness. The historical oppression of and discrimination toward mad people is analyzed from the points of view of people on the receiving end of physical and chemical restraints, invasive “treatments,” and grotesque caricatures that have led to the physical and mental suffering of so many mad people throughout history, up to the present day. Before getting into details about how this course came about, a definition is in order. Mad people’s history is, first and foremost, a history of mad people, or peo- ple deemed mad, rather than just a history of madness. The latter can quite easily become a history of ideas about madness, with little or no serious inclusion of the people whose stories make up this history. While this course does of course include ideas about what madness is or was thought to be at different times in history, the emphasis always rests on the experiences and, where possible, the viewpoints of the people who lived this history. It is also not a great mad people’s history, even though famous mad people, like Vincent van Gogh, are discussed. The emphasis is placed instead on the unknown and uncelebrated mad who make up the vast majority of people who lived this history, particularly from the nineteenth century onward, when the rise of literacy slowly expanded the diversity of people who left first-person accounts. Emphasizing the meaning that mad people bring to this history offers one essential way of getting past the prejudices so entrenched toward anyone who has ever experienced madness or any of the other terms that come to define this topic. Indeed, throughout the course, changing terminology to describe mad people is dis- cussed to understand how language has been used to mark, or reclaim, the identities of those variously described as mad, insane, crazy, lunatic, distracted, mentally ill, survivors, consumers, clients, and a host of other terms. The aim of this course is to bring forth and respect the very diverse ways mad people have expressed themselves throughout history. This ranges from the most virulent protests by some people who insisted that they were not insane to peo- ple who argued that mental illness does not exist while others claimed that it does to people who express positions on various sides of the medical model debate, without the stark contrast of completely accepting or rejecting one concept or another. The wide variation in how males and females experience madness and have been catego- rized as mad, as well as how race, class, disability, and sexual orientation influence 172 Radical History Review these notions are discussed both in specific classes devoted to this topic and more generally throughout the course, since such subjects cannot be compartmentalized in one week alone. This course therefore makes room for a great variety of differ- ent perspectives on what has always been and will probably always be a contentious topic: What does it mean to say someone is mad? More specifically, what do those people who have been labeled in this way think about the periods of history they lived through? Over the time that this course has developed since first being taught as a university-credit offering in 2000, a diversity of perspectives has been empha- sized more than any other single point in order to provide the clear understanding that mad people, like all other people, are not a simple “type” that can be typecast, as has so often been done in history. I originally developed this course as a six-week, and then an eight-week, noncredit course through the Marxist Institute in Toronto in the summer of 1992 and the winter of 1993. At that time, when I was a PhD student in history at the University of Toronto studying psychiatric history from the patients’ perspectives, I called the course “Madness, Medicine, and Mythology.” The idea for this course grew out of the intersection of my own history as a former psychiatric patient with my related frustration at the near-complete absence of patients’ perspectives in the academic historiography of psychiatry. As a student, I had heard the all-too-often offensive remarks about people with psychiatric histories as less than fully human, attitudes not unusual either inside or outside the classroom. As an undergraduate, it never occurred to me that I could do anything about it. As a graduate student who decided to no longer hide my psychiatric history when embarking on my doctoral work in this field, I realized more and more that one way to change attitudes, and to contribute to the broadening of the history of psychiatry, was to teach the topic so long neglected among mainline historians — mad people’s history. This idea did not remain without its own challenges. In the fall of 1991, while talking about my desire to study the history of psy- chiatry from the patients’ perspectives, a well-known scholar in this field told me that the writings of patients I was so interested in were nothing more than a sign of their pathology. These views, according to this historian of psychiatry, were only useful insofar as they assisted the researcher (or clinician, in other circumstances) in understanding the affected person’s psychiatric disorder. At best, this professor claimed, the patients’ accounts constituted “anecdotal history.” In other words, he insisted, psychiatric history from the patients’ perspectives — or as I prefer to call it now, mad people’s history (since not all mad people were, or want to be called, patients) — is hardly worth taking seriously. Needless to say, I thought otherwise. A few months later, I started to develop a course on this topic that was first offered under the auspices of a local Marxist group and not intended for academic credit but knowledge for its own sake. It would be almost another decade before it was offered as a full-fledged university course when I was able to use external funding Reaume | Mad People’s History 173 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto to design my own course. As of this writing, I have taught “Mad People’s History” five times as a half-year credit course since 2000 at three universities in Toronto — four times as an undergradu- ate course and once as a graduate course. The departments most receptive to this course have been the School of Disability Studies, Ryerson University, where this course has been taught since 2002, and the Critical Disability Studies MA Pro- gram, York University, where I began teaching it in 2005. Both universities now include “Mad People’s History” as part of their permanent curriculum. While the reading list has changed, the underlying purpose of the course has remained con- sistent — understanding first-person accounts of madness by people who have lived it, something that student evaluations show is the single most popular feature of this course, much more so than the theoretical interpretations. The syllabus below, from the 2005 graduate-level course at York University, was introduced to provide a wide-ranging exploration of how madness was viewed and experienced by the people who lived it. Such a course, I believe, challenges many of the stereotypes within and without the academy that ignore or trivialize this history. Such ignorance has had real consequences for people whom it is easier to brush aside through this willful act of historical amnesia. I have heard plenty