Mad World

Mental health affects us all, and yet it remains elusive as a concept.
Does getting a diagnosis help or hinder it? How is mental well-being, which is often incredibly personal, driven by widespread societal suffering? Can it be a social construct and real at the same time?
These are some of the big questions Micha Frazer-Carroll asks as she reveals mental health to be a political issue that needs deeper understanding beyond today’s 'awareness raising' campaigns.
Exploring the history of asylums and psychiatry; the relationship between disability and broader liberation movements; alternative models of care; the relationship between art and mental health; law and the decarceration of mental health, Mad World is a radical and hopeful antidote to pathologization, gatekeeping and the policing of imagination.

It’s time to reclaim our mental health!

Micha Frazer-Carroll is a columnist at the Independent. She has previously edited for gal-dem, the Guardian and Blueprint, a mental health magazine that she founded. Micha has also written for Vogue, HuffPost, Huck and Dazed. She was nominated for the Comment Awards’ Fresh New Voice of the Year Award, and the Observer/Anthony Burgess Award for Arts Criticism. She is invested in using journalism to challenge systems of power.

Introduction
1. Asylums
2. The Age of Awareness
3. 'Mental Health Does Not Discriminate'
4. Disability / Possibility
5. How Work Makes us Ill
6. Diagnosing Diagnosis
7. Art for Mental Health
8. Law and 'Disorder'
9. Ways of Being
Conclusion: Mad, Radical Futures