In a recent article, the Guardian presented Mad Matters, a Canadian movement that pleads for taking into account “the lived experience of madness”. Mad Matters brings together academics and “mental health survivors”, among them the well-known historian George Reaume. Kathryn Church, one of the initiator, challenges the way historians are writing over madness:
What we’re trying to do is offer a counterpoint to the history of psychiatry, which is sort of a professional and a disciplinary history, with the lived experience of madness,
The titles of the different classes, h-madness has assembled on the history of psychiatry, show how historians have tried to handle the tensions between “psychiatry”, “madness”, “mental health”, “medicine”….
