Dear Hmadness readers,

Geoffrey Reaume’s article Anti-Psychiatry Heritage and the Publication of Phoenix Rising in Toronto, Canada, 1980–1990, published in the collective volume The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations, edited by Katrin Röder and Cornelia Wächter, may be of interest to you.
Please find below the abstract of the article as it appears on the publisher’s website.

“Phoenix Rising: The Voice of the Psychiatrized published thirty-two issues from 1980 to 1990. During this period, it became probably the best-known radical anti-psychiatry magazine in Canada. Contributors aimed to give a voice to people who were dismissed as ‘crazy’ because of their psychiatric history. This magazine was the first contact that some current and former psychiatric patients near to, and far from, major population centres in this country had with a publication completely run by people who identified as ex-inmates of mental institutions. As such, its significance as a literary manifestation of mad peoples’ activism continued long past the time it ceased to publish. This chapter focuses on the origins, content, purpose, reader response, and overall legacy of this magazine as well as where it is located within the history of mad movement organizing of which it was very much a part during the late twentieth century”.