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 su
ounding 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
eaking the silences that William Belcher, and so many other mad people,
endured and attempted to
eak while they were alive, and which later generations
have an obligation to continue to
eak 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 XXXXXXXXXXor 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
ooks devoted exclusively to the perspectives and experiences of mad people have
een 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
ecome 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 uncele
ated 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
ing 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
ing 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-
ized as mad, as well as how race, class, disability, and sexual orientation influence
XXXXXXXXXXRadical 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 occu
ed 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
oadening of the history of psychiatry, was to teach the topic so
long neglected among mainline historians — mad people’s history. This idea did not
emain 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
ut 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 cu
iculum. While the
eading 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
ush aside through this willful act of historical amnesia. I have heard plenty