Introducing the MAD Studies Reader

“Mad Studies” is an emerging interdisciplinary collaboration for transforming how we approach mental health and wellbeing. Mad studies centers the perspective of lived experience and it brings together activists, artists, concerned clinicians, and critical disability scholars. It uses these differing perspectives to liberate us from rigid categories, from single vision framings, and from the sanist prejudice. Mad studies, at its heart, realigns who gets to contribute to the conversation, research, and practice around mental difference.

This panel, moderated by Neil Gong, brings together the three editors of the recently released Mad Studies Reader, Jazmine Russell, Alisha Ali, and Bradley Lewis, to celebrate and nurture this emergent work and the community it fosters.

This event is co-sponsored by NYU Center for Disability Studies.

Please note that zoom link will be sent 24 hours before the event.

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Panelists

Alisha Ali: Alisha is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University where she heads the Advocacy and Community-Based Trauma Studies (ACTS) Lab. Her research examines the mental health effects of various forms of oppression.

Jazmine Russell: Jazmine is the co-founder of the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, a transformative mental health educator, trauma survivor, and host of Depth Work: A Holistic Mental Health Podcast. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of Mad Studies, Critical Psychology, and Neuroscience, and a postgraduate student at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.

Bradley Lewis: Brad is a psychotherapist/psychiatrist and a humanities professor at New York University. He is devoted to enriching everyday life and clinical practice through integration with the arts, humanities, and cultural/political/religious study.

Neil Gong: Neil is an assistant professor of sociology at UC San Diego, where he researches psychiatric services, homelessness, and how communities seek to maintain social order. His recent book, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics, examines inequality in mental health care by comparing public safety net and elite private psychiatric programs.