Mad Studies Is More Than Lived Experience: An Interview with Merrick Daniel Pilling

[gentle music] Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Today on the Mad in America podcast, I'm joined by Dr. Marek Daniel Pilling.

Marek is an associate professor and interim co-director of the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.

He's the author of Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice, as well as the co-editor of Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives.

The newest book, Mad Studies: The Basics, introduces mad studies as a field that has emerged from community activism and from the perspectives of people who have been psychiatrized, institutionalized, criminalized, and otherwise dehumanized by what Marek refers to as the psi complex.

It organizes itself around two basic questions: what can mad studies help us understand, and what can mad studies help us to do? So those questions will guide our conversation today.

We'll begin with Marek's own path into this work, then move into psychiatric documentation and narrative, and then spend most of our time with Mad Studies: The Basics, its account of some origins of the field, its critique of psychiatric common sense, and the insistence that mad studies is simultaneously a way of interpreting the world and a form of critical praxis.

So Marek, thank you so much for coming to the Mad in America podcast.

Pleasure to have you here.

Thank you so much for inviting me.

I'd like to start with your own path into the field.

How did you first find your way to mad studies?