Mad studies is an emerging, interdisciplinary field, mainly in the social sciences and humanities, that expresses a radical new voice in academe about madness. Ms. Voronka often speaks to academics and professionals about mad studies and says she expects most listeners to be steeped in 150 years of psychiatric biases about madness, or as a colleague puts it, “clogged with sanism.”
After Ms. Voronka finished, Jennifer Poole, an associate professor in Ryerson’s school of social work, defined sanism for the audience this way: “A belief system that makes it okay to pick on, make fun of, discriminate, reject, silence, discredit, pathologize, de-centre, kindly undermine and commit violence against the mad. Sanism is an oppression, it is the reason for stigma, and it can happen even with the best of intentions.”
That day, the audience was receptive to the definition and presenters. Instead of asking “patronizing” questions about people with mental illnesses, such as “Why do they go off their meds?”, this audience focused on how to create safe environments and better supports for students, faculty and staff. In Ms. Voronka’s opinion, this was progress.
Mad studies is based on a simple idea: listen to mad people and look at madness from their points of view. More than 10 years ago, Ryerson’s school of disability studies and York University’s graduate program in critical disability studies pioneered mad studies. It’s not yet a program, but a series of courses that deconstructs medical models of “schizophrenia,” “psychosis” and madness in general and puts them in historical context. The courses look at different concepts of madness, surveying social, medical, political, economic, cultural and religious factors that influenced madness from ancient times to the present.