Love in a Time of Madness: The Importance of Purpose and Belonging in Healing and Harnessing Madness

Abstract

This is a vulnerable ethnography (Behar 1996) about the experience of Madness in a neoliberal-ableist society. In it, I combine ethnography with members and staff at a Michigan Psychosocial Clubhouse – a non-clinical strengths-based program that employs meaningful work and community building in order to meet the recovery goals of its membership, impoverished people diagnosed with psychiatric disabilities – with my own reflections as an “ex-patient.” In order to present my varied knowledge on this topic, I employ three metaphorical “microphones”; one for the academic voice, one for the unadulterated self, and one for tangential comedy.

There is an inevitable darkness to this topic. Madness is a collective and neutral phenomenon that has been individualized, problematized, and reduced to “mental illness” or “psychiatric disability” to the detriment of justice. Additionally, the wider world we live in – the “current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy” (Hedva 2016) – makes people Mad, and creates conditions in which social needs – like purpose and belonging – are very difficult to meet (which keeps people Mad). However, my “findings” are far from dark, because in spite of all this, people who experience the injustice of such medicalization and marginalization – like the clubhouse community I grew to love – steadfastly live unlivable lives. They continue to centralize the fringe and challenge the center, and in doing so prove that oppression’s power – though incontrovertibly destructive to our bodies/minds – need not extend to our souls, as it does not preclude the possibility of a rich and meaningful life.

In addition to contributing to the anthropological literatures on disability, work (as it relates to purpose), and kinship (as it relates to belonging), I make the following contributions; 1) I testify to the collective problems of trauma, oppression, medicalization, unmet social needs, and the fact that, in spite of intentions and successes, the U.S. mental health system remains an insidious source of harm; 2) I demonstrate that people – as individuals and collectives – can change for the better, and provide a toolkit for doing so on varying levels (i.e. strategies for healing and harnessing one’s own madness, recommendations for people looking to be active agents for socially just change, and recommendations for clinicians who work with people experiencing Madness/mental illness); 3) Because I creatively employ many of my voices – the interdisciplinary scholar, activist, musician (songs are included via YouTube links), ex-patient, Madwoman, anti-oppressive educator, and comedienne – I aim to not only reach readers with a variety of backgrounds and experiences, but also to model the vulnerability and authenticity I believe necessary for addressing a phenomenon as complex and existential as Madness, and to use my power (and the power of my intellectual ancestors) to make it easier for future scholars to do similarly integrated work.