call for submissions

for The Book of Mad Insight

^{image: La Inventora de Atole by Leonora Carrington, 2011}

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new project at the Centre for Mad Culture UK: The Book of Mad Insight.

Psychiatry uses the term ‘lack of insight’ to invalidate and disempower the mad perspective. The term ‘mad insight’ offers a different understanding of knowledge and testimony, one which celebrates the mad voice and insists upon its capacity to offer information and viewpoints that are relevant to the human experience.

The Book of Mad Insight will platform the mad voice and the mad community – not as research subjects or service-users, but rather as autonomous creators of mad culture.

Call for submissions

We invite submissions of stories, essays, poetry, personal reflections and artwork which explore one or more of the following questions:

1. How do you meet your madness?

2. What have you learned from your madness?

3. What issues and topics reside within your madness, and how do these reflect upon the wider society and the human condition?

4. How do complexity, boundaries and paradox relate to madness?

5. How does madness reflect ideas about the crises we face in the world and ways of responding?

6. What does your madness wish the world to know?

7. How does the expression of madness contribute to culture?

We welcome contributors with living and lived experience of madness, including:

· those with diagnosed and/or undiagnosed experiences

· voice-hearers and vision-seers

· visual creators and multi-disciplinary artists

· writers of poetry, fiction and non-fiction

· adventurers in the realms of the philosophical, spiritual or magical

· storytellers, psychonauts and tentacular thinkers

Submission guidelines

Please only submit pieces that are unpublished elsewhere.

· Fiction and non-fiction (stories, essays, reflections): 3000 words or less

· Poetry: 100 lines or less

· Artwork: high resolution (300 dpi) jpg’s

Please include your full name and a brief description of your lived experience.

Deadline for submissions: Friday 16 October 2026

Please send enquiries and submissions to: hello@centreformadculture.uk