let in the light

a reflection on power and voice

I posted in a Facebook group about the Book of Mad Insight call for submissions, and was surprised to receive a comment which referred to it as a “strike against psychiatric survivors” – that somehow de-centering the focus away from psychiatry amounts to denying psychiatric survivors a voice.

I responded:

The intention is definitely not to rip psychiatric survivors out of this project. On the contrary, it is to centre their voices on their own terms, rather than positioning them in relation to psychiatry, where experience with madness is framed as being a patient. The call is not excluding psychiatric survivors at all, and we welcome submissions from anyone who has living or lived experience of madness. The invitation is to explore what madness offers us on its own terms. I am very happy to speak with you further, and would very much welcome any submission from you which could explore the tension that exists whereby the mad experience is by default framed within its relation to psychiatric services.

I want to unpack this a bit further. Our society responds to madness through the lens of psychiatry, and very few madfolk escape contact with psychiatric services in some form or other – whether this is the information distributed by mental health charities and first-aiders, or the front-line service of the GP offering anti-depressants, or the intensive service of the acute hospital ward for the sectioned patient. The intention of this project is not to exclude psychiatric survivors but rather to shift the focus onto their own autonomy and to the unique knowledge and insight afforded by the mad experience.

This isn’t to diminish or disparage survivor testimony. Indeed, the impact of psychiatry is too widespread and too deep to simply set it aside. The relationship between madness and psychiatric treatment is not black and white by any means, it cannot easily be separated as distinct experiences, with one to be set neatly aside, but is rather a messy, grey area. However, within this grey area, the framing of the experience is a subtle and crucial matter which speaks to who holds power and to who possesses insight.

Psychiatry disempowers people by gagging them with the ‘lack of insight’ accusation, a term which lands up in so many case notes. One may either possess insight that one is mentally ill, or lack insight that one is mentally ill – but one is always caught in the trap of being deemed mentally ill by those who deem themselves to be sane. The power to determine insight always rests with the self-defined sane. This project aims to reclaim insight, and to reclaim the power to name the mad perspective as insightful.

Well ok, let’s just call it what it is: reclaiming power. Refusing to allow psychiatry to frame one’s mad experience or to condemn it as lacking insight. Offering mad testimony and mad knowledge, and insisting that they hold as much value as so-called sane testimony and sane knowledge. Celebrating mad insight and upholding the mad voice.

I am reminded here of Scilla Elworthy and the term ‘hara power’ which she coined in her books Power and Sex and Pioneering the Possible. “Hara power refers to the synthesis of physical and spiritual energy, and is also the synthesis of the masculine and feminine within each of us.” Hara power is not domination power; it does not seek to silence or contain or diminish. It is internal power - the birthright and source within us - which allows us to claim our place and our autonomy in this world. When we summon our hara power, we own our experiences and perceptions and we offer them as our truth.

When we reclaim power, we delve into hara power. It is not about engaging in a tug-of-war over who has stronger domination power over the other. In that tug-of-war, psychiatry will win; it already has. It already dominates the institutions and frameworks by which madness is met by society. But the mad voice, asserting itself and its own value, offers an alternative to psychiatry’s hegemony. It leverages a crack into that slab of psychiatric cement. Mad insight offers its own brand of wisdom to a maddening world.