the personal is political

a reflection

Shout out to my friend Tamsin at Art Pilgrim for sharing a wonderful post by Maryanne Hawes Trefern, entitled Creativity is Not Healing (linked below.) Maryanne’s article, while focused upon women, speaks volumes to the mission of the Centre for Mad Culture UK and articulates so well what is at stake.

We have struggled somewhat to frame what we are doing: are we an arts project? A mental health project? An activist project? A community development project? Which box do we tick, to make sense? The fact is that we are all of these and more, so why squeeze ourselves into one of those tickboxes and limit our scope?

We are not about healing: madfolk are not broken, nor ill. The biomedical model places madness squarely upon the individual - at best it will allude to one’s social circumstances as contributing factors that aggravate the problem of one’s inherent madness. As Maryanne points out, this sleight-of-hand distracts us all from the political implications of one’s personal state of mind and sense of self. We argue that madness is a rational response to a maddening world; a howl of anguish; a shriek of rebellion.

Maryanne captures it so beautifully: creativity is about reclaiming one’s subjectivity and autonomy in an objectifying system. Mad culture demands that the internal landscape be accounted for: it reflects who we are in the context of this society. Mad culture shines a light on the shadows and unspoken truths, it reveals the cracks in the facade of a world built on illusions and delusions.

Where madness is pressed into the shape of a merely-personal problem, the Centre for Mad Culture responds by demanding that the personal is political, and that mad creativity holds a mirror up to our world.

Here is Maryanne’s article in full:

Creativity is Not Healing.

photo by Bruno Braga on Unsplash