My Psych Abolition / Disability Justice Bookshelf
Some people seem to treat book recs as if they have to fully back everything every author says, but this is not the case. For example, Farber's work: I tend to disagree with his conclusions about the spiritual Significance of psychotic experiences, but I still recommend his books because the information, interviews, and perspectives (yes, including his own) are worth exploring and coming to your own conclusions about. I think you should always be evaluating and synthesizing all information, rather than trying to memorize the "correct take", so to speak.
I'm also intermixing Mad Studies and Psych Abolition alongside Disability Justice because I think one requires the other. Projects like the Soteria House have done more to prove that "mental illness" is far better helped by accommodation, care, and understanding than the entire field of Psychiatry has Ever proved its theory that "mental illness" is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain that can only be "managed" (never "cured") with lifelong medication -- what we understand as mental distress and psychiatric disability requires a disability justice framework to be fully understood, and we will go Nowhere with mad studies as a whole if we do not lean fully into disability justice's tenets that demand people not have their Worth measured by productivity, assimilation, and so-called independence.
Tangent: Speaking to a trend I notice unsettlingly often: attempting to distance yourself from your more disabled counterparts (whether that's Mad people who try to distance themselves from the Mad people who live in the streets and scream to their Voices; or Autistic people who try to distance themselves from the Autistic people who have Intellectual Disabilities; or Chronically Ill people who try to distance themselves from physically disabled people who have limb and body and facial differences; or any combination therein) gets you nowhere and if your advocacy does not include space for those who cannot live on their own, or mask, or force themselves to work, or read and write, or have a coherent conversation, or be "just the same as everyone else" then it is worth less than dirt ♡ "Nothing about us without us" means ALL of Us, not just the ones who look and act like you can.
Writhing Writing
by Phil SmithHow to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind
by La Marr Jurelle BrucePsychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia
Edited by Nancy Scheper-Hughes and anne M. LovellSoteria: Through Madness to Deliverance
by Loren R. Mosher and Voyce HendrixCare Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaCrazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
by Ethan WattersMad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life
by Margaret PriceSearching For a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies
edited by Jasna Russo and Angela SweeneyThe Disability Studies Reader
Edited by Lennard J. DavisMAD PRIDE: A Celebration of Mad Culture
edited by Ted Curtis, Robert Dellar, Esther Leslie, and Ben WatsonDisability Visibility: First-Person Stories from teh Twenty-First Century
edited by Alice WongCriptiques
edited by Caitlin WoodThe Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-SamarasinhaMadness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels
by Seth FarberStaring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside
edited by Kenny FriesThe Spiritual Gift of Madness
by Seth FarberDisability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire
edited by Alice WongRestricted Access: Lesbians on Disability
edited by Victoria A. Brownsworth and Susan RaffoOn Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System
by Judi ChamberlinTo Be a Problem: A Black Woman's Survival in the Racist Disability Rights Movement
by Dara BaldwinFeminist, Queer, Crip
by Alison KaferTyped Words, Loud Voices
edited by Amy Sequenzia and Elizabeth J. GraceCrip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
by Robert McRuerLoud Hands: Autistic People Speaking
by Julia BascomToo Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life
by Harriet McBryde JohnsonToxic Psychiatry: Why Therapy, Empathy and Love Must Replace the Drugs, Electroshock, and Biochemical Theories of the New Psychiatry
by Peter R. Breggin
Related Fiction:
Accidents of Nature
by Harriet McBryde JohnsonGood Kings, Bad Kings
by Susan NussbaumFailure to Comply
by cavarFreshwater
by Akwaeke Emezi