Celebrate Mad Pride | rabble.ca

Celebrate Mad Pride

By Jesse McLaren

| July 13, 2011

Today is the start of Mad Pride week in Toronto, an annual event that began here and has spread around the world, as psychiatric survivors/consumers and their allies challenge the stigma and oppression of those with mental health issues, and celebrate madness.
Psychiatric oppression
With the rise of capitalism, people who could not fit into narrowly-defined norms of labour productivity, either because of physical or psychiatric differences, became pathologized. Since then mad people have been subjected to diverse methods of "restoring sanity," such as institutionalization, electroshock and "the chemical prison industry" of Big Pharma. In Toronto, those incarcerated at the Provincial Lunatic Asylum (now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) were forced to build the walls that surrounded them (a history that psychiatric survivor and York professor Geoffrey Reaume has helped expose).

Celebrate Mad Pride | rabble.ca