Mad Knowledge and Relations: Living the Impossible - Jasna Russo and Erick Fabris

Is Mad life possible? Constrained by everyday mentalism, and controlled by various forms of psychiatrization of our biographies, we ask - can we live the lives we dream rather than dreaming that we live? In today’s lecture, Jasna Russo looks at the processes of knowledge making on what is considered madness and our ability to address each other in the second person, as you and me. And Erick Fabris revisits a life of activism, from mutual aid to identity politics, and asks if Mad culture is possible in our time.
This is the twelfth lecture in the London Lecture Series 2023/24, which this year is on the subject of Madness and Mental Health. Watch the whole series here: • Madness and Mental Hea...
About the speakers
Jasna Russo is a long-term activist in the European movement of survivors of psychiatry. She is professor of emancipatory approaches and collaborative methods in Social Work at Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. Jasna worked on numerous research projects, including largescale international studies. She co-edited Searching for a Rose Garden. Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies (2016, PCCS Books) as well as The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (2021).
Erick Fabris cofounded Mad Pride Day in Toronto with West End Psychiatric Survivors after being locked up in Vancouver in 1993. In 2000, he rallied against psych coercions, and later used these experiences to research and publish Tranquil Prisons: Chemical Incarceration Under Community Treatment Orders (2011, University of Toronto Press). Erick started Mad Canada Shadow Report Group (which champions the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in Canada) and since 2014 he’s hosted open monthly hybrid events called “Crazy Talks.”
Presentation of Speakers - 00:00
Lecture - 01:19
Q&A -38:28