Mad Studies Is More Than Lived Experience: An Interview with Merrick Daniel Pilling

Merrick Daniel Pilling is an Associate Professor and Interim Co-Director of the School of Disability Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice and the co-editor of Interrogating Psychiatric Narratives of Madness: Documented Lives.

His new book, Mad Studies: The Basics, introduces Mad Studies as a field that has emerged from community activism and the perspectives of people who have been psychiatrized, institutionalized, criminalized, and otherwise dehumanized by what Merrick refers to as the psy complex. It organizes itself around two basic questions: What can Mad Studies help us understand? And what can Mad Studies help us do?

Those questions will guide our conversation today. We'll begin with Merrick's own path into this work, then move into psychiatric documentation and narrative, and then spend most of our time with Mad Studies: The Basics—its account of some origins of the field, its critique of psychiatric common sense, and its insistence that Mad Studies is simultaneously a way of interpreting the world and a form of critical praxis.

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