ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the challenges for ‘Mad Studies’ seeking to centre race and mental health as the denial of damage to Black survivors and survivor researchers victimised by whiteness through European historical diagnostic systems. It explores the purpose and role of Mad Studies as a form of political liberation and advocacy to investigate madness within eugenic racialised European theories that emerge from the ‘pre-production stage’, slavery, that shaped the construction of race and mental disorder in current mental health practices. The author inverts narratives of mad away from their dominant meaning that defines black men as pathological, dangerous and feared as symptoms of whiteness in a misguided racialised diagnostic system. Mad Studies can thus interrogate the madness within whiteness as a form of violation of the black experience. A lived experience Afro-centric model and approach is offered as the basis of political and power equality for a co-production model for working across the colour line for race equality in mental health.
