Madness as a Space of Resistance

Welcome to Season 2 of Mad Poetry: Mental Illness Reimagined. In this season, I will be delving deeper into madness, how it is constructed by social and cultural norms, how mad people are being oppressed and marginalized by society. I will also look at madness as a lived identity, as a strength and as resistance. 

*Trigger Warning: mental illness and suicide*

In today's episode, I talk about madness as a space of survival, resistance and creation. This space is the margin (bell hooks+) where new knowledge is created on madness by us from us, to counter the dominant discourse on mental illness.

Suggested readings:

•hooks, b.+ (1989). Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness. Framework and Media, 36, 15-23.

•Freire, P. (2005). Education for Critical Consciousness. Continuum. 

•Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury Press, New York.

•Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxforn University Press.

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Email: themadpoetrypodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hi everyone, thank you for joining me on my podcast, Mad Poetry, Mental Illness Reimagined. My name is Georgia Vrakis. I'm an academic, a clinical psychologist, and a bipolar woman. This podcast is a space where we can talk about mental illness and destigmatize it through poetry, lived experience, clinical and academic expertise. Today's episode is called Madness as a Space of Resistance. We'll start first with a poem called The Little Blue Bird. If I were an animal, I would be a little bluebird. Not a bluebird, but a bird that is blue. The little bluebird has been with me since I was 16 years old. Or maybe before then, I don't really remember. But I do know that was the first time it appeared in my writings as Le Petit Oiseau Bleu, the title of my first ever poem. When I feel immense sadness, pain, or fear, my first thought is, I wish I was a bird, a very small, very tiny little bluebird, so I can fly away somewhere anywhere but here. Outside of myself, my body, my mind, unseen. Inevitably, as he flies away, le petit oiseau bleu hits a wall, a window pane, falls, and sometimes manages to pick himself up and fly once more. Albeit dizzy and disoriented, but determined to try again and again. And sometimes he can't. Is that my heart, my brain, my belly? I do not know. All of the above and more? It is hard for me to feel those parts of me. However, I do know that the little bluebird likes traveling about. He is persistent, and despite his many falls, he has not broken a single bone yet. I still write about him. These days he's a little quieter, resting maybe, gathering strength. God knows I have been called upon him a lot these past few years. A means of surviving the inescapable, always carrying me gently, always bringing me back to the physicality of my body, and to those pesky emotions I never wanted to feel. So that's the poem I wrote a few years uh back, and I've written several poems named Le Petit Boiseau Bleu in French and in English, and they were all like sort of part one, part two, part three, etc. But they always were about the same type of theme of flying away and getting away from the pain, but and but coming back always. So before we talk about resistance and madness, I want to talk about resilience, which is a concept we hear a lot about in clinical and research contexts. The American Psychological Association defines it as the process and the outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially those through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. So what we can see in this definition is that it focuses on the individuals successfully adapting to difficult situations. But what if that situation is a whole system designed to oppress and marginalize, such as racism, ableism, Sanism? Sanism, I will just I will explain what it is because it's a concept that's important when we talk about madness, but it's not a topic that we much discuss, you know, in everyday life. Soinism is the systemic discrimination of the mentally ill and the mad. So basically, it's much like the other forms of oppression, it is created and maintained to the structures of power. So the question is: do we wish to adapt to systems that oppress and marginalize us, like racism, ableism, sanism, that wish to invisibilize us and wanting to normalize us, quote unquote. Honestly, I sometimes really do wish I could fit into that norm, into that mold. And because to be honest, it'd be so much easier to live like that, to be able to fit, to be able to fit in. And I know a lot of people feel the same way as me. Here uh today, basically, I'm sharing with you a perspective of mental illness that is rooted in the mad studies perspective and on my own experience as a mad woman. I believe that for many of us, it is about surviving, it is about staying alive, sometimes literally, when we think about it, you know, with all the suicide risks and completed suicides that are related to mental illnesses. So when I mean surviving, it's literally staying alive in the face of everything that's happening, so which in itself is an act of resistance against the status quo, a resistance against the social norms, normalcy, again, quote unquote. We resist from within the margin of society where we have been relegated to. We do not choose to be in that space, which Bell Hooks calls the margin. Yet we are there and it is ours. It is in that space that we create new knowledge, new knowledge on madness and mental illness that challenges a dominant discourse. And we do that through a variety of ways, through academic research, through poetry, through music, theater, through podcasts, and through advocacy, among others. The margin does always remain a space of oppression because we were put in there by society. But it is also a space of openness and creativity. For me, it is not about adapting to the systems that oppress us. Believe me, I have been there and have tried, and it does not work for me because I can't and I won't change who I am. For me, it is very much about surviving and resisting and the new knowledge that we make together, we create together about us from within the very margins meant to silence us. I will end this episode with a passage from Bell Hooks, Choosing the Margin as a space of radical openness, from 1989, page 23. Silenced. We fear those who speak about us, who do not speak to us and with us. We know what it is to be silenced. We know that the forces that silence us because they never want us to speak differ from the forces that say, speak, tell me your story. Only do not speak in the voice of resistance. Only speak from that space in the margin that is a sign of deprivation, a wound, an unfulfilled longing. Only speak your pain. This is an intervention, a message from that space in the margin that is a site of creativity and power, an inclusive space where we recover ourselves, where we move in solidarity to erase the category colonize, colonizer. Marginality as a site of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. Enter that space. We greet you as liberators. So this was Bell Hook's Choosing the Margin as a space of radical openness. I really recommend that you read it. I will write the entire reference in the episode description. So I I really strongly suggest you read it. So thank you everyone for listening. If you have any questions or comments, please send me a message. You can send me an email at themadpoetrypodcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. And if you want to learn more about today's topic, there's going to be a list, there is a list of references for you that you can consult in the episode description. Also, one last thing, please don't forget to follow my podcast. Till next time, have a great day, everyone.