I’m starting an interview series — there are so many people whose brains I want to pick and a podcast feels like the perfect format for it. To kick off these conversations, I bring you a great chat I had with Micha Frazer-Carroll on her new book, Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health.

Micha is a writer and editor based in London whose work focuses on the theme of liberation, and when she sent this book to me, I honestly screamed, because I’ve been waiting for something like this to exist. (Micha also quoted my work in this book which is to me, the highest honor, and I’m so excited to be included in a book that I love so much.)

Mad World weaves together disability justice with mad studies and abolition to give us a political view of mental health that prioritizes solidarity, self-advocacy, and autonomy. What I love about it most is just how complicated it is — Micha gives us lots of questions with lots of different answers, and embraces the fact that there is a lot we can’t know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together to make change.

This is an expansive conversation full of big ideas about the limits of rationality, the complicated nature of diagnosis, the liberating power of art, and all the big possibilities to be found in embracing disability and refusing to disavow each other in our political movements. I had so much fun chatting with Micha and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

[episode transcript]

Order Mad World (Pluto Press): www.bit.ly/madworldbook

Follow Micha on Twitter and Instagram, or check out her website

Mentioned in this episode:

* Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Artie Vierkant

* Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk

* Crip Theory by Robert McRuer

* Lydia X.Z. Brown on disavowal (@ 37:00)

* Toward an Informed Consent Model for All Drugs by Devon Price

* Recovery In The Bin

* The MadZines project

* Making Mad History: Mad Pride 2022, by the Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition

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