A colleague recently sent me some questions about my thoughts as a disability studies and mad studies scholar. Here’s some of what I wrote:
There are two models of disability: medical and social. I am firmly in the social model camp; physicians, for the most part, are not. While physicians (psychiatrists) and other psy-complex professionals have given me lots of labels, those labels do not define me, nor do they adequately describe me. For me, and many of my Mad and Disabled colleagues/friends/allies, Madness and Disability are identities, and reflect a (sub, minority) culture. What makes me disabled is what is done to me by society, not something that is innate (and broken) in me. The same is true with madness. Still, they are identities that I claim, as a way to resist ableism and saneism, and as an identification with other Mad and Disabled people with whom I have much in common.
Madness and disability are socially constructed, and identities. The government and its psy-complex operatives (physicians, for example) reflect and operationalize these (and other) social constructions. Madness is disabling when culture disables Mad folx. Mad folx are said to have mental or psychiatric disabilities, descriptors that I find problematic, but haven’t found terms that are better. I am not mentally ill – that is a term that I reject. I am not sick or diseased, and reject biomedical explanations for Madness. The psy-complex creates taxonomies of difference, sorting disabled from abled, sane from insane, normal from abnormal, defining who is and is not deviant. These taxonomies reflect underlying, institutionalized ableism and saneism, both part of a wider and deeper matrix of oppression. I reject, abhor, and fight constantly this matrix in other people, institutions, and myself (through internalized oppression). Given notions of self-determination, and a broader understanding of identity and identity politics, only Mad people can define their identity. Others outside that identity group, who do not so identify, can never fully understand it.
From an identity perspective, the line that someone has to cross to be considered disabled is accepting a disabled identity, a crip identity. Thats the line that matters. Socio-cultural institutions, most especially the eugencist psy-complex that operates in neo-liberal, Eurocentric, White, colonialist, patriarchal culture, seek to define that line, as a way to sort and create taxonomies of difference, to exert hegemonic power. In accepting my Mad, Disabled identity, I create my own line, one that rejects the psy-complex, and seeks to undermine ableism, saneism, and other elements of the matrix of oppression.
In order to understand Mad and Disabled identities, it is critical to read the work of and talk to Mad and Disabled folx. The neurodiversity activism movement has given me many tools to think about these identities, as has Disability Studies, and, increasingly, Mad Studies. Know, too, that Mad and Disabled folx do not reflect a monocultural perspective – they are polycultural, as, for example, reflected in c/s/x identities.
Phil Smith 