Mad Collective

22/10/2026

first day vibes, visiting academic, but rly just that kid entering primary school, both nervous and excited.

Masters of Global Mental Health here we come 💜🩷

10/10/2026

10/10/2026

Lived experience isn't just our individual stories.

It's collective knowledge and expertise from centuries in our movements of resistance, particularly the past five decades, which include: users/service users/ consumers, psychiatric survivors, ex-patients and ex-inmates, Mad and Mad Pride, and psychosocial disability (CSXMP+) movements amongst many more identities and plural Mad movements.

You might also hear about peer or lived experience movements often driven by the workforce within mental health systems.

There are also more radical and transformative movements towards psychiatric abolition of carceral, and involuntary psychiatry and psychiatric systems of 'care'.

What's often misunderstood is when story becomes lived expertise: knowledge of our collective histories, cultures and policies.

Our knowledges are plural, contested and contradictory, like any knowledge. Hearing us takes epistemic humility.

Call to action: learn our movements, including their histories, aims, goals, values and principles, and resource them. Engage lived expertise as you would any other expertise. We bring more than our stories; we bring our communities and our broader social movements.

Check out this recently published website by GMHAN on the Mad movements:

https://gmhan.org/mad-movements

MadPride MadStudies PsychiatricSurvivors PsychosocialDisability NothingAboutUsWithoutUs PeerSupport DisabilityRights CRPD

08/10/2026

Three years with the man who keeps the engine running, the tank full, and still lets me speed through life like the manic depressive I am. 🏎️💨

He's my World Mental Health Day, Week, Month… and Life. 🌍

Happy 3rd anniversary, Andrew. Love you endlessly. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇵🇭💕🫂😍

Scroll through for the food!

***rLove

14/09/2026

Today is World Hearing Voices Day — 20 years since the first one.

I want to mark it by sharing something I don't often say out loud in professional spaces: I am a Mad person, and I'm thankful for it.

I've lived through extreme and altered states — periods of distress, crisis, grief, existential unravelling — where the ordinary boundaries of "self" didn't hold the way they're supposed to. I've held unusual beliefs in those times. I've had a manic, euphoric episode where I experienced becoming one with my mother, whom I now identify as non-binary — a dissolving of the line between us that felt, in that moment, like the truest thing I'd ever known.

I'm not sharing this to romanticise it. Some of those states were frightening. Some were dangerous. Some cost me things. That's real, and I don't want to erase it.

But it's also true that these experiences have brought me closer to my authentic self than almost anything else in my life.

Madness, for me, hasn't only been rupture — it's also been revelation. Both things are true at once, and I think that's exactly what the Mad movements have always tried to say: that our experiences don't need to be flattened into either "purely pathological" or "purely spiritual" to be honoured.

What I want — for myself and for the people I work alongside — is support that's peer-led. Support built by people who've been there, not just people who've read about it. And I want a world that's doing the harder work of confronting sanism: the stigma, the discrimination, the disbelief that meets people who hear voices, who have unusual beliefs, who move through extreme states.

If we can build that — genuinely peer-led support, and a society less hostile to madness — I think we go a long way toward addressing the destructive side of these experiences, while also making room for their transformative power to be seen and valued.

🙏 in gratitude to the movement, and to everyone building on the Melbourne Hearing Voices Declaration and the Hague Manifesto of Human Rights of Voice Hearers.

Join the Hearing Voices Movement through Intervoice
https://www.intervoiceonline.org/

10/09/2026

World Su***de Prevention Day 2026

CN: su***de, grief, family violence & psychiatric hospitalisation.

I have come very close to dying by su***de multiple times. For more than a decade, suicidal thoughts were a persistent part of my life.

My suicidality was never simply an illness located inside me. It was connected to grief, poverty, bullying, foster care, homophobia, family violence, housing insecurity, trauma and isolation. It was personal—but it was, and remains, social and political.

Madness has held pain, danger and rupture for me, but also meaning, spiritual connection, political consciousness and transformation. It should not be romanticised, but neither should it be reduced to pathology.

Too often, we turn survival responses into symptoms while leaving the conditions producing distress untouched.

We need to politicise distress—not pathologise people.

I am alive not simply because of services or individual resilience, but because people loved me and stayed.

Andrew, Sam, and my q***r, trans and Mad communities helped me find hope, belonging and love when institutions often could not.

Su***de prevention requires more than awareness campaigns and risk assessments. It requires housing, income security, freedom from violence and poverty, q***r and trans liberation, meaningful relationships, and spaces to speak honestly without fear of coercion or confinement.

May we build communities where people do not have to become less honest to remain free—and where nobody is expected to survive alone.

***dePreventionDay

29/08/2026

Big news 💜🇬🇧🇪🇺🗺️🩷

From October–December 2026, I’ll be joining Professor Rochelle Burgess and the team at UCL’s Institute for Global Health as a Visiting Research Fellow, alongside the new Master’s in Global Mental Health.

I’m particularly excited by the programme’s emphasis on lived experience, social justice and critical approaches to global mental health.

The fellowship will form part of my PhD exploring the contemporary international Mad movement(s) and will create space to connect this research with conversations around Mad Studies, lived experience, psychosocial disability, human rights, decolonisation and alternatives to dominant biomedical approaches to mental health.

🌍 A major part of my time in the region will also involve engaging with Mad movements across the UK and Europe — connecting with activists, survivor/user-led organisations, Mad Studies communities and lived-experience networks, and learning from different histories, politics and approaches to organising.

I’m looking forward to contributing to teaching and conversations at UCL, continuing my PhD research, and strengthening connections between academia, lived-experience communities and Mad movements.

📍 London + UK/Europe
📅 October–December 2026

If you’re a researcher, activist, Mad/survivor scholar, lived-experience researcher or part of an organisation working in these spaces across the UK or Europe, I’d love to hear from you and connect while I’m there. 💜

16/07/2026

🔥♿ Disability Pride Month × Mad Pride at Mad Collective

Madness is not something to hide. Mad Pride is about identity, community, creativity, resistance and our right to understand our experiences on our own terms.

Until 31 July, receive 20% off orders over $150 using the code:

MADPRIDE20

Wear the words that speak to you:

🔥 Madness Is My Superpower
✊ Mad Rights Are Human Rights
🌍 Mad Pride: United as One
📣 Oppression Is Not an Illness
🏳️ Mad ’N’ Proud
💜 Proudly a Voice Hearer
😈 Mad as Hell
🧠 Manic Depressive
🔥 Burn the DSM VI
🗑️ ICD Trash
🏥 Burn Psych Down
⚡ Break the Stigma
🏳️ Mad Pride Flag

Available across T-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and stickers.

Whether you identify as Mad, disabled, neurodivergent, a voice hearer, survivor, consumer or ex-patient—or are still finding the language that fits—there is space for you in this movement.

Wear your madness. Celebrate your difference. Make resistance visible.

Use MADPRIDE20 at checkout for 20% off orders over $150.

Offer ends 11:59 pm AEST on 31 July 2026.

Shop the collection: www.madcollective.com.au/shop

09/06/2026

💜 Wear the Movement. Support the Movement. 💜

One of the questions I am often asked is how people can support the activism, advocacy, research, and movement-building work I am involved in across Australia and internationally.

One way is through the Mad Collective merchandise store.

Mad Collective is a for-purpose social enterprise that supports and resources the Mad Pride movement through visibility, identity, community, and activism. It is grounded in values of human rights, disability justice, inclusion, empowerment, and resistance to stigma and psychiatric oppression.

Every purchase helps support work that spans:

✊ Human rights and social justice advocacy
🌏 International Mad movement organising and solidarity
♿ Disability justice and psychosocial disability rights
🏳️‍🌈 Q***r, Mad, and neurodivergent liberation
📢 Challenging sanism, discrimination, and stigma
🏛️ Engagement with the WHO, United Nations, and global policy spaces
🤝 Community-led alternatives, peer support, and collective action

I wanted to create merchandise that reflects our movements, our histories, and our pride. Whether it's "Mad 'N' Proud", "Break the Stigma", or "Oppression Is Not an Illness", these designs are intended to spark conversations and make visible a community that has too often been silenced.

Madness is part of human diversity. We deserve to be visible, celebrated, and connected.

If you'd like to support the work, check out the collection below:

🛍️ https://www.madcollective.com.au/

Thank you to everyone who has already purchased merchandise, shared the store, or worn Mad Collective gear out in the world. Seeing these designs at conferences, community events, and on the streets reminds me that our movement is growing.

Discover Mad Collective's empowering merchandise supporting the Mad Pride movement and mental health advocacy. Shop our unique collection celebrating authenticity and resilience.

05/06/2026

Last montH, I spoke at the Care Not Custody campaign event, co-organised by the Global Mental Health Action Network (GMHAN) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), on the urgent need for deinstitutionalisation, at the World Health Assembly 🇨🇭

I spoke about a difficult truth: across the world, people experiencing madness, distress, and psychosocial disability continue to face coercion, detention, seclusion, restraint, forced treatment, and other practices that would be unacceptable in most areas of healthcare.

These are not historical issues. They are contemporary human rights issues.

My mother experienced trauma, abuse, poverty, and abandonment. Labelled with Borderline Personality Disorder, she repeatedly entered systems that often responded to her suffering through diagnosis rather than understanding. One week after being discharged from hospital, she died by su***de.

The last time I saw my mother was in a psychiatric hospital.

Years later, I found myself cycling through similar systems. Too often, I encountered environments focused on containment rather than healing.

These experiences taught me that one of the greatest barriers to justice is sanism — the belief that people experiencing madness are less credible, less capable, and less deserving of autonomy and dignity.

Across the world, Mad movements, psychiatric survivor movements, disability justice movements, and peer-led initiatives have long argued that there is another way.

The answer is not more institutions or more coercion. The answer is housing, peer support, mutual aid, trauma-informed approaches, culturally grounded healing, and rights-based community support.

Deinstitutionalisation is not about abandoning people.

It is about ending abandonment disguised as care.

If you have lived or living experience of institutionalisation, involuntary treatment, seclusion, restraint, or other restrictive practices, I encourage you to join the Care Not Custody Experts by Experience group and help shape this international work.

Nothing about us without us.

Learn more: https://unitedgmh.org/care-not-custody/