A Question for Mad Studies: What About the Non-English-Speaking World?

I made a long, tiring trip to a book launch. The book was presented as an introduction to the basics of Mad Studies.

My question was this: as someone involved in mental-health action in China, I wanted to know whether the book discussed practices and research outside the English-speaking centres. I could see all sorts of interesting, critical, radical mental-health work happening around the world.

The author said the book discussed the turn towards Mad Studies, but he wouldn't say it covered the things I was asking about. I could accept that answer. Another guest added that Mad Studies means different things in different places: Ireland, the United States, and Canada, for instance. Even within Canada, it differs from province to province.

My immediate thought was: I asked about places outside the English-speaking centres. Why are we talking about English-speaking places again?

What particularly bothered me was that she didn't continue towards the non-English-speaking world. She redirected the question towards differences within the English-speaking world: practice in Ireland might not be the same as here; Mad Studies in the US and Canada might not mean the same thing; even within Canada, its meaning might vary between provinces. None of that is wrong, of course. But it still didn't address my concern. It also exposed the default boundaries of "diversity": they still stopped at the English-speaking world. As though a little comparison within that world were enough to answer a question about what lies outside its centres.

The response sounded very attentive to cultural diversity, but it struck me as slippery and dismissive. It reduced my challenge to a piece of common knowledge about cultural difference, as though I didn't know that things vary from place to place. Of course I know that. First, though, difference shouldn't be essentialized, as if experiences in different places were sealed off from one another, untranslatable and beyond comparison. Second, difference isn't an excuse not to discuss something. Third, even Canada, even Ontario, contains worlds outside the English-speaking centres. Migrants, international students, refugees, people involved in action across borders, non-English-language experiences, people from other political systems and traditions of mental-health practice: we're already here. Even the "local" is already transnationally constituted.

To me, that answer felt evasive and defensive.

If you're introducing a book and keep invoking whiteness, decolonization, the Global North, and intersectionality, you can't slide past a question about practices beyond the English-speaking centres with "it's different everywhere." At the very least, you need to acknowledge that the book remains largely situated in English-speaking, Global North, North American traditions of knowledge; that it hasn't adequately addressed mental-health resistance in the non-English-speaking world; and that this isn't a minor omission, but a question about the politics of knowledge that Mad Studies must face as it becomes institutionalized as a field.

I wasn't picking a fight or demanding that one book cover the whole world. I wanted to see how different people would answer a familiar question.

Now that the term Mad Studies circulates across borders, it can't enjoy that circulation and the disciplinary benefits it brings, then retreat to "it's different everywhere" when someone asks about the non-English-speaking world. If things were so utterly different, people wouldn't use the term or draw on it to make sense of so much. Precisely because it can connect across contexts, we need to discuss how it travels, how it is translated, how it misrecognizes others, and how it excludes them.

Canada is a country of immigration. Knowledge and practice are therefore already on the move. People involved in action elsewhere come here too, bringing their trauma, practices, concepts, and bodily memories with them. Canadian Mad Studies cannot possibly be only an internal Canadian affair. And psychiatric practice in the English-speaking world has long been closely entangled with the rest of the world: colonialism, medicine, global mental health, medication, diagnosis, NGOs, academic publishing, immigration, international students. These aren't separate things.

I found it dispiriting. Not just because of that exchange, but because of the many kinds of selective disregard I've encountered in North America. There is such enthusiasm here for complexity, such emphasis on the importance of lived experience. Yet I see complexity distributed unevenly: some complexity is cherished; some is set aside. In Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist fields, for instance, complexity keeps being opened up. But when the subject is Chinese labourers, Southeast Asian migrant workers, Asian people, or geopolitically charged questions involving China or Iran, suddenly there aren't so many layers to explore.

English-language critical scholarship is very good at saying global, international, decolonial, transnational. Yet it still often revolves around a limited set of places and issues that have been extensively translated, cited, funded, and framed in moral terms within English-language academia. Non-English-speaking people doing work outside the mainstream are simplified, silenced, or treated as cases, rather than sources of knowledge.

So I want to ask: do critical spaces of culture and knowledge selectively recognize some suffering as a theoretical resource, while demoting other suffering to background, case material, or complexity that would be inconvenient to pursue?

In some settings, I can feel that there is somewhere for my thoughts to land. Much more often, there isn't. I keep speaking: both to test the space and to make myself heard. The failure of that test doesn't make me dismiss the event, or the things I've learned in North America. What I feel more strongly is urgency: the urgency of theorizing my own work, of developing our own theory. How do we resist the unequal distribution of attention, empathy, complexity, and room to speak in spaces that call themselves progressive and critical?

I'm someone who identifies as a mad researcher, in the terms used here. I've come into a space of madness raised to the power of madness, and I still feel uneasy. Unease can be an occasion for producing knowledge. So I'm writing down this moment of discouragement first. The conversation can continue, slowly.