Paper short abstract:

Mental-health activist service 'survivors' live with the shadow of biomedicine. While striving to assert their autonomy, the biomedical system positions them as incapacitated. This is the context in which they come together to build alternative worlds and make spaces to ‘go through madness’ together

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork with groups of mental-health activists in London. As past or current patients of the National Health Service, activists self-identify as 'survivors', 'evaders' and/or ‘ex-users’ of formal mental healthcare. These terms express how engagement with services has left activists with a profound sense of grievance. Activists decry the dominance of the biomedical model, invasive managerial systems, and the insensitivity of clinical encounters, many of which involve violence. The lingering affective and phenomenological presence of biomedicine in activists’ lives manifests as a shadow. Whilst activists strive to assert their autonomy and competence and call out epistemic violence and injustice, the biomedical system positions them as incapacitated and vulnerably dependent, in turn discounting their concerns and corroding their sense of independence. This is the context in which activists come together to forge their own modes of healing through worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the everyday relational and spatial practices and ways of being which are founded on mutual support and indeterminacy. Building healing worlds around these attributes allows activists to enact alternative social and political imaginaries. In the process, activists seek to re-frame their lives and relationships by making spaces to ‘be’ and ‘become’, and to ‘go through madness’ together.