The Mad Movement in Spain. On the politics of recognition and the debate on the question of mad essentialism

Abstract

This article is part of the debate on the «struggles for the recognition of difference» (Fraser, 2008) that has been growing and developing in recent years. It focuses specifically on the so-called Mad Movement as a territory where the demands of people and groups who have lived through the experience of psychiatrisation in the field of mental health converge. The text proposes a series of analytical variables and concepts that allow an approach to the Movement in Spain as a political space of common construction to produce testimony and knowledge that enable other possibilities in the understanding of the social experience of psychic suffering. It proposes an itinerary that allows us to observe the phenomenon as a territory of dispute, dialogue and social listening that leads to the promotion of a critical conscience; as an attempt at emancipation, an instance in which people renounce being objects of intervention of expert knowledge to become subjects in their own life projects.

From the incorporation of Miranda Fricker’s concept of «Epistemic Injustice» and the theory of labelling, among other references, the article understands the violence experienced by psychiatric patients as a starting point for the origin of the Movement. At the same time, it reflects on the difficulties generated by the notion of madness as an axis of identification in the structuring of actions. A closed definition of what it means to be mad is not proposed, but rather it is understood as a category that is built on the basis of constructing oneself as a subject with rights in the face of an expert other who has historically closed off this possibility.