The Mad Archives
Stories of Mad movements resistance
What are the Mad Archives?
The Mad Archives is a living, community-centred space dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing the histories, stories, artefacts, and knowledges of Mad, psychiatric survivor, peer-led, and psychosocial disability movements around the world.
It brings together materials such as written and oral histories, zines, flyers, recordings, personal testimonies, creative works, and documentation of peer-led organising, centring the voices and experiences that have often been marginalised or excluded from dominant psychiatric and institutional archives.
Who can contribute?
The Mad Archives welcomes contributions from everyone with lived experience, community history, or materials connected to Mad and survivor movements.
This includes Mad people, psychiatric survivors, activists, peers, artists, and community members who wish to share diaries, flyers, recordings, reflections, creative expressions, or documentation of organising and events.
The archive is collective and participatory, shaped by those whose lives and movements it documents.
What is their purpose?
The purpose of the Mad Archives is not only to preserve history but to actively challenge erasure and epistemic exclusion by centring lived experience as legitimate and vital knowledge.
It aims to honour the complexity of Mad lives and movements, support ongoing co-theorising and knowledge production, foster cross-movement and transnational solidarity, and make these histories accessible to researchers, activists, and communities working toward more just and humane futures.
