Mad World by Micha Frazer-Carroll | Review

Examining and critiquing the state of mental healthcare systems and the history of madness, Micha Frazer-Carroll's Mad World offers frameworks that go beyond the medical model of nature vs nurture, instead explaining how mental illness 'follows the political contours of our lives'. Very broadly intersectional, this book unpacks how mental illness is connected to *everything*: capitalism, racism, colonialism, disability, sanism, neoliberalism, the environment, class, art, gender, queerness, policing and incarceration, and so, so much more.

One of the elements that really stood out to me is how Frazer-Carroll explores dismantling the premise of diagnosis and psychiatry without dismissing the necessity of these systems in our current world. The book also questions the medicalisation of madness without prescribing guilt to those of us who rely on the medicalised model to stay afloat. It's through this sort of structure that she takes you on a whirlwind tour of the history of madness/mental illness, bringing you through the forces that have shaped it from the past, through to the present and finally, to visions of the future.

Mad World is very well-referenced without being dense, and I would whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone with an interest in our world because, as the author writes, ‘when we see that our oppression is so closely interrelated, it becomes easier to dismantle it, and build new worlds together.’ Especially as someone who’s been navigating mental health services for most of my life, I found so much to treasure in this exploration of how madness/mental illness permeates through our lives and societies.

So from one 'illegitimate knower' to another: pick this up. Get your loved ones to read it too. To the ‘well’ — you too. As Frazer-Carroll explains, and as disability advocates have long explained, the line between the two is often blurrier than you might think, if it even exists at all.