This seminar will feature early findings from Matthew Jackman’s PhD research, which maps the international Mad movements through the lenses of Mad Studies and lived-experience resistance. Matthew will explore how individuals from various backgrounds -including consumers, survivors, activists, and diplomats - articulate their experiences of oppression and envision transformative changes in mental health systems through storytelling.

This discussion will highlight how these communities (consumers of mental health services, survivors of psychiatry and coercion, ex-patients who reject ongoing patient identity, mad people reclaiming madness as identity, culture and politics, people with psychosocial disabilities) organise to challenge medicalisation and Western psychiatric universalism, treat lived experience as political and epistemic authority, advance collective peer support, and community-based alternatives, reclaim knowledge and identity, and assert their rights, dignity, and self-determination.

Matthew's presentation will be followed by a panel discussion about the lived experience movement in relation to mental health advocacy, policy, and research, as well as global recommendations and their relevance in Asian contexts.