Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum

Michael Rembis’s book rewrites the history of madness, at last foregrounding the ideas, action and lived experience of mad people through over a century of asylums. More than that, it provides powerful foundations for the modern Mad Studies movement to realize its goal of offering an inclusive, decolonizing route to understanding and supporting our future wellbeing. This is an essential text. * Peter Beresford OBE, Visiting Professor, University of East Anglia, England, and Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives *This impressive book curates hundreds of stories by mad people between 1830 and 1950. Heralding a new intellectual approach to histories of madness, Michael Rembis invites readers into the worlds of ‘mad writers’ as they started public conversations, invoked themes of justice and visibility, and sought reform. This is an exciting, radical history of mental illness as experience, of mad peoples resistance and striving for connection, community, and peer support. * Catharine Coleborne, Author of Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840-1910 *This superb and accessible book underlines the central importance of mad writers who worked to influence public opinion on what madness means and why institutionalized people must be taken seriously about their own experiences. Writing Mad Lives makes a major contribution to remembering the work of mostly long-neglected authors while correcting the historical record by showing that mad activism in the US long pre-dates the second half of the twentieth century. * Geoffrey Reaume, Associate Professor, Critical Disability Studies, York University, Toronto *Michael Rembis’s book rewrites the history of madness, at last foregrounding the ideas, action and lived experience of mad people through over a century of asylums. More than that, it provides powerful foundations for the modern Mad Studies movement to realize its goal of offering an inclusive, decolonizing route to understanding and supporting our future wellbeing. This is an essential text. * Peter Beresford OBE, Visiting Professor, University of East Anglia, England and Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives *This impressive book curates hundreds of stories by mad people between 1830 and 1950. Heralding a new intellectual approach to histories of madness, Michael Rembis invites readers into the worlds of ‘mad writers’ as they started public conversations, invoked themes of justice and visibility, and sought reform. This is an exciting, radical history of mental illness as experience, of mad peoples’ resistance and striving for connection, community, and peer support. * Catharine Coleborne, Author of Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840 - 1910 *This superb and accessible book underlines the central importance of mad writers who worked to influence public opinion on what madness means and why institutionalized people must be taken seriously about their own experiences. Writing Mad Lives makes a major contribution to remembering the work of mostly long-neglected authors while correcting the historical record by showing that mad activism in the US long pre-dates the second half of the twentieth century. * Geoffrey Reaume, Associate Professor, Critical Disability Studies, York University, Toronto *

Michael Rembis is the Director of the Center for Disability Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He has served on the American Historical Association’s Committee on Disability, the Organization of American Historians Committee on Disability and Disability History, and the board of directors of the Society for Disability Studies.