Breaking Silence through Mad Disclosures: A Comment on Greg Procknow's ‘Silence or Sanism’

Abstract

Like Greg Procknow (Procknow, 2017), I am implicated in any adult educational discussion of mental illness, having been diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety. So it's refreshing for me to see his piece appear in this journal. Like him, I've lamented the lack of sustained attention on how people learn to deal with a supposed absence of normality in their lives. Learning to live with a classification of mental illness is a multifaceted learning project involving everything from learning to undergo ideological detoxification to instituting biofeedback processes, working out the political calculus of disclosure to managing timings, dosages and combinations of medications. At its root of course, as Greg eloquently argues, is the challenging of the very notions of madness and sanity.

The Pedagogy of Saneness: Sane-Centricity in Popular Culture as Pedagogy

“…One can narrate one's storied subjectivities on, or about, one's mental illness(es) and make meaning of this hidden site of suffering through autoethnography (Brookfield, ; ; Couser, ). Autoethnography is a “genre of writing and research that captures multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (McMahon, , p. 304).…”

“…There is a shortfall of mentally ‘Othered’ males normalizing their own entangles with mental illness in adult education (AE) (Brookfield, ; Procknow, 2017a). Psychiatrized voices in AE have been vitiated by years of imprisoning silence.…”

“…Yet, the mental ‘Otherization’ and oppression of ‘mad’ folk is seldom ever named in critical pedagogy as sanism (Castrodale, ; Procknow, 2017a). It is only recently that mad scholarship has started to enter into AE and begun to capture mad students’ voices and lived experience (Brookfield, ; Castrodale, ).…”

“…To date I have not found any paper under the rubrics of AE, Mad Studies, or cinema studies that discusses how slasher films are performative texts which impart and enact notions of saneness. To my knowledge there has been no other adult educational researcher other than Brookfield (; ), who has been so forthcoming with their experiences of fabricating a synthetic, sane facade which has allowed them to step in and out of deviance in order to blend into pedagogical spaces. There is also a shortage of autoethnographies in AE that engage the educative aspects of slasher films in which masking hidden sites of suffering is the norm.…”

Invisible Lives: Using Autoethnography to Explore the Experiences of Academics Living with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

“…Fernando (2017) writing in reply, recognized the value of the Mad Studies perspective Procknow represents, while simultaneously advocating for a variety of research and practitioner‐based approaches to neurodiversity, madness, and mental wellness. Brookfield (2017) himself, applauded Procknow's contribution and pointed to the need to continue the dialogue about madness and mental disorders, including through Scholarly Personal Narratives (SPN) and other first‐hand accounts. Other survivor researchers like Janet Russo and Peter Beresford (2015) have followed in the steps of these critical voices by highlighting the tenuous and difficult relationship between social science research and their subjects, as participants can become colonized or excluded in unseen and subtle ways.…”