Latin American Mad Studies: Conceptual Frameworks and Research Agenda

Abstract

This article analyzes the emergence of Mad Studies as an investigative tradition that proposes critical theories and alternative methodologies in the production of knowledge from people who have been labeled with psychiatric diagnoses. For Mad Studies, the meanings around Madness express the relationship of forces and the forms of oppression that constitute the field of mental health, therefore, they emphasize the political nature of the research that is developed in this field and sustain a questioning of the claim of objectivity and neutrality of the biomedical model. In this framework, through a review of the academic literature and netnography as a research method, the growing role of the communities that have received mental health care in Latin America to express their narratives in the public sphere is described, positioning themselves as agents of knowledge and political actors. Around these new grammars, Latin American Mad Studies are constituted as a research perspective towards the configuration of other ways of inhabiting madness and articulating their struggles for social emancipation in the contemporary regional scenario.