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You are here: Wild Ideas > Madhouse >
You know it feels like I’m going insane
I’ve done everything you told me to take away the pain
And then you change my medication again
Getting harder to tell just who or what’s insane...
— The Levellers
 hat
can one expect to find in the Madhouse? Well, madness, of course. Various
views of what constitutes sanity and insanity, the experiences of both,
and strategies for coping. Of particular interest here are ecopsychology
— the theory that our personal and cultural madness may be rooted
in alienation from nature; mood disorders such as depression and anxiety;
activist burnout and how to deal with it; and the culturally relative
nature of many of our definitions of “mental illness”.
Too many web sites that address the topic of madness fall into one of
two polarized categories: self-help or family support sites, which are
generally completely uncritical of mainstream psychiatry and unquestioning
of the medical model of mental illness; and radically anti-psychiatry
sites which, while often insightful in their critiques of the mental
health system, are notably short on viable alternatives for people struggling
with very real problems.
The Madhouse will be neither of these. I want this to be a place where
people can find both challenging ideas and practical coping strategies.
Nothing is off-limits — neither mainstream resources nor radical
critique. The only absolute criterion is that everything remain rooted
in, and truthful to, personal experience.
The Madhouse can be viewed as a stand-alone site, but it is also part
of a larger entity called Wild Ideas,
an online celebration of the Wild in all its forms, from the familiar
sense of wilderness and wild nature, to looser interpretations in the
contexts of spirituality, sexuality, politics and consciousness. It's the
newest area of Wild Ideas, and is still quite underdeveloped at the moment,
but will be expanding as time goes on.
Regarding navigation, the menu at the top, just below the title graphic,
shows the other areas of Wild Ideas. The menu at left shows the different
sections of the Madhouse (note: right now, there isn't much more to the Madhouse
than this page and the Web Reviews).
All content copyright 1999-2006 by the
individual authors, where cited, or by
Lynna Landstreet
where not specifically credited.
Except where otherwise noted, this site is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
2.5 License.
Site design: Spider Silk Design - Toronto web designers
This page last modified: January 29, 2006
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