An Historic and Unprecedented Opportunity
Over forty years ago a group of psychiatric survivor activists and progressive mental health professionals from the San Francisco Bay Area got together to create a newsletter that would be distributed to treatment centers and individuals throughout the "madness network." That newsletter, Madness Network News, evolved and grew into a nationwide newspaper that sparked the "Mental Patient Liberation Movement" both here and abroad. The critiques and advocacy found within its pages, though often unknown or unacknowledged today, have, nevertheless, left an indelible legacy and imprint on the lives of people diagnosed with mental illnesses, their human dignity and civil rights, as well as in the policies and practices of the mental health treatment system. Most of today's Peer Specialists/Counselors/Advocates and the people they serve are the direct heirs and beneficiaries of the work started by these early pioneers in the psychiatric survivor movement yet have no idea of the ground-breaking work started by their predecessors. This complete collection of Madness Network News is an unprecedented opportunity to reclaim and rediscover the history of the millions of people who have been marginalized and discounted as "mental patients," their despairs, their struggles, and their hopes.
"If you know whence you came, there are no limitations to where you can go.” James Baldwin
Now, for first the time in nearly thirty years this untold history of the psychiatric survivor movement, as told by those who lived it, is being made available, to the general public, universities, and public libraries in textbook format. These rare, hard-to-find newspapers which were originally published on 11.5" x 17" stock newspaper have been re-sized to standard 8.5" x 11" letter-sized pages so that they could be reproduced and converted into softcover textbooks. Few public libraries nationwide possess original copies of Madness Network News, and those that do, display them only as reference literature, not as rentals. Madness Network News is also now available as full volume e-books on Google Play and Google Books or as single issue e-books by downloading the CopySafe PDF Reader. "Let's restore Madness Network News and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement to their rightful place in history." David Gonzalez, 2003 Fast for Freedom in Mental Health Hunger Striker
Madness Network News
Madness Network News (MNN) began as a San Francisco Bay area newsletter in 1972 and then evolved into a quarterly newspaper format whose readership extended to a national as well as an international level. MNN became, in essence, the voice and networking center for the "Mental Patient Liberation" movement in the United States, unapologetically advocating for the full human dignity, self-expression and civil rights of people diagnosed and labeled as mentally ill. As a quarterly journal, Madness Network News published personal experiences, creative writing, art, political
theory, and factual reporting from the point of view of people who had been on the receiving end of psychiatric treatment and who now found themselves treated as social pariahs, living in oppressive conditions and denied even the most basic aspects of personal choice and self-determination. Known for its use of humor and sense of irony, Madness Network News wrote on its masthead that it covered "All The Fits That's News to Print". Ceasing publication in 1986, Madness Network News remains an invaluable historical and primary source material that continues to elucidate the concerns and lives of people labeled as mentally ill both in the past and today.
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