Demedicalizing mental health: Toward community-based approaches

Author Biography

• Simon Adam

  Simon Adam is a social scientist in nursing. His program of scholarship focuses on the mental health industry, its institutional and discursive dimensions, the consumer/survivor/mad experience, and alternative and counterhegemonic ways of conceptualizing human illness, suffering, and crisis. His work considers what is currently termed “mental illness” as being largely a product of social, economic, and political apparatuses, and examines how education, professionalization, and pop culture reproduce a medicalized understanding of an otherwise normal human condition. Simon works with various communities, including psychiatric survivors and psychiatric consumers, mad people, neurodiverse people, and people who use drugs. In addition to scholarly venues, his work also appears on his podcast, Crazy Making, at anchor.fm/crazymaking.