Our goal, in drafting early versions of the current chapter, was to ask hard questions about the potential synergies between the disability rights movement (and associated academic theory) and mad movement(s). To that end, we initially included a targeted section, centred on recent work on impairment, pain and embodiment within disability theory under the premise that this would facilitate an exploration of how work within disability studies might inform activist theory focused on madness. However, as we struggled through this analysis, we came to feel that our efforts were distinctly premature. While theoretical traction can certainly be gained from hybridisation across and between disparate domains, the complexity of movement-specific identities, social values and theoretical commitments seemed to demand that we grapple with our own problems, before too seriously looking elsewhere.

We came to this task informed and also constrained by our own complicated and often confusing personal experiences of psychosis. If there is a point in the lives of activists when they feel a relative sense of certainty and stability in the way they view the politics of their movement(s), we have not yet reached it. In this sense, our theoretical hesitations undoubtedly reflect a more personal feeling of caution and uncertainty.

Both of us grew up in the shadow of a parent with enduring and, in a very real way, ‘disabling’ struggles with psychosis. Unlike us, these members of our family – our mothers – live at the margins of society with no voice in either academic circles or centres of political organising. Like Spivak's (1988) subaltern, it is questionable to what extent, in an authoritative or publicly legitimated way, they can speak at all. Our own trajectories have been very different: we will soon join the ranks of the less than 1 per cent of the US population with doctorates; when we speak, at least a large portion of the time, we are able to make ourselves heard. The differences between us (Nev and Timothy) and between both of us and our mothers, serve as a constant reminder of the often pronounced differences in the experiences of individuals diagnosed or labelled with psychotic disorders in the United States. In our work as clinicians, peer facilitators and researchers, these differences – and their human and sociopolitical costs – have only become clearer and more pressing as time has gone on.