Disability History and Mad People’s History

This presentation will discuss the state of the field of mad people’s history in North America beginning with a brief historiographical overview ranging from anthologies, articles and books, as well as web sites, which illustrate first person perspectives of mad people from a historical perspective, either through primary source documents or published analyses of such experiences. Who is, and is not, represented in published sources will be discussed in order to address the need for more work on the histories of: racialized mad people; sexual minorities; class issues around the exploited labor of unpaid institutionalized inmates and sheltered workshop workers in the community; the gendered dimensions of this history (which, arguably, has been more seriously addressed than other issues listed here, though much remains to be done); and the cross-­‐disability links between mad people’s pasts and those of other population groups who have been categorized as disabled. In particular, the need to draw links between the histories of mad people and people with developmental disabilities provides a potentially rich area of comparative analyses. Throughout this presentation, methodological challenges of the practicality of accessing much of this hidden history in archival repositories will be discussed, along with our obligations as researchers of ensuring our work engages and is accessible to the people whom we study.