Towards a Mad technoscience: revealing, repurposing, and reimagining carceral mental health technologies

Digital technologies are increasingly being used in mental health services. This includes carceral settings, where the surveillance technology Oxevision has been implemented in the bedrooms of people in psychiatric wards across the UK, Europe and the US. Mad people have drawn attention to the oppressive and violent nature of Oxevision, and the neoliberal political motivations behind the innovation scheme through which it emerged. This includes the StopOxevision campaign, started by four of this article’s authors. In this article, we draw concepts from crip technoscience together with abolitionist perspectives on technology to argue for the necessity of a Mad technoscience; an account of how Mad people – particularly those of us who are, or have been, incarcerated – resist, repurpose, and (re)imagine technologies used on us against our will. We illustrate this through three vignettes detailing Mad technoscience in practice, informed by our experiences with this technology, and our resistance against it. Ultimately, we reject the notion – mainly perpetuated by industry – that mental health technologies are, in themselves, either ‘good’ or ‘bad’; designated as such through merely ‘involving’ Mad people in their design. Rather, we understand these technologies, and our practices concerning them, as inherently entangled with the violent historical and contemporary injustices of psychiatry and its carceral tools. Subsequently, our final argument is inspired by Benjamin’s (2021) call for a radical reimagining of what technoscience might look like outside of carcerality. Here, we consider how mental health technologies could be otherwise – to avoid simply ‘tinkering Armageddon’.