Taking Madness off the Shelf

If there is one thing I think that a person can learn about me by looking at my bookshelves, it is that I am completely and utterly mad. The words “madness ” and “mental illness ” pop up again and again on the spines of my books, proudly announcing that perhaps their owner has something a bit wrong with her head. The Age of Madness and The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz, Women and Madness by Phyllis Chesler, and of course Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, sit next to multiple texts on famous asylums, the history of psychiatric care, and the persecution of the mentally ill/disabled. These loony volumes and my accompanying collection of texts on disability theory have changed my perception of what it means to think differently, and allowed me to feel a sense of pride in belonging to a set of people that Foucault once charmingly referred to as “my little mad ones, my little excluded ones, my little abnormals,”1 but these mostly theoretical texts are not where my collection of books on madness began. Initially when I sought to connect with abnormal minds through books, it was through fiction. My collection began over ten years ago with a search for community. I knew that I was what most people would deem “mentally ill ” from the time I was twelve or thirteen, but I was taught to regard this term with a sense of revulsion, and directly forbidden from ever saying