no/mad is a posthuman and postidentitarian exploration of madness that challenges the assumption that mental distress is best understood as an individual pathology or stable identity.
Instead, Simon Adam reconceptualizes madness as a relational, distributed, and continually emerging phenomenon shaped by social, political, material, and ecological conditions. Drawing on mad studies, posthuman theory, poststructural thought, and psychiatric survivor/mad knowledge, the book argues that what is commonly called “madness” is often a misrecognition of structural violence, including poverty, housing precarity, racialization, policing, migration, and gendered oppression.
The book advances the concept of no/mad, a figuration that resists both psychiatric classification and the tendency of identity-based politics to solidify fluid experiences into governable categories. While recognizing the strategic importance of identities such as mad, survivor, and neurodivergent, the book examines how recognition and visibility can become mechanisms of capture that render subjects legible to institutional power. Through speculative cartography, digital ethnography, and community-based research, no/mad maps the creative practices through which people navigate, refuse, and evade psychiatric control while assembling alternative ecologies of care. Ultimately, the project offers a future-oriented vision of mad liberation grounded not in inclusion within existing systems, but in ongoing processes of relation, becoming, refusal, and collective world-building.