Mad Pasts, Mad Presence: International Mad Movements, Lived Experience Resistance, and Health Justice Futures

International Mad movements have emerged as powerful forms of lived experience–led resistance to psychiatric authority, medicalisation, and the global expansion of coercive mental health systems. While contemporary global mental health increasingly recognises the importance of “lived experience,” this recognition often occurs within institutional frameworks that risk depoliticising, professionalising, or extracting Mad knowledge from its activist and collective roots. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Mad activists, organisers, and scholars across multiple global regions, this presentation examines Mad movements as transnational health justice movements. It understands lived experience not as individual testimony, but as collective, political knowledge shaped by local histories, colonial legacies, and global mental health agendas. The analysis foregrounds how Mad movements organise differently across contexts while remaining connected through shared struggles against sanism, confinement, epistemic injustice, and carceral forms of care. The presentation situates international Mad movements within longer genealogies of survivor resistance, peer work, disability justice, and psychiatric abolition, tracing connections with prison abolition and other anti-carceral movements. It explores how Mad activism challenges dominant biomedical and recovery-oriented frameworks while advancing community-based, relational, and peer-led alternatives grounded in dignity, autonomy, and collective care. Attention is given to tensions within lived experience inclusion, including the co-option of Mad knowledge within professional and policy spaces, and the uneven translation of global recommendations into local contexts. The presentation argues that Mad movements offer critical insights for reimagining public mental health beyond reformist approaches, shifting the focus from scaling psychiatric interventions toward supporting non-coercive, contextually grounded, and justice-oriented responses to distress. By centring Mad presence as an ongoing practice of resistance, care, and imagination, this contribution invites participants to engage Mad pasts as living resources for building more ethical and liberatory mental health futures.