Mad pride

Mad Pride emerged at the end of the 20th Century primarily in London, UK, as a mass movement of mental health services users and their allies. It seeks to reclaim the terms "mad", "nutter", "psycho" and so forth from the hysterical tabloid media, and through a series of mass media campaigns to re-educate the general public on such subjects as the causes of mental "illness", the real victims of the mental health system, and the global suicide pandemic. Its founder members were the late Pete Shaughnessy, the early Robert Dellar, "freaky Phil" Murphy and "gentleman Jim" MacDougall, among others. It was launched alongside a book of the same name, Mad Pride: a celebration of mad culture, which is still available from mad publishers Chipmunka Publishing. This launch combined an evening of drunken revelry with traditional mad folk music at the legendary Chats Palace community arts centre in Hackney, and the book was Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week in the Guardian newspaper.

Comments ensued from such literary luminaries as the English republican Jonathan Freedland and popular novelist Clare Allan. Mad pride goes from strength to strength in many forms, such as the south London collective Creative Routes, Chipmunka publishing itself, and the many works of the mighty Dolly Sen