Mad Tea

In this episode of  Mad Tea , we sit down with Ishaa Vinod Chopra, author of Finding Order in Disorder and founder of the collective by the same name. Ishaa speaks candidly about living with diagnosis, surviving abuse, and navigating the systems that attempt to define her. She reflects on how those experiences shaped her understanding of self rather than ending it. Our conversation moves toward th...

In this first episode of Season Two Matt Bodett sits down with Matthew Jackman for a conversation that moves across art, identity, and the lived experience of madness without reducing any of it to diagnosis. We talk about how culture shapes what gets called disordered, how language can both confine and release, and what it means to claim authorship over your own narrative. Matthew reflects on proc...

In this conversation you will hear Nze Okoronta speak from years of building peer-run crisis alternatives. The focus stays on peer respites, warmlines, and community responses that move away from policing and coercion. You learn how these models function day to day, not as ideals but as working systems. The discussion names structural harm inside mainstream crisis care and shows what changes when...

I sat down with Matt Perry to talk about his book  A Revolution of the Mind . The book asks you to rethink what the mental health system considers normal. It asks you to look at crisis response, policy, peer work, and community power through the lens of lived experience. Matt has moved through these systems as a patient and an advocate. He has organized statewide networks, shaped policy in Illinoi...

This week’s  Mad Tea  offers a pause. Matt reflects on the practice of self-permission within mad and disabled life, sharing gratitude for the community that makes this work possible. It is an episode about rest, imperfection, and the quiet courage it takes to keep creating through uncertainty.

This week I sat down with  Dylan Sturdy , the creator of Chicago’s first  MadMade Print and Zine Fair , happening November 15th from 12 to 4:30 pm. The fair will gather mad and disabled artists working in print and zine for a day of conversation, creativity, and connection. Our talk moves through Dylan’s path to this moment, the choices that shaped her practice, what community means when you live...

In this episode, Matt and Megan journey into the life and words of  Margery Kempe , a 15th-century English mystic whose uncontrollable weeping, visions, and pilgrimages made her both revered and reviled. Told through a mad perspective, the conversation explores how her tears became testimony, how her voice survived interrogation, and how her story continues to challenge the boundaries between fait...

This episode explores how political leaders weaponize the language of madness, calling critics “lunatics,” “hysterical,” or “insane," to dismiss dissent and justify control. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s  Pedagogy of the Oppressed , we examine how these labels silence dialogue, criminalize difference, and collapse madness, criminality, and foreignness into one category of threat. We ask what happens t...

“Everyone is a little crazy” is a phrase we may hear often, it is meant to soften the edges of difference. In this episode, Matt Bodett unpacks the grain of truth in that claim while pushing back on the ways it flattens lived experience. From the spectrum of human disorientation to the histories of stigma, confinement, and appropriation, this conversation asks: what gets lost when madness is reduc...

In this episode of  Mad Tea , Matt and Megan explore the extraordinary life of Hildegard of Bingen. From her beginnings in the cloister to her bold preaching tours across Germany, Hildegard emerges as a visionary abbess, composer, healer, and writer who challenged the boundaries of her time. We discuss her luminous visions, her music that sought to echo the harmony of creation, her inventive  Ling...

In this episode of  Mad Tea , we dive into the extraordinary hidden world of Henry Joseph Darger Jr. (1892–1973). A reclusive hospital custodian in Chicago, Darger spent decades creating a 15,000-page epic and hundreds of massive watercolors that no one saw until after his death. We trace his childhood losses and institutionalization, his solitary adult life, and the vast universe of the Vivian Gi...

In this episode of  Mad Tea , we explore how 19th- and early 20th-century psychiatry turned the poetry of the mad into medical evidence. From Dr. G. Mackenzie Bacon’s  Writing of the Insane  to Ales Hrdlička’s  Art and Literature in the Mentally Abnormal , we look at how doctors treated poems and letters as “symptoms” instead of works of art. We contrast that history with a mad-centered reading—se...

This episode explores mad liberation as both personal truth and collective resistance. We revisit themes from earlier conversations, not out of redundancy, but as an act of solidarity in the face of ongoing political hostility toward mad lives. Through reflection, metaphor, and lived experience, we examine how societal roles are imposed, how resistance becomes community building, and why affirming...

In this episode, recorded live at Access Living on August 7th, 2025, Matt Bodett explores the relationship between madness and culture, examining how it has shaped our histories and creative expressions, and how it has been systematically erased from them. Part of  Cripping the Galleries , a collaboration with Bodies of Work, Access Living, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Art Insti...

🚨 In this episode of Mad Tea , we break down Trump’s new Executive Order on homelessness and mental health line by line. What looks like care is actually surveillance, coercion, and criminalization. We name the harm, expose the language, and offer solidarity. Housing is a right. Madness is not a crime. Listen now. Here is a link to the executive order on the government's website: https://www....

In this episode of Mad Tea , Matt and Megan explore the idea of ghosts—not the spectral kind, but those that haunt our memories, bodies, and inner landscapes. Through the stories of Milarepa, the Tibetan “mad yogi,” and Vincent van Gogh, they reflect on how madness can be met not with fear or suppression, but with compassion, invitation, and integration. These figures did not escape their sufferin...

What does it mean to be responsible as a mad person in a world that refuses to recognize your reality? In this episode, Matt Bodett and Megan Sterling explore the difficult, necessary, and expansive terrain of mad responsibility. Drawing from the myth of Herakles and his labors, we ask: What happens when madness causes harm? What is penance without punishment? And how do we create communities that...

In this special reflection episode, we step away from biographies and histories to explore madness itself—not as a diagnosis, but as a philosophy. What happens when madness is seen not as error, but as insight? Not as disorder, but as sacred rupture? Drawing on lived experience, poetic language, and philosophical frameworks, this episode invites listeners into a deeper meditation on perception, be...

In this episode, we trace the haunting life and visionary work of Unica Zürn. She was a German/French surrealist, poet, and artist. Through drawings, anagram poetry, and hallucinatory writing, Zürn reimagined madness not as pathology, but as a form of expression. We explore her relationships, institutionalization, and artistic resistance, asking what it means to write from a dangerous place.

This episode traces the life of Antonin Artaud—a poet, actor, director, and relentless disruptor of theatrical and psychiatric order. From his early struggles with mental distress and dependency to his expulsion from the Surrealist movement, Artaud's life defied categorization. We follow his journey through experimental theater, his voyages to Ireland and Mexico, and the nine years he spent co...

On April 24th, Julia Macintosh visited the Center for Mad Culture all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland. Julia presented some of her history and advocacy work with friends who came to hear her speak. This visit to the Center was accompanied by the wonderful news that Julia would be opening a Center for Mad Culture UK! Our collaborations will find further ways to create international opportunities f...

In this episode, we sit down with artist Cam Collins, whose current exhibition at the Center for Mad Culture "Copper Odyssey 2: Museum of Miracles," explores the layered relationship between lived experiences and built worlds. Cam talks about their process and the role of printmaking and museums in their work. We get into the way of the Canvas, Redman, and Respecting the Craft. This conv...

Attorney and psychiatric survivor Jim Gottstein joins us to discuss his decades-long fight against forced treatment and psychiatric abuse. As the founder of the Law Project for Psychiatric Rights (PsychRights), Jim has worked to expose the legal and ethical violations at the heart of the mental health system. In this episode, he shares the inside story of  The Zyprexa Papers —a landmark case in wh...

This episode of Mad Tea explores the deeply complicated 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill by Hans Prinzhorn—a psychiatrist who gathered over 5,000 works of art made by institutionalized psychiatric patients. In this episode, Matt and Megan examine how the book influenced modern art movements like Surrealism and Art Brut, while also reinforcing psychiatric narratives that erased the humanity a...

Ever heard of Mad Pride?  If not, this is your invitation. Before the hashtags, before the awareness ribbons, there was a bed pushed through the streets of Toronto. Survivors in hospital gowns. It wasn’t a plea for better treatment—it was a celebration. A refusal. A revolution. In this episode of  Mad Tea , we bring you the story of Mad Pride—from its protest beginnings to its global evolution. It...