What we’re up to

In this Mad in America essay, Tam Martin Fowles (2026) reflects on her lived experiences to argue for closer dialogue between psychedelic research and mad perspectives. She questions the exclusion of people diagnosed with psychosis from psychedelic research, contrasts the support offered by psychedelic integration with more coercive models of psychosis care, and calls for a future in which psychedelic research and the mad liberation movement reshape one another.

In this Psychedelics article, coauthored by Tam Martin Fowles and Tehseen Noorani (2026), the authors bring current scientific research into psychedelic-assisted therapies into conversation with long-standing insights and concerns of critical, historical, user-led, participatory, and theoretical literatures on psychosis/madness. They develop key questions and frameworks for this emerging subfield, including revisiting the concept of “integration” in contrast to the “sealing over” of experiences of psychosis/madness.

In this International Mad Studies Journal article, Sabina Wantoch (2025) argues that the “fear of madness” is not inherent to mad experience itself but is socially produced through stigma, Othering, and practices of control, and that coping requires relational, collective ways of “being with” madness that challenge these dominant cultural framings.

In this BioSocieties article, Tehseen Noorani (2025) challenges the opposition between “willed” psychedelic experiences and “unwilled” psychosis, arguing that psychedelic therapy’s emphasis on surrender, trust, and openness reveals unstable assumptions about autonomy and brings psychedelic medicalisation into uneasy proximity with the forms of vulnerability and boundary violation it seeks to distinguish from psychosis.

In this contribution to A. Tollan et al.’s edited volume Breaking Convention: A Seismic Shift in Psychedelia, Strange Attractor Press, Tehseen Noorani (2022) traces the history of modelling and excluding ‘madness’ in psychedelic science.

Funded by a Wellcome Early-Career Award, Madness in Medicine uses community-engaged clinical ethnography in South London to bridge divided research on psychedelics and psychosis, examining how psychotic-like experiences are made therapeutic in clinical practice amid the psychedelic renaissance and contemporary mental health crisis.

This conference series re-examined the contested relationship between madness, psychedelics, and spiritual awakening, challenging the pathologization of difficult psychedelic and extreme emotional experiences while opening dialogue around psychosis, recovery, medicalization, and community-based approaches to care and harm reduction.