Mad Tea

The Center for Mad Culture
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For too long, mad voices have been silenced, dismissed, or medicalized—it's time to change that. Mad Tea explores the histories, stories, and creative expressions of madness, amplifying its insights, resilience, and brilliance. We challenge stereotypes and reframe madness as a way of understanding culture, art, and activism. This podcast is an extension of The Center for Mad Culture, a space dedicated to mad voices. Subscribe, share, and join the conversation. You can support this podcast by finding us on Patreon, where you'll have access to exclusive content!

  1. 13/12/2025

    Nze Okoronta Interview

    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 people with lived experience design the response. Nze draws on work at SOAR and Solstice House to explain how peer leadership reshapes safety, consent, and care. You are invited to listen for strategy, asking what it takes to replace emergency control with relational support? What gets lost when policy ignores peer knowledge? What becomes possible when mad and disabled people lead?

    51 min

  2. 22/11/2025

    Interview with Matt Perry

    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 Illinois, founded the Disability Law Society in law school, and now leads a community support team at Thresholds. His thinking is sharp, grounded, and deeply human. You will hear a conversation about change that comes from within the community. You will hear how lived experience shapes real reform. You will hear questions that stay with you. Take a listen. Ask what forms of liberation you are willing to imagine. And share the episode with anyone who is ready for a different kind of conversation.

    1h 5m

  3. 02/11/2025

    When the work must wait

    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.

    7 min

  4. 25/10/2025

    Interview with Dylan Sturdy

    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 at the edges of psychiatry, and how making art together can become its own kind of care.

    52 min

  5. 18/10/2025

    The Book of Margery Kempe

    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 faith, madness, and power. Listeners will discover how The Book of Margery Kempe the first autobiography in English, was dictated, lost for centuries, and rediscovered in 1934, reawakening a voice that still refuses silence. From medieval marketplaces to modern conversations about madness and identity, this episode invites reflection on what it means to live fully, speak boldly, and cry without apology.

    39 min

  6. 11/10/2025

    The Madness Card

    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 to truth when it is called madness, and how reclaiming language can restore dialogue and resistance

    35 min

  7. 04/10/2025

    Everyone is a little crazy... right?

    “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 reduced to a universal quirk? Matt traces how culture has borrowed mad aesthetics while sidelining mad people, and offers a different way of thinking, different ways oof reclaiming madness as identity, history, and knowledge.

    29 min

  8. 27/09/2025

    Hildegard of Bingen

    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 Lingua Ignota, and her writings on medicine and the natural world. Along the way, we reflect on what Hildegard can teach us about mad authenticity, spirituality, and the greening power she called viriditas. We also share a tea drawn from her world, hyssop, linking the taste of an ancient remedy with the themes of renewal and community. Tune in for history, reflection, and a living conversation with a figure whose voice still resonates across the centuries.

    35 min
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About

For too long, mad voices have been silenced, dismissed, or medicalized—it's time to change that. Mad Tea explores the histories, stories, and creative expressions of madness, amplifying its insights, resilience, and brilliance. We challenge stereotypes and reframe madness as a way of understanding culture, art, and activism. This podcast is an extension of The Center for Mad Culture, a space dedicated to mad voices. Subscribe, share, and join the conversation. You can support this podcast by finding us on Patreon, where you'll have access to exclusive content!

Information

  • Creator
    The Center for Mad Culture
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    33
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © The Center for Mad Culture
  • Show Website
    Mad Tea