Breaking Silence through Mad Disclosures: A Comment on Greg Procknow's ‘Silence or Sanism’

Like Greg Procknow (Procknow, 2017), I am implicated in any adult educational discussion of mental illness, having been diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety. So it’s refreshing for me to see his piece appear in this journal. Like him, I’ve lamented the lack of sustained attention on how people learn to deal with a supposed absence of normality in their lives. Learning to live with a classification of mental illness is a multifaceted learning project involving everything from learning to undergo ideological detoxification to instituting biofeedback processes, working out the political calculus of disclosure to managing timings, dosages and combinations of medications. At its root of course, as Greg eloquently argues, is the challenging of the very notions of madness and sanity.