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.

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

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.

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

“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.

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.

We sit down with Colombian artist Polvo Eres, whose exhibition Our Existence is Protest is currently on view at the Center for Mad Culture. Born out of fear of government crackdowns on mad, disabled, houseless, and immigrant communities, the project transformed the Center into a space of resistance where community members could gather, set type, and print their own posters of protest.

In this conversation, we talk about political violence, the weaponization of psychiatric language, and the power of creating together when traditional protest spaces are inaccessible. As part of the show, visitors also left their own messages of protest, two of which are shared at the end of the episode.

Instagram: @polvo.eres

website: polvoeres.co

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 Girls, their endless rebellions, and the dreamlike collages drawn from mass culture. We also look at the debates around his reception: outsider art, madness, violence, and Queer readings that complicate how we understand his life.

Darger’s story asks us to think about who gets remembered, who is erased, and how madness can be a site of creativity as well as struggle.

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—seeing repetition, metaphor, and fragmentation not as disorder but as strategies of expression and survival. Along the way we discuss surrealism, Antonin Artaud, and Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals, highlighting how psychiatry’s categories like “logorrhea” and “graphomania” have been reimagined by poets and activists as creative methods.

We also ask: What happens when madness is read as method instead of failure? What shifts when we reclaim mad poetics as part of literary and cultural history?