Institutional Autoethnography as Relational-Reflexive Testimony: Refuting 'Obsessive-Compulsive' Personality

A range of thoughts, feelings and actions pathologised as Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders are vastly underrepresented in Mad Movement narratives. In this interdisciplinary study, I technically explore how I have used institutional autoethnography as a methodological tool for practicing active disloyalty against totalising psychiatric and Mad paradigms. I discuss how my lived experience can critically and credibly provide a counter-discourse not only to ‘OCD’ as irrational and meaningless, but to Mad tropes of the idiosyncratic genius or eccentric, artistic spirit. These performative tropes are situated within neoliberal paradigms about the self as autonomous individual responsible for his own well-being and within a capitalist culture that selectively rewards ‘madness’ only as it benefits productive citizens. Reviewing the work of self-identified Mad academics and community organisers, I also provide caveats on the ways in which a social movement that defines itself outside of and through alternatives to psychiatry risks reinscribing narratives of privilege in empowering madness as Mad politic. Citing my undergraduate research, I hope to subvert the tropes of genius, sage and creative powerhouse that exist within and outside of the Mad movement. To do this, I evaluate both my physician’s and social worker’s ‘sense-making’ of my madness, as well as my own interpretive process that departs from their beliefs and recommendations for ‘recovery’. I reveal how sense-making is mediated by ruling relations, in particular the economics of understanding how we are ‘irrational’ and how we must self-to demonstrate methodological ways of approaching Mad resistance to psy survey in the context of my racialized, immigrant history. In doing so, I hope oppression that extend beyond discourses of community pride vis a vis claims to unique difference.