When the work must wait

In this episode of Mad Tea, we sit down with Ishaa Vinod Chopra, author of Finding Order in Disorder and founder of the collective by the same name. Ishaa speaks candidly about living with diagnosis, surviving abuse, and navigating the systems that attempt to define her. She reflects on how those experiences shaped her understanding of self rather than ending it.Our conversation moves toward the body. Toward dance. Toward art-making as a practice of reclaiming authorship. Ishaa shares how movement, visual art, and mad poetry became tools for grounding, expression, and rebuilding identity on her own terms.This episode invites you to listen closely to how order and disorder are framed in culture. Who decides what is stable? What forms of expression are dismissed before they are understood? Ishaa’s story offers a lived response rooted in creative practice, survival, and collective care.You can find Ishaa on Instagram - @findingorderindisorder.ngo and @ishaavinodchopraYou can also listen to her podcast on Spotify - "Finding Order in Disorder Podcast"You can purchase Finding Order in Disorder hereYou can find Ishaa's YouTube channel here

In this first episode of Season Two Matt Bodett sits down with Matthew Jackman for a conversation that moves across art, identity, and the lived experience of madness without reducing any of it to diagnosis. We talk about how culture shapes what gets called disordered, how language can both confine and release, and what it means to claim authorship over your own narrative. Matthew reflects on process, familial history, and the tension between visibility and erasure in ways that feel grounded and urgent. If you care about mad culture as something more than a clinical category, this episode asks you to listen closely and consider how we engage in activism and how we honor our lived experiences.Matthew Jackman is the founder of The Australian Centre for Living Experience 'TACFLE' - www.tacfle.comFind Matthew Jackman on Linkedin: https://au.linkedin.com/in/matthew-jackman-he-him-57b28951

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?

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.