ANTEPSYCHIATRY MOVEMENT or THE MAGIC OF A FALLACIOUS FUGITIVE PSYENCE THAT DARES TO CURE; AN ANARCHIVAL STUDY OF AND AS MADNESS WITHIN, BEFORE AND BEYOND A [CONQUISTADOR-SETTLER] COLONIAL PSY-ARCHIVE, INCLUDING CRIP RITUALS PERFORMED IN WITCH’S FLIGHT

This thesis engages with abolition healing arts and ritualistically studies the deep implicancy of Madness, Witchness, Blackness, and Indianness. With this, archival material that engages with witch trials and a mad reading of the 1487 witch hunter’s handbook Malleus Maleficarum; racially segregated psychiatric asylums of the 19th and early 20th centuries; skull collecting, measurement and categorizations that became professionalized and popularized in the United States in the early to mid-19th century, all rub up against and corrupt notions of health, healing and care that are still in motion in the colonial present. Antepsychiatry Movement conjures an anarchival breakdown that is considered a healing art in itself within the poethical and radical potential of a fugitive psyence. This fugitive psyence carries with it an intention to unsettle onto-epistemic violence inherent in matrices of dispossession and apparatuses of property and the proper, foreclosing notions of healing in the World as we know it.
My engagement with multiple healing modalities (poetics, sound/noise, anarchival collages, automatic writing, and tarot) became a necessity of this project’s content as it emerged through my own experiences with cripness, madness, neurodivergence and chronic pain/illness that arose in fits and sputters during my research. Returning to practices of witchcraft and the radical healing potential therein, I crafted crip rituals that experimented both with the archive as well as with my own pain, healing and questioning what it is to heal in this World. The Witchness, Blackness and Indianness chapters reflect the crip rituals performed and each contain corresponding archival material that was experimented with.
Antepsychiatry Movement emerges as a crip creative revolt that casts abolition spells with the magic of a fallacious psyence that dares to cure and moves and rests within Calvin Warren’s statement: “the only cure [for insanity] is the destruction of the world itself.”