Item Tag: 2013

Madness Network News 8.5 X 11 Full Volume Books, (Volumes: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 & 8) Madness Network News (MNN) began as a San Francisco Bay area newsletter in 1972 and then evolved into a quarterly newspaper format whose readership extended to a national as well as an international level. MNN became, in essence, the voice and networking center for the 'mental patient' liberation movement in the United States, unapologetically advocating for the full human dignity, self-expression and civil rights of people diagnosed and labeled as mentally ill. As a quarterly journal, Madness Network News published personal experiences, creative writing, art, political theory, and factual reporting from the point of view of people who had been on the receiving end of psychiatric treatment and who now found themselves treated as social pariahs, living in oppressive conditions and denied even the most basic aspects of personal choice and self-determination. Ending publication in 1986, Madness Network News remains an invaluable historical and primary source material that continues to elucidate the concerns and lives of people diagnosed as mentally ill both in the past and today. In 2013 copies of the complete eight volumes of Madness Network News were scanned and resized from their original newspaper size of 11x17 into 8.5x11 to make them available in paperback format for activists and pioneers of the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement. They contain an account of the psychiatric survivor movement as told by those who lived it, and are an unprecedented opportunity to read about a marginalized history rarely told. Compiled into seven books with a grand total of forty-five issues, each book contains six issues, with Vol. 1 containing the last three issues printed in Vol. 8. Each volume contains an average of 175 or more pages. Only 50 copies were ever printed for limited distribution, some of which were never diseminated and remained in storage. Those remaining copies are now being offered for sale only on ebay. Every volume - except for Volume #4 which is no longer available - is included in this set. Once these remaining books are sold they will no longer be available.