ABSTRACT:
Abstract International Mad movements have emerged as powerful forms of lived experience–led resistance to psychiatric power, medicalisation, and the global expansion of coercive mental health systems. While global mental health has increasingly recognised the importance of “lived experience,” this recognition often occurs within institutional frameworks that risk depoliticising, professionalising, or extracting experiential knowledge. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Mad and lived experience activists, organisers, and scholars across multiple global regions, this paper examines Mad movements as transnational health justice movements. It understands lived experience not as individual testimony, but as collective, political knowledge shaped by local histories, colonial legacies, and global mental health agendas. The analysis highlights how Mad movements organise differently across contexts, while remaining connected through shared struggles against sanism, confinement, epistemic injustice, and carceral forms of care. The paper situates international Mad movements within broader traditions of disability justice, decolonial health praxis, and psychiatric abolition, drawing connections with prison abolition and other anti-carceral movements. It explores how Mad activism challenges dominant biomedical and recovery-oriented frameworks, while advancing relational, community-based, and peer-led alternatives that prioritise dignity, autonomy, and collective care. By foregrounding transnational lived experience resistance, the paper argues that Mad movements offer vital insights for reimagining public mental health beyond reformist approaches. These movements invite a shift from scaling psychiatric interventions toward supporting non-coercive, contextually grounded, and justice-oriented responses to distress. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of Mad-led knowledge for public health policy, research, and practice in a global context.