Celebrating madness, crazies, nutters and others is what Mad Pride is all about.

“Just like we all suffer under patriarchy and heterosexism, we all suffer under ableism and saneism,” says Jeremiah Bach, 25. Bach is a self-identified madman and co-organizer of Toronto Mad Pride 2007.

The Mad Pride movement has grown from a smattering of people frustrated with the stigma and silence surrounding psychiatric consumers, survivors and others to a cacophony of loosely organized annual events around the world.

The name (inspired by Pride as in Gay Pride) and the date (July 14, a.k.a. Bastille Day, an international symbol of liberation) are the same around the world, but as the movement spreads, it evolves with the communities it celebrates. In Ghana, there is a street march planned; in upstate New York, a vigil. England celebrates with a week-long BonkersFest.

In Toronto, Mayor David Miller has issued a proclamation declaring July 14, 2007, Mad Pride Day in the city. The day’s main event for Toronto is the Bed Push. The Push is becoming a tradition for Mad Pride and was started in England in 2005. A group of Mad People dressed in pajamas staged an escape, wheeling a bed from Mill View Psychiatric Hospital 60 miles to London’s Bethlem Asylum, infamously known as Bedlam, while being chased by a giant syringe.

Ruth Ruth, director of the Friendly Spike Theatre Band and one of the organizers for Torontoâe(TM)s Mad Pride, sees Canadian Mad Pride as an opportunity celebrate the margins. “I really believe there is hope for the world in what we have excluded,” she says. Ruth entered the psychiatric system in the late 1960s as a teen with dyslexia. “I grew up believing that I was really stupid, and I turned out to be really smart.”

Ruth, a disability studies student at Ryerson University in Toronto, maintains an A average and a scholarship, but it was through her work at Friendly Spike as an actor on shows by and about mental health consumers that she began to think of herself as a survivor. “It was deemed that there was something wrong with me rather than that there was something wrong with society and I began to believe there was something wrong with me; that I was insecure, nervous, a fuck up,” she recalls.

Mad Pride is about building general community awareness and visibility but, Bach emphasizes, also about increasing awareness within the community. “People are so heavily psychiatrized or medicalized that they donâe(TM)t know there is a community. People are taught that they have illnesses as individual problems so therefore itâe(TM)s dealt with individually when in fact, there is a community that questions these labels, that throws them out, thatâe(TM)s engaged, thatâe(TM)s sexy and ready to move forward politically and socially and culturally.”

The movement resists sticking to any one definition of a mad person. Some people, like Ruth, identify as survivors of an oppressive system, some as consumers of the mental health system and others, like Bach, say that “being crazy is an experience in itself, it is not necessarily a result of oppression.” Both include anyone who exists outside the social norm in their understanding of madness.

Ultimately, “If you think you belong in Mad Pride, you belong in Mad Pride. Itâe(TM)s simply about being who you are and being proud of it,” says Ruth.

The Mad Pride day festivities will begin at Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (1001 Queen St. West) at 1 p.m., with speeches from local politicians (Toronto city councillor Gord Perks, NDP MPP Cheri DiNovo and NDP MP Peggy Nash). The Bed Push leaves at 1:30, marching, drumming, and dancing to the Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre for more celebration.

Links to wash it down with:

  • Mindfreedom.org, the international go-to organization for mental health activism.
  • Sparknotes on Foucaultâe(TM)s ideas of madness and institutions.
  • CAMH’s discussion of language.