How the Mad Studies Hub is building a more inclusive future for mental health

Mental health is about more than treatment. It is about people, communities, and creating spaces where lived experiences are valued. Grounded in lived experience, the Hub is helping build more compassionate, community-based approaches that connect research with meaningful change.

The Mad Studies Hub was created to address one of today's most pressing challenges: the connection between social and health inequities and emotional well-being. As homelessness, poverty, and barriers to care continue to grow, the Hub is helping reshape conversations around mental health by placing the voices of people with lived experience at the centre of research and knowledge sharing.

Since 2025, the Hub has brought together faculty and students from five York University Faculties alongside international scholars and community collaborators, creating a network built on partnership, inclusion, and shared learning. Rather than looking at mental health through a single lens, researchers explore it through perspectives including queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, Indigenous epistemologies, decolonial approaches, and intersectionality.

Their work tackles issues that affect communities every day, from policing and coercion in mental health crisis response to accessibility, policy reform, racialized experiences of neurodiversity, and overlooked histories of psychiatric institutionalization.