In this episode of Mad Tea, we explore how 19th- and early 20th-century psychiatry turned the poetry of the mad into medical evidence. From Dr. G. Mackenzie Bacon’s Writing of the Insane to Ales Hrdlička’s Art and Literature in the Mentally Abnormal, we look at how doctors treated poems and letters as “symptoms” instead of works of art.

We contrast that history with a mad-centered reading—seeing repetition, metaphor, and fragmentation not as disorder but as strategies of expression and survival. Along the way we discuss surrealism, Antonin Artaud, and Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals, highlighting how psychiatry’s categories like “logorrhea” and “graphomania” have been reimagined by poets and activists as creative methods.

We also ask: What happens when madness is read as method instead of failure? What shifts when we reclaim mad poetics as part of literary and cultural history?