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About Us

Mad+Bad+Sad is an interdisciplinary research collective based at the University of St Andrews, co-founded by Dr. Patrick Greenough, Dr. Bridget Bradley and Dr. Cecily Whiteley. Our work centres the voices and experiences of those who live with, through, and beyond madness, distress, suffering, neurodivergence or any other difference. We challenge dominant medicalised and pathologising narratives around mental health, illness, and disability by foregrounding lived experience as expertise — not as a supplement to academic knowledge, but as foundational to it.

Our collective brings together academics, professionals, activists, and community members across disciplines and identities to ask urgent questions: What is mental illness? In what ways is the neurodivergent experience distinctive? How can the ill self be known? Who gets to speak about mental distress? And what happens when we shift from studying people to studying with them?

We reject the idea that understanding mental difference requires detachment. Instead, we advocate for scholarship that is accountable, embodied, and in solidarity with those historically marginalised by psychiatry, psychology, and other institutional systems. Mad+Bad+Sad is a space for critical, creative, and care-full approaches to madness, disability, and difference.