Can Mad Zines Revolutionize the Mental Health Curriculum?

A new article published in Social Work Education: The International Journal demonstrates how zines—self-published booklets often created by those with lived experience—an serve as a powerful medium for communicating alternative forms of Mad-centered knowledge across various learning contexts.

Researchers Jill Anderson and Hel Spandler from the University of Central Lancashire respond to the urgent need for alternative ways of understanding, practicing, and imagining mental healthcare through the Madzines Research Project.

They define Madzines as “not-for-profit, low-budget, self-published and/or low-circulation booklets, graphic memoirs, comics, or other visual narratives” that challenge dominant conceptualizations of mental health. These zines are created by individuals with lived experience of mental illness, psychosocial disability, or other psychiatrized mental experiences.

Drawing from their research, which they acquired, spent time with, created their own zines, and facilitated Madzine workshops, the authors argue for a Madzine pedagogy. This pedagogy would involve using zines as critical mental health teaching and learning resources in social work curricula, offering new ways of producing knowledge in the mental health field that challenge sanist and ableist educational practices.

They write: 

In our project, we define madzines as zines that ‘craft contention’ about madness and distress, and how such experiences are lived with, understood, and responded to. Madzines are usually created and read by people with lived experience of mental ill-health, neurodiversity, psychosocial disability and/or other conditions that have been psychiatrized. They question accepted understandings of mental health and associated practices, policies and politics, and we use a Mad Studies lens to bring them into view.”

By incorporating zines into social work education, the researchers hope to foster a more critical and inclusive approach to mental health that reconnects the profession with its radical and activist roots.

“We think there is a strong case for introducing madzines as a form of critical pedagogy in social work education, as a means of supporting, valuing and integrating grassroots bottom-up experiential knowledge. This, in turn, might help re-connect with the profession’s more radical and critical potential.”

Among numerous other creative outlets, Zines have proven to be a powerful tool for contextualizing the experiences of individuals often marginalized or silenced, particularly those in the mental health survivor movement.

The authors explain zines as involving “sketching, writing, cutting, tearing, sticking, folding, collaging, printing, photographing, defacing, cartooning, stitching, and binding. Through these varied methods, participants can explore and express their own experiences while connecting with the lived realities of others.”

Historically, zines have provided a platform to reveal and challenge power dynamics, offering a means for the unheard to speak out. Many of these zines have emerged from the mental health survivor movement, giving voice to individuals who might otherwise remain invisible within mainstream narratives.

The authors advocate for this use, writing:

“Zines can offer space for individuals and groups—whether in formal or informal learning contexts—to excavate, process, develop, and share grassroots knowledge about experiences, conditions, and identities that have been marginalized, stigmatized, or pathologized. In recent years, there has been a flourishing of Queer, Trans, Neurodiversity, and health/disability-related zines. Many of these are what we refer to as ‘madzines.’”

Madzines, as they explain, are both personal and collective works that enable access to the collective wisdom and knowledge of mental health survivors and co-creators. These zines serve not only as creative outlets but as a form of resistance and empowerment for those who navigate mental health struggles.

Drawing directly from the voices of madzine contributors, the authors demonstrate how sharing and co-producing madzines allows participants to process their experiences, critique dominant narratives, and engage imaginatively with alternative understandings and approaches to mental health and recovery processes.

They advocate for a Madzine pedagogy, which they believe sits at the intersection of service user involvement, creative methods, and Mad Studies frameworks. This approach, they argue, serves as an effective model for teaching and learning about mental health in ways that are inclusive, empowering, and rooted in lived experience. They outline the following 3 ways in which zines act:                                                

1. Process Alternative Knowledge and Understanding

 With zines, not only is the product made visible, but the process.

The crafting process of zines is made visible, revealing their “seams,” which contrasts with the polished materials typically found in professional educational settings. Zines don’t have any “formal” expectations of originality, perfection, or completion. By reading and interacting with zines, readers can gain a tactile and intellectual understanding of how to create their own, fostering a sense of agency and empowerment.

Additionally, the authors demonstrate how zines can serve as a space to contain difficult thoughts and emotions and can trace and map the healing and learning process. 

Using anecdotes from their research as support, the authors demonstrate how zine-making can be particularly helpful in social work education as it encourages connection and mutual understanding while breaking down barriers between students, educators, and service users.

They write, 

“both the process of zine making (the state of flow it can induce) and the processing that zine making enables can be understood as hopeful interventions. Crafting zines, alone or in company, can start to erode the barriers that often form between workers and people using services, between students and teachers. It can build a sense of solidarity, mutual understanding and appreciation.”

2. 
   

   Actively Critique Existing Services and the Policy that Informs Them

Madzines are a creative tool that engage with active criticism, particularly in mental health education and knowledge production. The authors demonstrate how reading, creating, and sharing zines can challenge the reduction of service users’ perspectives into generalizable, static representations, while also addressing the failure to understand the lived experience of mental illness within broader social and political contexts. Unlike biomedical perspectives, which claim to have the “answers,” zines don’t make such claims. Instead, collaborative zines center service user epistemologies offer students a deeper, embodied understanding of these experiences.

The authors use the Recovery in the Bin zine to demonstrate how critical, satirical commentary can be much more impactful than academic critiques. 

3. 
   

   Imagining Alternatives

The authors’ final point demonstrates how madzines can help students, teachers, and service users imagine alternative narratives surrounding diverse mental health experiences. These zines provide a platform for people to share their stories outside of traditional frameworks, offering more nuanced accounts of complex experiences such as dissociation, as seen in Tasmin Walker’s Superpower zine, among others. The authors highlight how misunderstanding such experiences, like Walker’s, can be dangerous, leading to incorrect, stigmatizing language and labels.

Madzines also offer narratives that move beyond the narrow, linear recovery model. For example, Lea Cooper’s Take it Back project encourages survivors to reclaim their stories through zines, challenging conventional recovery narratives.

By engaging with zines, social work students can better understand and connect with the diverse, complex, and often unresolved or uncertain experiences that individuals with mental health challenges face.

“We suggest that zines might offer mental health/social work education a pedagogy of hope: enabling students to process knowledge and understanding, actively critique existing services, and imagine genuine alternatives. Through these hopeful pedagogies—of process, active criticism, and imagination—zines might help address some pressing issues faced by social work educators and their students.”

While the authors highlight several potential limitations to integrating zines in formal educational settings—such as unethical sharing, the othering of madness through the application of the biomedical framework, and the instrumentalization of zines (particularly in assessment and treatment contexts)—they suggest moving away from interrogating zines for its underlying meaning and towards fostering curiosity about what a zine can do. This approach, they argue, will allow zines to transform mental health teaching and learning.

Their work brings together Mad Studies, Social Work pedagogy, and creative arts-based approaches to mental health. Incorporating Madzines into mental health curriculum can foster profound empathy and allow lived experiences to be recognized as valuable knowledge, while challenging oppressive, dominant understanding of madness and distress.

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Anderson, J., & Spandler, H. (2025). Mad Zine pedagogy: Using zines in critical mental health learning and education. Social Work Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2025.2469586 (Link)