Essays and Blogs
As of January 1, 2026, we invite submissions of two distinct types: essays and blogs. Please see a description of what we are looking for with each of these two types of submissions.
General Criteria
Not all essays or blogs are accepted for publication at Mad in America. We publish essays and blogs that meet our criteria described below and that we believe will be of interest to our readers.
Please send your query, or your essay or blog submission, to [email protected]. If your piece is focused on your personal experiences of the psychiatric system, please submit it as a personal story here.
We will not accept pieces generated by AI. We do not republish content that has already been published elsewhere, whether in an edited publication or on personal blogs, Medium, or other blog sites.
We publish edited copy. Our editorial staff will work with you on any revisions that we believe may help to create a clear, concise, and thematically tight piece. We ask writers to hyperlink to any source material; we do not accept footnotes, references lists, or works cited sections.
Essays and blogs must be readable by the layperson (i.e., not written in academic jargon).
Essays
We publish essays that are relevant to our mission of serving as a journalistic forum for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States and abroad. We are looking for essays that are informative, thought-provoking, and clearly written. An essay should be between 2,000 and 5,000 words.
The essay should provide an informative, contextual dive into an issue of interest to our readers (which can be broadly interpreted.) We welcome essays grounded in history, philosophy, sociology or other academic disciplines; critiques of the conventional disease model narrative; examinations of the psychiatric discourse in the mainstream media; presentations of the “lived experience” of patients in mental health systems; and critical explorations of possible alternatives to the current “disease” model of psychiatric care. We particularly appreciate essays that are responsive to current events in psychiatric care.
Please see MIA Reports/Essays for examples of this type. If your essay is argumentative in kind, your essay should include specific supporting information and rebuttals of the counterarguments. We feature these essays on our front page and in our archive of MIA Reports, and thus we are selective in the essays we choose to publish.
Blogs
Blogs are opinion pieces that look at one specific aspect of the mental health system or offer an insightful comment on a timely matter of interest. They should be tightly written and make a clear point. It is helpful if, in a short piece, the writer can make it known why the readers should trust his or her opinion. Writers should aim for submissions of 1,250 to 2,500 words in length.
Our editorial criteria for publishing blogs will be driven by this consideration: Will the submission be of interest to MIA readers? And is it clearly written?