Interview | Mad Youth Organise

At The World Transformed (TWT), rs21 members interviewed a range of activist groups. In this article we speak to an activist from Mad Youth Organise. 

Can you tell us a bit about your campaign and why you set it up? 

Mad Youth Organise officially came into being in February 2025. I first got involved with all of this a year and a half ago. We were initially a branch of Just Treatment, a health justice campaign group. I was basically looking for a group to get involved in that approached mental health from a more radical perspective. I always felt that the campaigning I’d done in the past was too limiting, was not radical enough, and was not getting to the root of why people were experiencing mental distress. They were too lazy in their analysis. I wanted something more political, because mental health has been seen as apolitical. Mental health is deeply embedded in the society we live in and is a consequence of our current way of living. It was originally a group of several people with lived experience of mental distress who served as the initial core of the campaign. It was a group effort, and it was very exciting to see that grow into Mad Youth Organise. The months leading up to the launch were busy and sometimes stressful. Still, I feel very proud of where it is now and what it’s achieving, including the publicity it’s getting, the conversations it’s starting, and the actions we’ve taken. Firstly, we wanted to move beyond campaigns focused solely on awareness and conduct a political analysis of the issue. We want to hold public organisations and corporations to account for their part in the mental health crisis. We look at the systemic drivers of the crisis, factors such as racism and misogyny. We want people to begin seeing mental health not as an individual issue, but as a societal and collective one, and that the solution is a collective one that addresses those systemic drivers. Our demands, as listed in our manifesto, are:

1. Decommodify the services that we rely on for life, and that give us our human rights, such as education, housing, water, energy and healthcare.
2. Shut down toxic, extractive industries, such as the fossil fuel industry, which are profiting from the destruction of our futures.
3. Curb corporate power by ending damaging monopolies and cleaning up the corruption and lobbying undermining our democracy.
4. Demand corporations pay for the harm they have caused by compensating affected communities.
5. Nourish the lives of young people with comprehensive and accessible care, and community.
6. Make policy as if the future counts. Give 16-year-olds the vote, implement radical democratic reforms, and include young people in policy and decision making. Stop persecuting society’s most vulnerable for the failings of the most powerful.

These are our north star principles; we understand they are ambitious, challenging, and broad, but it’s good to know what our core principles are and what to orient our goals toward. When we run campaigns, we set specific goals that align with the demands. One thing we have started to look towards recently is holding Big Tech to account and demanding a social media tax, which could be used to fund mental health and youth services. We consider this a reparative tax, similar to climate taxes. Corporations that are causing massive harm to young people should be held to account, and, unfortunately, one of the few ways in the current system is financially. In Britain, we know that these corporations are making huge profits at the expense of society’s mental health. They are also notorious tax avoiders, so we feel like demanding this tax is the very least they can do. It’ll be barely a scratch for the Big Tech grifters but potentially significant for societal health, if well used and implemented.

What have you achieved since starting?

So we had launch week, and during that week, we took actions outside Meta, Shell and the Priory Health Group. The Priory is a private chain of mental health hospitals which profits from the mental health crisis and charges the NHS a considerable amount to use their beds. We targeted the Priory because it is a privatised healthcare provider, and we disagree with the idea of privatising and exploiting mental distress. This also leaves a massive gap in care quality between people in the NHS and private beds, with those using free services receiving a lower standard of healthcare. If we look at the class analysis, people from working-class, underprivileged backgrounds aren’t able to access services because waiting lists and provisions aren’t available. The provisions in working-class and deprived areas are, by and large, fewer and harder to come by, in comparison to richer, white middle-class areas. We’ve also done direct interventions with MPs regarding the disability cuts. That’s been really big because we’ve seen the government back down on their initial policy, and we’ve been a part of making that happen. 

We had patient leaders (volunteers with lived experience of mental distress) who disrupted Wes Streeting’s speech at Guardian Live for ‘backing cruel cuts which will kill disabled and mentally ill people.’ I disrupted the Treasury Minister, Darren Jones, who had previously compared PIP payments to children’s pocket money. Whilst he apologised in the end, the fact that it was made in the first place shows his inherent biases. Finally, we confronted Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, about his support for the cuts. 

We’ve received support from MPs such as  Nadia Whittome and Jeremy Corbyn. We’ve also done a lot of media work, which has been very exciting, including appearances on BBC Radio and LBC and coverage from Novara Media. We’ve been around officially less than a year, but we’re already getting so much leverage and support.

What do you hope you would get out of being at TWT and from the left in general?

From our perspective, we’d like to see more support for the campaign. We’d like to see people interrogate the way they view mental health and to start seeing mental distress through an anti-capitalist lens. I think more solidarity across campaigns and support would be good. I think we can achieve so much more if we work in collaboration. It’s been really exciting to meet people from so many campaigns nationwide, to see the work happening, and to think about what we can do together. Because the struggle for Palestinian Liberation, the struggle for tenants’ rights, the battle against the far right and disabled people’s struggles are all connected, it’s impossible to separate.

What traditions or historical struggles do you draw from, or feel a connection with?

Personally, the Palestinian struggle for sure and the historical disability rights movement. I also feel very inspired by the Black Panther Party; they were seminal in how they built their movement, in how they struck a balance between discipline, dedication, cross-movement solidarity, and the spread of radical education. Black third-wave feminist thinkers in the US also inspire me every day, particularly the work of bell hooks and Audre Lorde. There have been Mad Liberation groups that have paved the way for viewing madness not as a pathologised state of being, but as something to be embraced and reclaimed. In particular, I’m thinking of the Mad Pride movement and the Mad Studies space, which is more academic but has done some instrumental work.

What does your campaign mean for the people? 

It means that people finally feel heard and listened to, and are given a space for that. We feel our work is empowering for people who’ve experienced mental distress; it’s giving people the feeling they can enact change, that their inherent way of being in the world is not wrong, that it shouldn’t be punished. We’re also a community, because being mentally unwell can lead to isolation. This is bringing a group of people together with a shared experience, and has been supportive and “healing”, for lack of a better word. That word has been co-opted by capitalism so much that it can even feel like pressure and a compulsion to be ‘well’. It can often just mean returning to being a productive unit for capitalism and neoliberalism. We create a space where you can be yourself, with all your edges, without feeling like you’re being pushed to change. I think that’s quite radical in itself.