Tennessee Technological University hosted its first Mad Topics Symposium in April 2024 to build a sense of community around caregivers and sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Simone et al., 2024). Over 500 participated online and in person to listen to a panel of neurodivergent academics and mental health professionals discuss lived and professional experiences of the disorders. In addition to surveying participants from diverse backgrounds, the panel members held more private sessions in separate rooms afterwards to address individual concerns and questions of audience members. The symposium’s success motivated the team to expand its research another year by including qualitative methods to collect and analyze data from a second symposium in April 2025 (Culkin et al., 2025).

Mad Studies and neurodiversity are emerging fields of scholarship that often are embedded in disability studies with roots in critical theory (McWade et al., 2015; Procknow, 2023). Both areas are critical because they examine power differentials between groups who aggregate power at the expense of the other. Mad Studies involves active questioning of

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