Simon Adam

Faculty & School/Dept.

Faculty of Health - School of Nursing

Degrees

PhD - 2017
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

MA - 2011
University of Toronto
Toronto, Canada

BScN - 2006
Toronto Metropolitan University
Toronto, Canada

Biography

Simon Adam is a critical social scientist. His program of scholarship focuses on mental health--its various institutional and discursive dimensions, the consumer/survivor/mad experience, and alternative and counter-hegemonic ways of conceptualizing 'mental illness,' suffering, and crisis. His work considers what is currently termed 'mental illness' as largely a product of social, economic, and political apparatuses, while examining how medicalization pathologizes what is often known as 'the human condition.' Simon works with various communities, including psychiatric consumers/survivors, mad people, and neurodivergent people.

 

Areas of Interest:

• Mental health, Mad studies, Critical mental health movements 
• Critical theory, critical posthumanism, neomaterialism
• Qualitative/post-qualitative methods/arts-informed methods

Selected Publications

 

BOOKS

Adam, S. (forthcoming). Against sanity: A critical posthuman encounter with psychiatry. Bloomsbury.

Adam, S. (Ed.). (in review). Entangled im/materialities: Transdisciplinary posthuman interventions. University of Toronto Press.

ARTICLES

Meijer, P., Ford-Jones, P., Carter, D., Duhaney, P., Adam, S., Pomeroy, P., & Thompson, S. (2024). Examining an alternate care pathway for mental health and addiction prehospital emergencies in Ontario, Canada: A critical analysis. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 21(2), 146-160.

Holmes, D., Turcotte, P-L., Adam, S., Johansson, J., & Orser, L. (2023). Toward an ontology of the mutant in the health sciences: Re/defining the person from Cronenberg’s perspective. Nursing Inquiry, 31(1).

Adam, S., Gold, E., & Tsui, J.* (2023). Critical ethnography and its others: Entanglement of matter/meaning/madness. Nursing Inquiry, 31(1).

Tsui, J.* & Adam, S. (2023). Resilience in nursing education: An evolutionary concept analysis. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 20(1).

Davies, A. W., Watson, D., Armstrong, B., Spring, L., Brewer, K. C., Shay, B., Purnell, A, & Adam, S. (2022). Exploring Histories of ECEC to reconceptualize “normalcy” through mad studies: A critical proposition for early childhood education and care post-secondary programs. eceLINK, 6(2), 21-39.

Adam, S., Jiang, C.*, Mikhail, M., & Juergensen, L. (2022).  Infrahuman madness: Mental health nursing and the discursive production of alterity. Nursing Inquiry, 31(1).

Adam, S., Gold, E., & Burstow, B. (2022). From subjective opinion to medical fact: A critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 44(1), 55-63.

Adam, S., Juergensen, L., & Mallette, C. (2021). Harnessing the power to bridge different worlds: An introduction to posthumanism as a philosophical perspective for the discipline. Nursing Philosophy, 00, e12362.

Johnson, S.*, Adam, S., & McIntosh, M. (2020). The lived experience of postpartum depression: A review of the literature. Issues in Mental Health Nursing.

van Daalen-Smith, C., Adam, S., Santerre, F., & Hassim, F. (2019). A world of indifference: Canadian women’s experiences of psychiatric hospitalization. Issues in Mental Health Nursing.

Adam, S., & Juergensen, L. (2019). Toward critical thinking as a virtue: The case of mental health nursing education. Nurse Education in Practice, 38, 138-144.

Adam, S., van Daalen-Smith, C., & Juergensen, L. (2019). The indispensability of critique: Reflections on bearing witness to mental health discourse. Canadian Journal of Critical Nursing Discourse, 1(1), 39-48.

Adam, S. (2017). Crazy making: The institutional relations of undergraduate nursing in the reproduction of biomedical psychiatry. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 14(1).

van Daalen-Smith, C., Adam, S., Breggin, P. & LeFrançois, B. (2014). The utmost discretion: How presumed prudence leaves children susceptible to electroshock. Children & Society, 28, 205-217.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Adam S. (in review). Disciplines, boundaries, posthuman entanglement. In S. Adam (Ed.), Entangled im/materialities: Transdisciplinary posthuman interventions. University of Toronto Press.

Haghiri-Vijeh, R. & Adam, S. (in review). Performativity and the posthuman subject: Diffracting Foucault/Butler/Ahmed/Braidotti. In S. Adam (Ed.), Entangled im/materialities: Transdisciplinary posthuman interventions. University of Toronto Press.

Adam, S., Jiang, C., Mikhail, M., & Spring, L., Dobson, S., & Moumos, E. (in review). Maddening mental health nursing: A mad-engaged critical discourse analysis. Mad Matters (2nd Ed.). Canadian Scholars Press.

Adam, S. & Jiang, C. (2022). Identity, inclusion, and society. In W. Austin, D. Kunyk, C. Peternelj-Taylor, & M. A. Boyd (Eds.), Psychiatric & mental health nursing for Canadian practice, (5th ed.) (pp. 29-41). Wolters Kluwer.

Burstow, B. & Adam, S. (2016). Stopping CAMH: An Activist IE Inquiry. In B. Burstow (Ed.), Psychiatry interrogated: An institutional ethnography anthology, (pp. 21-40). Palgrave.

Adam, S. (2014). From subservience to resistance: Nursing versus psychiatry. In B. Burstow, B. LeFrançois, & S. Diamond (Eds.), Psychiatry disrupted: Theorizing resistance and crafting the (r)evolution, (pp. 65-76). McGill-Queens University Press.

 

Affiliations

Posthumanism Research Institute (Brock University)

Partnerships

Krasman Centre
Principal Investigator

Awards

Dean's award for excellence in teaching, Trent University - 2018

Supervision

Currently available to supervise graduate students: Yes

Currently taking on work-study students, Graduate Assistants or Volunteers: Yes

Available to supervise undergraduate thesis projects: No

Current Research

Research Projects

Demedicalizing Madness: Diversifying the Understanding of Mental Health with Voices of Survivors
This project is a critical interrogation of mental health nursing education discourse. By way of working with psychiatric survivors to critique dominant discursive (textual-based) practices in mental health nursing education, tensions and contradictions will be elucidated and recommendations for a survivor-centric practice can likewise be made. This is an institutional ethnography with critical discourse analysis embedded during the interview phase of the project.
Role: Principal Investigator
Amount funded: $38,520
Year Funded: 2021
Duration: 1
Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Developing a Best Practice Model for Mental Health Crisis Care: A Community-Engaged Approach
This community-based project examines models of mental health crisis responses and compares them across the community and the acute care sectors in Ontario. The goal is to develop a best practice model to guide a unified and client-centric response to mental health emergencies and crises in the community.
Role: Collaborator
Amount funded: $360,000
Year Funded: 2021
Duration: 3
Funded by: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

Entangled Identities: Exploring Neurodiversity Through Social Media Expression
This project examines the development of neurodivergent identities by studying social media discourse. Tensions/overlaps between understandings of neurodiversity by mental health professionals and neurodivergent-identified individuals will also be examined. The project uses critical discourse analysis as its main methodology, framed by critical posthuman theory.
Role: Principal Investigator
Amount funded: $103,553
Year Funded: 2023
Duration: 2
Funded by: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

History in Practice: An Online Resource for Enacting Consumer/Survivor-led Mental Health Education
This project is an interdisciplinary pan-university initiative designed for campus-wide impact, with collaborators from 10 departments/programs. History in Practice/Histoire en Tête (HiP/HeT) is an open access consumer/survivor-informed mental health resource for teaching, learning, and knowledge sharing for future health practitioners and humanities and social science students.
Role: Principal Investigator
Amount funded: $47,400
Year Funded: 2020
Duration: 1
Funded by: York University

Postpartum Depression: A Critical Phenomenology
This project critically examines the diagnosis of postpartum depression by working with critical women diagnosed with the disorder and interrogating historical and contemporary discourses that gave rise to its development.
Role: Principal Investigator
Amount funded: $10,000
Year Funded: 2020
Duration: 1
Funded by: York University