After collaborating with mad justice activists, I undertook critical psychological research into the histories, bodies, and politics circulating through the rise of ‘bipolar disorder’ diagnoses in young women living in New York City, drawing on archival and interview material. The project ended with three publications and one experimental animation where I explored the ways in which politics of terror, particularly through the discursive logic of risk and the affective logic of fear,  have come to affect the ways in which we – practitioners, researchers, people – do madness.