his paper sets out a current challenge for historians writing histories of mental health and psychiatry. It reflects on different writing projects to ‘narrate the history of madness’ in global context, and focuses on a specific case study: the politics of mental health.This paper takes up ideas about personhood, activism, disability and patient rights between the 1970s and 1990s, examining how these concepts informed discussions about mental health. It argues that the period of ‘opening the asylum’, which had started in several places around the world by the 1970s, created new flows of information about the politics of mental health and its treatments. Inspired by other human rights movements, mental health consumers and advocates found common goals in seeking redress for institutional and other forms of psychiatric treatment. In doing so, they opened up new ways of thinking about the agency of patients, the authority of psychiatrists and ultimately the study of the history of psychiatry itself.