Elena Demke, MA, B.Sc., studied history at the University of Oxford and psychology at the University of Hagen. In addition to working in historical-political education, she has been involved in the movement of people with psychiatric experience for around 15 years, initially in peer counselling, then increasingly in research contexts (including co-leading the EmPeeRie project together with T. Bock). A project on “Ding-Bedeutungen in Krisen-, experiences of madness and psychiatry” resulted in the MAD_Museum of Other Things.

She also writes in the spirit of Mad History about the historical agency of those who have experienced psychiatry (e.g. “Contested Memorialisation. Filling the “empty space” of the T4 murders” (UBC 2024); “Brutal Sanity and Mad Compassion. Tracing the voice of Dorothea Buck” (Springer 2021)).