As a young girl, Cristien witnessed her mother slip from reality, her suffering shaped by trauma and interpreted as mental illness by a world that mistook pain for pathology-answering distress with institutionalization and heavy medication.

Women, Madness, Whiteness is a fiercely intimate and incisive exploration of the cultural, social, political and intergenerational roots of mental illness. As an adult, Cristien became a politicized therapist, movement organizer, and spoken word performer, discovering that her mother's madness was not an isolated story but an inheritance-echoing through ancestral lineages and entangled with the enduring violence of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and modernity.

Women, Madness, Whitenesss is a powerful, embodied and poetic treatise about the collective and cultural inheritance of madness. Weaving together poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, and memoir, Women, Madness, Whiteness celebrates the tenacity and creativity of trauma survivors and illuminates the painful, gritty process of individual, familial, collective, and ancestral healing.