The established approach to addressing the rise of distress amongst higher education students has predominantly excluded classroom instruction as a form of intervention. Critical pedagogy, that is, pedagogy aimed at conscious-raising, is too often absent, if not purposefully excluded from the sector’s mental health schema. The central query of this chapter concerns pedagogy’s role in responding to the historical legacies and current enactments of institutional violence, surveillance, and control. The chapter is interested in pedagogy as a response to the dogma of individualism and neo-corporatization that plagues institutions of higher learning and has led to what many refer to as a “mental health crisis.” It explores two projects developed and designed by mad studies students at Carleton University to consider how critical pedagogy approaches can challenge traditional mental health interventions and respond to the violence enacted by what Peter Fleming (2021) has called dark academia. This includes the biomedical, reductionist explanatory models used to define distress and suicidality and influence the designs proposed to respond to these concerns, which only work to individualize and self-responsibilize care. This mad-informed pedagogical approach is also an experiment in how pedagogy can activate students to respond collectively to the current conditions in higher education. Ultimately, this work aims to imagine pedagogy as an intervention – not to eliminate madness, but to harness the embodied, enminded, and embedded diversity in our learning spaces to move us collectively towards yet unimagined mad futures.