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Concept
Psychiatric survivors movement
Summary
The psychiatric survivors movement (more broadly consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement) is a diverse association of individuals who either currently access mental health services (known as consumers or service users), or who are survivors of interventions by psychiatry.
The psychiatric survivors movement arose out of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and the personal histories of psychiatric abuse experienced by patients. The key text in the intellectual development of the survivor movement, at least in the US, was Judi Chamberlin's 1978 text On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System. Chamberlin was an ex-patient and co-founder of the Mental Patients' Liberation Front. Coalescing around the ex-patient newsletter Dendron, in late 1988 leaders from several of the main national and grassroots psychiatric survivor groups felt that an independent, human rights coalition focused on problems in the mental health system was needed. That year the Support Coalition International (SCI) was formed. SCI's first public action was to stage a counter-conference and protest in New York City, in May, 1990, at the same time as (and directly outside of) the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting. In 2005, the SCI changed its name to MindFreedom International with David W. Oaks as its director.
Common themes are "talking back to the power of psychiatry", rights protection and advocacy, and self-determination. While activists in the movement may share a collective identity to some extent, views range along a continuum from conservative to radical in relation to psychiatric treatment and levels of resistance or patienthood.
The modern self-help and advocacy movement in the field of mental health services developed in the 1970s, but former psychiatric patients have been campaigning for centuries to change laws, treatments, services and public policies.
Official source
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