Tag: psychiatric survivor

There is not one movement but many, and the language people use reflects how accepting they are of the psychiatric explanation of their experiences.

The term “psychiatric survivor” says it all in just two words. In no other medical specialty do the patients call themselves survivors because they survived despite being exposed to that specialty.

MIA’s Ayurdhi Dhar interviews Helen Spandler about how psychiatric survivors challenge and change our thinking about mental health.

This year, I finally got that first major speaking invitation: One of the four keynoters in the largest gathering each year for mental health consumers and psychiatric survivors, Peerpocalypse.

For more than four decades, I have worked as a psychiatric-survivor human rights activist. Then, at the end of 2012, I broke my neck. As readers of my blog posts, such as those on Mad in America, know, I have devoted the past few years to rehab and activism. But it has been a while since my last personal blog. Let me sum up my Mad Pride journey today, because a lot is changing.

Trauma-informed approaches have the potential to promote recovery but must involve survivors and service-users to prevent the experience of retraumatization within psychiatric and mental health services.

I increasingly think we can only reach greater understanding by working through our own experiences first, and then, if we can, alongside survivors. That will help us become more open to survivor knowledge. For example, we may need to work through our own need for control and understanding. It’s helpful to consider our own reactions to distress or madness — in ourselves and others.

The Psychiatric Survivor Archives of Toronto “aims to collect and preserve the stories and histories of people with lived mental health experience, and to value and...

Robert Neugeboren, who “spent most of his adult life in institutions, often subject to isolation, physical punishment and numbing medication,” was “a celebrity of sorts in the world of the mentally ill: a survivor of the horrors of mistreatment, a case history for those who point to the positive effects of kindness and talk therapy, and, perhaps most of all, the embodiment of the bottomless mystery of the human mind.”