Leonard Roy Frank:
Activist and Pioneer

Leonard Roy Frank, early pioneer of the Psychiatric Survivor movement, discusses his lived experience, including forced insulin shock treatment, ECT, and the relationship between non-conformity and psychiatric diagnosis.

Since 1959 Mr. Frank has resided in San Francisco, where he managed an art gallery that played host to early meetings for the Psychiatric Survivor movement. Starting in 1972 he was staff at Madness Network News, and in 1973 Frank and Wade Hudson founded Network Against Psychiatric Assault (NAPA), a patients’ and survivors’ advocacy group. Peter Lehmann called Leonard Roy Frank ‘one of the most important people who helped to develop the theory and practice of humanistic antipsychiatry.’

Join Mr. Frank and other featured speakers at the upcoming Occupy Psychiatry protest of the American Psychiatric Association’s 2013 annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Sunday, May 19th. The Open Paradigm Project will be live streaming the protest on MadinAmerica.com – stay tuned for upcoming details.

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Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

12 COMMENTS

  4. Dear Leonard, this is a perfect interview. As always, you are so articulate about the political reasons for so many of us having been (and currently are) locked away. I am so proud to know you and to be a fellow comrade and insulin/ECT survivor. I hope so much to see you when I will be out in San Francisco in November.
    Love, Dorothy

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  6. Dear, dear Leonard. You were my brother-in-arms, above all, a fellow insulin/ECT survivor. You always spoke for everyone with such wisdom and passion and intelligence. May peace and harmony and love envelop you in the great hereafter. In loving memory, Dorothy

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