Lucy Costa was born to Azorean parents who immigrated to Toronto, Canada in the early seventies. She is deputy executive director of a non-profit service user rights-based organization in Toronto, Canada. She works as an advocate promoting the rights of mental health service users/survivors, as well as encouraging critical analysis about service user inclusion in the mental health sector. She sits on a number of advisories and has been involved with the psychiatric survivor community for over āfifteen years.
Her publications include, āMad Patients as Legal Intervenors in Courtā in Mad Matters: A critical reader in Canadian Mad Studies (2013); āRecovering Our Stories: A Small Act of Resistanceā (2012); and ā(W)righting women: constructions of gender, sexuality and race in the psychiatric chartā (2012).