Remembering Jay Mahler

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“I’ve spent 58 years in the public mental health system—10 years surviving it and 48 trying to change it.”

That’s how Jay Mahler—psychiatric survivor, activist, leader—described his experiences.

Jay Mahler in 2012.

Sadly, Jay passed away this week at the age of 74.

Jay was the most thoughtful and tenacious person I’ve ever known. He was gentle and loving but strong in a way that few can be. He was an unstoppable force of nature who was always working to relieve suffering and to protect the human rights of all, both in the system and without.

We were friends and comrades for over 40 years, and we spent 28 years together in that struggle from within the belly of the beast in a large mental health system in the Bay Area.

In 1965, Jay was an 18-year-old college student who became an activist for civil rights and free speech at UC Berkeley. After going without sleep for six days, he became overwhelmed with emotion, which led to his being hospitalized.

“In the ‘60s, the mental health system did not believe that those of us with major mental health issues could recover,” Jay said in a 2012 interview. “It was very much an authoritarian, kind of medical model approach. So when I was hospitalized, I didn’t have any rights to have friends, make telephone calls, have visitors… I was given shock treatments against my will, given medications against my will.”

Jay was tortured in the psychiatric hospital, as countless were and are to this very day. He said that the horror of being strapped down and given massive injections of Haldol was second to the terror he experienced when he tried in vain for days to remember his own name after being shocked relentlessly with ECT.

“There was a period in the shock treatments that I was completely without memory,” Jay said in the interview. “I mean, I didn’t know who I was, what my name was, I didn’t know where I was, perceptions were bad… It was very terrifying to not know, to not have any memory.”

After experiencing that authoritarian system stripping away his rights, Jay devoted himself to ensuring that others’ basic human rights would be protected. Because of his own experiences, Jay felt his lifelong mission was an urgent quest to stop every form of psychiatric harm from happening to others. Instead, he tried his best to find a humane form of help, which he believed could best be provided by peers who could be trusted to be compassionate.

He got funding for such a project in the 1970s: Mental Health Consumer Concerns, which was peer-run and peer-staffed.

I met Jay in 1980 when I went to work at the I-Ward medication-free extreme state sanctuary. Jay was the patient rights advocate for the county hospital there. He believed in the radical and healing I-Ward sanctuary we provided, but he had to constantly work to protect those trapped on the traditional J-Ward, where everyone was heavily medicated and threatened with being tied down in five-point restraints—just as Jay had himself been restrained.

Our friend and fellow firebrand Pat Risser was also part of the coalition that constantly pushed back with Jay against the power of NAMI and the county psychiatric staff who wanted to increase forced treatment.

Jay could always see the next organizing step—what to do to advance the struggle for human rights in the mental health system, which is always mired in several layers of administrative and local politics. We got together and formed a county mental health coalition of all the stakeholders, even including NAMI. Our credo was to always seek the patch of common ground where we all could stand united. It worked for decades to greatly influence the county supervisors, who were the ultimate decision-makers and funders.

Jay Mahler in 2017.

Using the clout of the united coalition, Jay led the way in getting funding for several peer-run and staffed drop-in centers, and a whole new civil service job classification of Community Support Workers. That was a new job class that could be protected in the local Labor Union mental health staff group that I represented on the coalition. Those Union peer workers got full benefits and retirement and became the leaven of people with lived experience to humanize every county clinic, hospital ward, and program.

Jay made so many things like that happen for people.

There are many details of Jay’s life and work I don’t know of, but I remember at one point he was at the White House during the Carter administration to support initiatives that he believed were good.

Jay was like that—a total pragmatist. He never let the pursuit of the perfect get in the way of the getting some of the good. His path was of those who work inside systems like Trojan horses, as in “the long march through the institutions.”

At one point Jay even got a job in county mental health administration itself as an ombudsman, because of his strong power base among the peer community.

I’ll never forget the wry smile on his face when I came to see him in his new office on the top floor of mental health administration. He said something like “Now they’re going to have to deal with me every hour of the day!” Jay was like the boxer that never stops coming and just wears down the opposition because they know he’s never going away.

After decades, he left Contra Costa county and went to work in Alameda county to again transform the system in Oakland and Berkeley. There he organized and led what became a massive peer movement of thousands of members of The Pool of Consumer Champions.

I worked with him there on the Mandala Project, that again, because of Jay’s clout, was able to influence the mental health director and all the programs there to adopt more humane and peer staffed programs.

Jay had a quiet spiritual dimension to him that I always thought partly was born from the incredible suffering he had endured. I can’t help but think of Nelson Mandela when I think of Jay, because Jay never hated those who had tortured him for years.

He became a leading catalyst state-wide for a whole new focus on the spiritual dimension of suffering and healing. We even did a workshop together at the Esalen Institute on that subject in 2011, along with David Lukoff and Laura Mancuso. We followed it up with large gatherings in Alameda county that drew many who also recognized Jay’s drive for deeper understanding.

In honor of Jay’s leadership and contribution, Alameda county named their first peer respite center after Jay.

Yes, what a long way he came from the imprisoned young man, tortured in the name of psychiatric medicine, to the soft-spoken leader who humbly asked what I believe was his basic message to all of us:

“Isn’t there more that we can do to stop psychiatric abuse, and to instead be loving and kind to those suffering?”

Jay’s devoted wife Susan was a constant presence of loving kindness and support during all the years, and especially during recent years, as Jay underwent dialysis.

Jay sadly told me he believed the horrendous harm inflicted on his body during those many years in the psychiatric gulag ruined his health.

Yet Jay always felt that his activism, his work promoting human rights in the psychiatric system, was the most meaningful contribution he could make in the world. “Being involved in the consumer/survivor movement has given me a purpose in life,” he said in the 2012 interview.

Let’s remember Jay’s family as we grieve his passing, and let his life example do what it always has done for countless people: Help us fight the fight and believe in the example of his loving heart.

Rest in peace, faithful servant.

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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.

18 COMMENTS

  1. This is a beautiful remembrance of Jay, Michael. We met in Boston in 1979/80 through Judi Chamberlin. We had both survived the atrocities of forced ECT. We saw each other over the years at conferences and I shall always remember his kindness. He was a truly kind man.

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  2. Thank you for the eulogy, Michael. As one who is somewhat new (over merely that past 16 years) to garnering insight into the systemic crimes of the psychiatric industry, whose found the medical proof of why we truly do need to fight the scientific fraud of the psychiatric industry.

    I do appreciate learning about all that Jay has done. But I’m still somewhat at the phase, that learning all about the systemic crimes that the psychiatric and psychologic industries have committed against humanity for over a century, still breaks my heart. My sincerest condolences to all of Jay’s loved ones, relatives, and friends. I know, with all my heart, he was on the side of God.

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  3. Nice eulogy Michael, I was drawn rather hypnotically to this paragraph: He became a leading catalyst state-wide for a whole new focus on the spiritual dimension of suffering and healing. We even did a workshop together at the Esalen Institute on that subject in 2011, along with David Lukoff and Laura Mancuso. We followed it up with large gatherings in Alameda county that drew many who also recognized Jay’s drive for deeper understanding.

    And sharing the same drive for deeper understanding I’m bewildered by my synchronistic impulse to check out MIA this morning, to find myself see your writing again and having flashback memories of spending a weekend with you at Esalen, in 2014. And curious at this mere coincidence, intellectually speaking, I allowed my impulse to click on the links of MIA Global and spotted a fellow madman writing from the hard to do perspective of 1st-person experience and mentioning your old mentor, JWP.

    An interview discussion can be read here: Philosophy & Madness: A Discussion with Wouter Kusters on his new book: https://www.madintheuk.com/2021/04/philosophy-madness-a-discussion-with-wouter-kusters/

    In his book Wouter writes of the spiritual dimension of suffering and healing: Spiritual psychiatry is a continuation of the age-old idea that madness and genius are bedfellows. It attempts to demonstrate that a mad person may have the same kinds of aspirations and insights that any number of “enlightened,” highly gifted, or highly sensitive individuals have but that the mad person, for some reason, deals with them in a clumsy way. This idea is close to my own view of the mad person as a “crypto-” or “proto-philosopher.” Madness is philosophy lived out in practice.” From: A Philosophy of Madness by Wouter Kusters, MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

    While these days I prefer to video the spiritual reality of my many experiences of being the earth turning in space (boy did psychiatrists have a field day with that personal disclosure) and when normal people laugh at my daily habit of filming sun-rise & sun-set, I respond with “you think the sun is moving?” Anyway, perhaps when you and David are at Esalen facing the sun next time, you might discuss spirituality from a scientific world-view by consulting & meditating upon Earth-Axis Rotation?

    Which for San Francisco at: Latitude: 37.4225° 37° 25′ 21.09. Involves the Speed: 827.28 mph.
    Please see link for a one world meditation here: http://www.unitarium.com/earth-speed

    Maybe you’ll remember a strange Aussie dude saying; “the body is the shore on an ocean of being?”

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  4. It was Jay’s extraordinary luck and intuition that allowed him to live until age 74. For normies, that’s an ordinary death. But, Mad people are often killed by psychiatry in their 60’s, 50’s, and even their 40’s. Jay’s determination to live a full lifespan was already inspiring, and reading about his long career in Mad health care fills me with pride and hope. Though he should have had a little more time, I’m glad he achieved so much in his life.

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  5. I’m so sad to hear this but appreciate you writing this beautiful eulogy. I became familiar with Jay Mahler’s activism as a psychiatric survivor while conducting my research for my thesis on the early activism and history of psychiatric survivors in the 1970s and 80s.

    I learned of his experiences and work (along with other early activist survivors like Judi Chamberlin) while reading the archives of Madness Network News, among many other important movement materials. It was clear how essential his decades of activism have been for the movement and the rights of ex-patients, survivors, consumers, and others who have had to deal with the damaging effects of the mental health system and psychiatry.

    I regret not getting the opportunity to reach out to Jay about his work and experiences. His devotion, activism, leadership, and work towards building alternatives to the mental health system (and the importance of this for furthering rights and compassion) became so obvious that it was a central part of my own thesis.

    As you stated, “His path was of those who work inside systems like Trojan horses, as in “the long march through the institutions.” If I may say so, I do believe that this attitude and perseverance is what made him and this segment of the movement (along with activists such as Sally Zinman and Judi Chamberlin) so successful at this period (at the juncture in the mid-1980s where the “movement” was splitting and the more “radical” survivors and ex-patients wanted to go their own way). This “tempered liberation focus” is evident in two of Jay’s quotes that really resonated with me:

    “When you think of the thousands of people still suffering, you can’t just talk about abolishing the system. You have to use every strategy you can to change it.”

    “I’m not going to be co-opted. I’m not going to forget what psychiatry did to me.”

    (And I hope it is okay to share a link to my thesis about the early activism of the psychiatric survivors’ movement: https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/21421 – this is the first time I’m sharing it on this forum or anywhere really. But after reading this sad news, I realize how important it is to try and share this history with others who might be interested.)

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    • Thank you very much Maddie, for your great comment and sharing your very important research. Those 2 quotes by Jay about him not being co-opted and the value of working to change the system from the inside out for the sake of those countless people still trapped and dying in it, are very relevant and true I believe. Jay and many of us activists who stayed inside the belly of the beast for decades, fighting for the rights of those suffering from within, also were just as active at leveraging all of the levels of exterior political power to both stop psychiatric abuse and to build humanistic alternatives based on compassion, and the value of inclusion of survivors and others with lived experience.

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    • Thanks for the link Maddie, I might follow this up with you.

      While Jay & I represented different “wings” of the mental patients liberation movement (which for the record maintained in its principles since 1976 that the psychiatric system cannot be reformed but must be abolished) I was certainly aware of his presence. As I didn’t know him well it would be presumptuous to say much more than that I respected his commitment, and to give him a tip of the cosmic hat.

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  6. Thanks Dr. Cornwall for this lovely tribute to Jay Mahler. The cruelty and torture psychiatry inflicted on him as a younger man is shocking. How very commendable he was able to give his pain a purpose through his activism and to make such remarkable contributions to help others who were suffering harm at the hands of psychiatry. He certainly was a wonderful man. I extend my deepest condolences to his family and friends. RIP Jay.

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