Winning Mad Liberation with a New Strategy: Solidarity

What are the goals of the mad movement?

(Can’t be a movement without goals!)

One of the best visions of the goals of the mad movement is also one of the most unsettling ones because none of our goals have been reached.

It’s the statement adopted in 1982 by the 10th Annual International Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression. Basically, abolish forced treatment, stop the double legal standard on people with psychiatric diagnoses, and create voluntary alternatives. (Similar statements led by survivors are Abolish Forced Psychiatry and the Campaign for Psych Abolition).

That just about sums it up, that’s what we’re after. If we achieved that we’d end psychiatric violence and liberate the mad.

So ask yourself, have those goals been met? No. Not only have we not reached the goals of the psychiatric survivor movement established at least in the 1980s and earlier, things have gotten worse. Much worse. As Ron Wipond so carefully and powerfully documents in his brilliant Your Consent is Not Required: The Rise in Psychiatric Detentions, Forced Treatment, and Abusive Guardianships, forced psychiatric treatment—as well as harm from psychiatric drug prescriptions and psychiatric labels—has only grown. Massively. And is now international in scope. And accelerating.

This is the reality we face: Psychiatric violence led the survivor movement to push back, but decades later psychiatric violence is still coercing, bullying, assaulting, abducting, torturing, poisoning, maiming, and killing people worldwide.

Now some of the people who are part of the psychiatric survivor/mad movement¹ will point to many changes over the past decades and call these successes. But are changes really successes, if we honestly look at the big picture?

Yes, there are a handful of peer respites. Yes, there is a whole industry of “peer specialists” who are working in different capacities for the system. Yes, we have more awareness of drug harm. Yes, we have online groups to support coming off meds. Yes, we have stellar leading efforts like Wildflower Alliance and Mad in America.

And yes, we have a bureaucratized psychiatric survivor “lived experience” leadership class that has made careers through the movement. (I work as a therapist and trainer, so I do plead guilty to that charge as well, but please hear me out!)

So I agree, we have made changes. But this is not winning. When we meet with people just out of the prison system, when we talk with people living in tents under the freeway, when we read accounts of forced treatment on college campuses, when we talk to our friends and community, and when we ourselves find ourselves in altered states and spiral back into “care,” we see exactly what is going on. Psychiatric violence is thriving and mad people are being decimated.

And there is a disturbing connection between rising psychiatric oppression—which punishes the vulnerable and despises people in need—and the overall authoritarian cruelty that has taken hold in the US and so many other countries.

So what happens when a movement has been rolling for decades and hasn’t won? Time for a new strategy!

First, here is what doesn’t work.

Education doesn’t work. Rewind to the newspapers of the 2000s and the cautious “hmm maybe psychiatric drugs have some downsides” makes a regular appearance every year. Yet forced drugging as a human rights issue makes no appearance at all. We’ve been “telling our stories” until we are blue in the face. People are sympathetic to our cause, and we do make a lot of sense when you listen to us. There are tons of survivor voices getting out there on social media. But pro-Big Pharma voices dominate the mainstream airwaves, with forced treatment stories relegated to small, alternative outlets. But even when in the rare moment forced treatment does become the focus of national conversation (remember Britney Spears?) it doesn’t go anywhere (the psychiatric survivor movement was largely absent from the story, which was framed as a conservatorship issue rather than a psychiatry issue). It’s good to tell our stories, it does wake some people up to hear our stories. But all this education hasn’t won real change.

A seat at the table doesn’t work. I’ve been invited to boards, watched friends join committees, I’ve filed public comments to the FDA—just getting on the committees and getting a “foot in the door” doesn’t achieve victory. We’ve had decades of trying to convince people in power to listen to us—and yes, eventually they listen to us. Then they ignore us. Of course, some will argue that it takes time, it takes time… But I don’t see us moving forward with the seat at the table approach, I see us getting coopted and going in circles instead. This shouldn’t be a surprise, winning takes a movement, not an invitation. (Might be time to re-read Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.)

Begging for money doesn’t work. Hey, remember all those programs and initiatives and grants and research and jobs that got funded, well sort of funded, always on the edge of being cut? Victories? I don’t think so. One new president comes in and the federal money goes on the chopping block. Getting reluctant funding from sources that don’t have any real incentive to give us money just puts us under threat of losing funding at any moment. Now we have to look over our shoulders and not be too honest, or those strings attached will get yanked. Cooptation is the inevitable result. And the money we get is always just too little to actually make a real difference. For every really impactful peer-led program that gets funding there are thousands of jobs for peers and “recovery” programs that are just set up to fail. (We can’t even get adequate drug and alcohol treatment programs and harm reduction funded, even when forced treatment is part of the budget. That’s how cruel and neglectful our poor-hating society is.) The money, we are told? “There just isn’t enough.” A complete fraud—there is plenty of money. The people in power just want to spend it elsewhere.

Ok so those are a few things we do a lot that don’t work, and you yourself can add to this list. My point is we need a new strategy. I’ve been writing about this over the years, helping us think our way into a new focus for the survivor movement/mad movement so we can really win.

A reason our past strategies haven’t worked is because we didn’t learn the lessons of the 1970s and early ‘80s. All of the major advances protecting psychiatric patients’ rights and the rights of disabled people overall were won because there was broader social change uprising going on. The women’s liberation movement, the civil rights and Black liberation movements, the labor movements, the anti-war movements, the gay liberation movement… In fact, some of the most influential leaders of the psychiatric survivor movement are from that era, many still going strong.

Today the real push for forced psychiatry abolition, as small as this push is, is happening among the activists in the prison and police protest movements, where the call to “decarcerate care” has risen with little or no connection with the momentum of the psychiatric survivor movement and with very few survivors leading the way. And a shout out to the neurodivergent and trans liberation movements, and groups like Health Autonomy Convergence also starting to promote decarcerating care, but who also need stronger mad movement bridge-building and abolition awareness. Those movements really need us, because they are easy to channel into demands for “more money for services” without the abolition foundation needed to make services truly support people in crisis.

The lesson that we should have learned is this: There is a reason psychiatric oppression exists. It serves the powerful. It’s part of a larger system of cruelty, neglect, isolation. The prison system, the homelessness crisis, endless wars, poverty… none of those problems have been solved either, because they are all part of the same political economic system that rewards psychiatric violence, just as it rewards all the other kinds of harm we do to each other in the name of making money and keeping the system afloat. Psychiatric violence is big business, psychiatric violence feeds bureaucracy, it feeds scapegoating the poor and vulnerable, it fuels our overall money-making militaristic machine. As a society we neglect human rights, and the human rights of psychiatric survivors are the first to be discarded. As a society we neglect basic needs, and not having your basic needs met drives people crazy. As a society we tolerate and thrive off punishment and meanness to the homeless and criminals and poor, and that same meanness lands on psychiatric survivors. Don’t deal with trauma? It shows up as psychiatric oppression. Isolated, fragmented, competitive society based on loneliness? It leads to emotional distress that gets soaked up by the profit sponge of psychiatry, hospitals, and insurance companies.

My own story is just one of many that illustrates this. If I hadn’t spiraled into poverty and isolation after losing my job, I might have had a safety net preventing me from my psychiatric incarceration. If my father—a US War in Korea veteran and prison torture survivor—had actually gotten some healing I might not have suffered so much and been in the terrifying grip of trauma that dragged me down. If my mother—an abuse survivor who grew up orphaned—hadn’t faced poverty and neglect she might have been better equipped to raise a family that met everyone’s deeper emotional needs. Instead, I was neglected in a capitalist, individualist society that just doesn’t really care, and when I went down the drain, the drain led to psychiatry.

So here’s a way forward.

Last year I started doing a little volunteer work with the Greens (uh, you know, in my spare time). I was able to point out that the Green Party platform was already very psychiatric survivor friendly. The colleagues I was working with steered me in the right direction to make some changes. The result was that the Green Party of California endorsed abolishing forced psychiatry. They endorsed without really any controversy at all; they already shared values with our issues. It’s just nobody had asked them before.

Unfortunately, this came too late to throw their weight against the pro-forced treatment Proposition 1 ballot initiative in California. The horrible Newsom flagship proposal aims to sweep people off the streets (and from their homes) into mandatory “treatment”, while cutting voluntary services. The proposition was opposed by the main disability justice and civil rights groups in the state, but supported by the Pharma front group NAMI and the hospital industry. It won by such a small margin that I wonder: what if just one or two activists in the state had spoken up and gotten a group like the Greens, small but not negligible, with thousands on their email lists, to take some action pushing against it? We might have defeated it.

I believe getting the statewide Greens is consequential, because, whatever you think of the Greens, it elevates our issues to the level of political change and awareness. It’s actually on an agenda for making real concrete changes through the power of actual political reform. People working on a broad social change agenda and gathering power across issues and communities are including psychiatric liberation on that agenda. For the first time.

The other night I went to a candidate forum for Chris Bennett, a democratic socialist running for the federal house of representatives in my district. I asked him if he supported psychiatric force abolition, and… he said he does! I read his bio: turns out he is disabled and his strong support for disability justice is already in agreement with the mad movement. He just hadn’t come out publicly against forced treatment—probably because, like the Greens, nobody asked him. So after sending him information about the Green Party endorsement and talking with his campaign manager… we now have a candidate for congress who signed www.abolishforcedpsychiatry.org and has publicly come out against forced treatment and featured it prominently on his website! I’ll be helping his campaign to win in my district, and his endorsement will help build greater awareness of the mad movement.

The Palestine movement has a Disability Justice Collective, so I’ve been meeting with folks to weave mad movement issues onto the agenda. At the Bennett candidate forum an organizer from Decarcerate Sacramento, doing fantastic work for prison abolition, echoed my call for abolition of forced psychiatry. She even backed me with a story of her own—a homeless man who didn’t want to go to the hospital for a medical condition out of (very justifiable) fears of forced psychiatric detention. A next step is to get these decarceration activists to make the connections clearer with decarcerating mental health care, and come out for psychiatric survivor issues more visibly.

I’m all in favor of being in survivor-only spaces (one of the reasons Dina Tyler and I created Mad Camp). We also do need single issue mobilizing and to build our own organizations. Alternatives are crucial, peer specialists are a good thing, and having a seat at the table is better than staying home despairing (not that I don’t do a lot of that these days, but it’s a matter of… balance). And we do need to connect with other psychiatry abolitionists, so we don’t feel like lone weird conspiracy theorists. But we are playing a losing game if we have a losing strategy. Instead of building new silos of mental patients doing single issue advocacy business as usual, instead of being embedded in echo chambers that eventually turn on each other looking for someone to criticize, instead of spending our time fighting on the comments in Mad in America and sending advocacy emails to committees and panels, instead of hammering away at a strategy that hasn’t worked (though some have made a living at failing, it seems) what if we try a new strategy?

The idea could be called the strategy of solidarity. The mad movement organizing inside other movements—not just inside our own—anti-poverty, homeless, living wage, prison abolition, universal healthcare, anti-ICE, anti-corruption, climate emergency, electoral reform, Democratic Socialists, Palestine solidarity, mutual aid, childcare, trans liberation, forest defense, anti-war, labor unions, antifa, immigrant rights, money out of politics, animal rights, ending student debt, reproductive rights… building connections with everyone challenging the roots of our cruel gangster capitalism imperialist system. From inside these movements coming out as mad, and developing the psych survivor goals and agenda within those organizations as bridging to larger movements.

(And yes, I know many of us already do this—shout out to everyone who is creating these bridges and working in cross issue organizing and in organizations raising the awareness of mad liberation broadly in social movements. I just want it to grow! Anyone out there want to join the Greens in your state and get them to endorse Abolish Forced Psychiatry like I did in California? Anybody see a congressional candidate who is running with DSA you want to get on record for mad liberation? Contact me!)

And one more thing—I believe as mad activists we have something very unique to offer all the other issues. We know about self-care and community care and we know about seeing through labels of Us vs Them and we know about wild states and visions and intuition and deep sensitivities. We can help the broader movements be more grounded in our hearts, we can help each other see through how political elites manipulate and divide us. We’re the ultimate banished, the ultimate outsiders, and we offer a way to feel our common humanity. It’s those of us who have gone mad who can remind the group we are all vulnerable, we all need to speak up, we all need to share what’s inside of us. I believe that mad activists in the broader movements can play a very crucial role in the struggle to end the empire that dehumanizes, oppresses, kidnaps, and kills us. We are connected to the dreaming, we have access to the wildness, we embody healing and hope just by being alive. Our intuitions and visions and courage are vital ingredients for real social change. Empire pushes dehumanization, and as mad people we know a lot about the fight to not be dehumanized.

Maybe this time, as the chaos storms grow and the society goes into crisis, we can actually build enough people power across multiple issues and root causes to really shake the foundations of power in this society. And win.

Thanks to Dina Tyler for her contributions to this essay.