Tag: Psychiatric Survivor Movement

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.

An interview with Celia Brown: psychiatric survivor, human rights activist, and president of MindFreedom International.

An interview with activist Dorothy Dundas about her connection to the psychiatric survivor movement from the 1970s to today.

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.

New understandings of medication and withdrawal experiences warrant rethinking conceptualizations of health and “madness."

An interview with Jeffrey Michael Friedman, clinical social worker and activist in the psychiatric survivors movement who provides trauma-informed therapy to victims of abuse and violence, including those who have survived abuses within the mental health system.

In this piece for Rooted in Rights, s.e. smith chronicles the life of Judi Chamberlin and discusses the important role she played at the intersection of...

For the last month or so, Mad in America has been hard at work building a directory of “mental health” providers across North America (and eventually, we hope, the world) who will work with people wanting to come off psychotropic drugs.  I’ve been honored to have been tasked with the responsibility of building this directory, and I have to say, it’s been inspiring to talk to people all over the country who do this work, and who “get it”.

“And so what we should be thinking about is our responsibility to care for and shield them from harm and give them the...