Psychiatric Survivors

From Recovery

A Psychiatric survivor is a member of a group of people who believe that they have been harmed or betrayed by psychiatry. They often advocate in favor of mental health treatment alternatives for those diagnosed with or accused of being afflicted by a mental illnesses. This is also called the consumer survivors movement by some however that is disputable since the term consumer implies empowerment and choice. Many psychiatric survivors subsequently feel that they have been mistreated by certain psychiatrists or by psychiatric doctrine in general, do not benefit from the services offered or forced upon them. Many respond with outrage to a system which judges them to be mentally ill, because they consider there to be a value bias within psychiatry that undermines the judgment of psychiatrists, pharmaceutical companies, and the legal oversight of the mental health system. According to many persons with anti-psychiatry views the interventions made in the name of help to be coercive and inherently violent in nature. The psychiatric survivors movement grew out of these experiences, and seems to have been triggered by the ziest of earlier inspirations for the movement (anti-psychiatry and the opposition of surrealism to psychiatry) and the civil rights movement. The beginning of a formal movement is often attributed to Howard Geld, or Howie the Harp, and the formation of the Insane Liberation Front in Portland, Oregon, in 1969. Many other local initiatives followed, many of them with Howie's direct participation, and most owing to his articulation of peer alternatives to traditional treatment methods, and demonstrated success in funding and operating peer-operated service centers. A coalition of such programs meets annually at the Alternatives conference. People with mental illnesses often "suffer from widespread systemic discrimination and are consistently denied the rights and services to which they are entitled". One of the goals of the psychiatric survivors movement is to have mental illnesses protected by Anti-discrimination laws, thus affording them the same legal protection as those of varying genders, age, race, religion etc. Additionally, it is well recognised that those with mental disorders have generally higher rates of unemployment, and lower occupational attainment; for example, none of the executives in the Fortune 500 companies have diagnosed mental disorders. Proponents of affirmative action believe that, as with other minority groups, there should be equal representation of those with mental illnesses in all occupations.