NEWS: American Psychiatric Assn. Debates Psychiatric Survivors &
Allies
mindfreedom-news at intenex.net
mindfreedom-news at intenex.net
Thu Jul 27 13:51:38 CDT 2006
NEWS: Your Mind & Your Freedom - 1 August 2006
http://www.MindFreedom.org - please forward
The American Psychiatric Association Published
A Heated Debate About Psychiatric Survivors,
Mental Health Consumers and "Antipsychiatry."
The Debate Mentions MindFreedom Several Times,
And The APA Published Replies From MindFreedom.
BELOW read the debate, letters, essay and more.
The American Psychiatric Association has published a heated back-and-
forth debate in the August 2006 issue of their _Psychiatric Services_
journal about the history of the social change movement for human
rights and alternatives in the mental health system.
The debate mentions MindFreedom International a number of times. The
American Psychiatric Association published ten letters, including
several by MindFreedom members, board and staff.
BELOW are two of these published letters, along with the original
essay that sparked this controversy about our movement's history
published in their June 2006 issue, plus how you may read all ten
published letters.
Please forward this exchange widely to help inform the media and public.
~~~~~~~~~~
_Psychiatric Services_ 57:1212, August 2006
published by American Psychiatric Association
Letter
The Evolution of the Consumer Movement
To the Editor: The essay "Evolution of the Antipsychiatry Movement
Into Mental Health Consumerism" (1) in the June issue attempts to
impose false labels and a skewed history on activists for human
rights in mental health, including the nonprofit organization that I
direct, MindFreedom International.
The origin of our social change movement cannot be traced to a few
antipsychiatry theoreticians and campus intellectuals. Many of us
actually credit the civil rights movement and our own experiences of
psychiatric abuse as the original sources of our inspiration. We can
and do organize on our own. The authors use the undefined term
"antipsychiatry" 34 times in their essay, applying that label to many
of us who do not describe ourselves or our groups in that way. There
are, for example, compassionate, practicing psychiatrists who play an
active role in MindFreedom.
The authors claim that psychiatry has addressed our key grievances
"to some degree." Even if some psychiatrists have reduced the dosages
of neuroleptics prescribed, overall neuroleptic prescriptions are
skyrocketing. Neuroleptic prescriptions for youths have shot up more
than fivefold in less than a decade (2). From our perspective, both
electroshock and psychosurgery have experienced a resurgence in
popularity within psychiatry and the mainstream press. Many states
have greatly expanded commitment criteria, and most states have
implemented involuntary outpatient commitment. Courts now order some
MindFreedom members who live peacefully in their own homes to take
neuroleptics involuntarily.
The authors appear to observe us from afar through a flawed lens,
which may explain their factual errors. The well-respected activist
Leonard Roy Frank is not the founder of Support Coalition
International. Support Coalition International and MindFreedom
International are not two separate organizations--our name change
occurred in 2005. The essay aligns the history of our movement with
the "radical left" to a great extent, ignoring decades of outstanding
work by conservatives and libertarians in fighting psychiatric abuse.
Today, conservatives lead the grassroots opposition to mental health
screening in schools.
Consider the bias inherent in this sentence: "Psychiatry continues to
fight antipsychiatry disinformation on the use of involuntary
commitment, electroconvulsive therapy, stimulants and antidepressants
among children, and neuroleptics among adults." The authors appear to
transmogrify into "antipsychiatry disinformation" all public
education efforts that are inconsistent with the American Psychiatric
Association's official position.
This is my 30th year working for human rights and alternatives in the
mental health system. We have made mistakes. We are not perfect. But
I am very proud of our social change movement, which includes
concerned family members, advocates, attorneys, mental health
professionals, and interested members of the public. The authors
claim that the psychiatric profession finds it difficult to
communicate with us. The fact is that the American Psychiatric
Association has generally refused our repeated invitations for
conversation.
Somehow, some people who have experienced serious human rights
violations in the mental health system--including unscientific
labeling, forced drugging, solitary confinement, restraints,
involuntary commitment, electroshock, and more--have reached deep
within the human spirit and found the power to speak out and unite
nonviolently (3). Please reply with dialogue, not distortion.
David Oaks
Footnotes
Mr. Oaks is director of MindFreedom International, Eugene, Oregon.
References
1. Rissmiller D, Rissmiller J: Evolution of the Antipsychiatry
Movement Into Mental Health Consumerism. Psychiatric Services
57:863-866,2006
2. Carey B: Use of antipsychotics by the young rose fivefold. New
York Times, June 6, 2006, p A18
3. Mahler J, Unzicker R, Foner J, et al: Taking issue with taking
issue: "psychiatric survivors" reconsidered. Psychiatric Services
48:601,1997
~~~~~~~~~~
_Psychiatric Services_ 57:1214, August 2006
published by American Psychiatric Association
Letter
To the Editor: Psychiatric Services has done a disservice to any of
its readers who might want an accurate picture of our movement for
the human rights of psychiatric consumers/survivors. Anyone familiar
with our history would have a hard time recognizing us from the
bizarre and highly inaccurate article that appeared in your most
recent issue.
The authors got it partly right when they mentioned two of our long-
time leaders, Leonard Frank and Judi Chamberlin. If the authors had
interviewed either of them, their account might have some resemblance
to reality. Instead, the authors seem to have relied completely on
articles and books, rather than first-hand reports from the people
who have actually been involved.
As for myself, my 35 years of activity in our movement wasn't
inspired by any books written by Drs. Szasz or Laing or the other
seminal thinkers named, although I respect their contributions. It
came about from my ten years in a state hospital as a child, after I
received electroshock treatment at age six at the hands of one of the
profession's most honored child psychiatrists. And most activists in
our movement have also become involved because of their own experiences.
Though I would hardly expect a journal of the American Psychiatric
Association to support our criticisms of psychiatry, I think that it
would be much more useful for your readers--and more interesting--if
you exposed them to accurate reports of our positions and activities.
Any psychiatrist who relied on articles such as this to get a picture
of our movement would be living in a dream world.
Ted Chabasinski, J.D.
Footnotes
Mr. Chabasinski is a patients' rights attorney, Berkeley, California.
[Ted is also a MindFreedom International board member.]
~~~~~~~~~~
HOW TO READ ALL TEN LETTERS:
For a limited time, at no cost you may download a PDF with all ten
letters, and/or read the text of each of the ten letters, in the
August 2006 issue of _Psychiatric Services_ on the APA's web site:
http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/content/vol57/issue8/?etoc#LETTERS
or use this smaller web address:
http://tinyurl.com/r8vqp
When these letters become unavailable from the APA for free, go to
the MindFreedom International web site for information about how to
access them at no cost, or contact the MindFreedom office.
~~~~~~~~~~
BELOW is the text of the original essay:
~~~~~~~~~~
_Psychiatric Services_ 57:863-866, June 2006
published by American Psychiatric Association
Evolution of the Antipsychiatry Movement Into Mental Health Consumerism
by David J. Rissmiller, D.O. and Joshua H. Rissmiller
Abstract
This essay reviews the history and evolution of the antipsychiatry
movement. Radical antipsychiatry over several decades has changed
from an antiestablishment campus-based movement to a patient-based
consumerist movement. The antecedents of the movement are traced to a
crisis in self-conception between biological and psychoanalytic
psychiatry occurring during a decade characterized by other radical
movements. It was promoted through the efforts of its four seminal
thinkers: Michel Foucault in France, R. D. Laing in Great Britain,
Thomas Szasz in the United States, and Franco Basaglia in Italy. They
championed the concept that personal reality and freedom were
independent of any definition of normalcy that organized psychiatry
tried to impose. The original antipsychiatry movement made major
contributions but also had significant weaknesses that ultimately
undermined it. Today, antipsychiatry adherents have a broader base
and no longer focus on dismantling organized psychiatry but look to
promote radical consumerist reform.
Radical antipsychiatry in the past four decades has changed from an
influential international movement dominated by intellectual
psychiatrists to an ex-patient consumerist coalition fighting against
pharmacological treatment, coercive hospitalizations, and other
authoritarian psychiatric practices. This Open Forum article explores
the history of the antipsychiatry movement and attempts to define how
the movement has evolved.
The antecedents of the antipsychiatry movement can be traced to the
early 1950s, when deep divisions were developing between biological
and psychoanalytic psychiatrists. Psychoanalytic psychiatry, which
had exerted unchallenged control of the profession for decades,
endorsed treatment that was subjective and dynamic and that involved
protracted psychotherapy. It was being challenged by biological
psychiatry, which claimed that psychoanalysis was unscientific,
costly, and ineffective.
Conversely, an outcry was mounting against psychiatry's practice of
compulsory admission of mental patients to state institutions, where
they were coerced into taking high doses of neuroleptic drugs and
undergoing convulsive and psychosurgical procedures. The
antipsychiatry movement arose as a group of scholarly psychoanalysts
and sociologists shaped an organized opposition to what were
perceived as biological psychiatry's abuses in the name of science.
This protest was joined by a 1960s worldwide counterculture that was
already rebelling against all forms of political, sexual, and racial
injustice.
The term "antipsychiatry" was first coined in 1967 by the South
African psychoanalyst David Cooper (1) well after the movement was
already under way. It was internationally promoted through the
efforts of its four seminal thinkers, Michel Foucault in France, R.
D. Laing in Great Britain, Thomas Szasz in the United States, and
Franco Basaglia in Italy. All four championed the concept that
personal reality was independent from any hegemonic definition of
normalcy imposed by organized psychiatry.
In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason (2), Foucault traced the social context of mental illness and
noted that external economic and cultural interests have always
defined it. During the Renaissance, madmen were characterized as
fools who figured prominently in the writings of Shakespeare and
Cervantes. Beginning in the 17th century, madmen were confined and
locked away, justified by the state's "imperative of labor." The
poor, criminals, and the insane were all isolated as a condemnation
of anyone unwilling or unable to compete for gainful employment.
In the early 1800s madmen were separated from prisoners and beggars
and forced into hospitals run by medical doctors. Madness was
reinvented as a disease, and inhumane treatment was begun. It
consisted of classification, custody, and coercion by a psychiatric
authority, which operated as an arm of the state, ridding it of
unwanted individuals. Psychiatry became "a jurisdiction without
appeal ... between the police and the courts ... a third order of
repression" (2).
While Foucault was writing in France in the early 1960s, R. D. Laing,
in England, joined other authors of the period who were describing
the social origins of behavior. Fanon (3) demonstrated how blacks
often would fulfill racist stereotypes; Lessing (4), how women
commonly conformed to society's expectation of passivity and
femininity; and Goffman (5), how patients, stripped of normal social
responsibilities, developed institutional behavior. Laing promoted
the idea that severe mental illness, similarly, had a social causality.
In The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (6),
a best-seller in colleges across the United States and Great Britain,
Laing noted that a patient with psychosis could be viewed in one of
two ways: "One may see his behaviour as 'signs' of a 'disease' [or]
one may see his behaviour as expressive of his existence." For Laing,
paranoid delusions were not signs of an illness but an understandable
reaction to an inescapable and persecutory social order. If Laing was
correct, and schizophrenia were not a disease but rather an
existential fight for personal freedom, then logic allows that it
could be cured through social remediation. Laing, through the
Philadelphia Association founded with Cooper in 1965, set up over 20
therapeutic communities throughout England where staff and patients
assumed equal status and any medication used was voluntary. A
recounting of a seven-week stay in one of these communities was
chronicled in the 1972 film Asylum (7).
Other psychoanalysts were also exploring the social context
surrounding mental illness. Thomas Szasz, having recently been
appointed to the faculty of the State University of New York, in 1957
wrote his most influential paper, "The Myth of Mental Illness." Over
the next three years, it was rejected by at least six psychiatric
journals, including the American Journal of Psychiatry, until it was
finally accepted for publication in the American Psychologist (8) in
1960. As the antipsychiatry movement gained momentum, this article
became the core of his best-selling book (9) by the same name and the
slogan around which many in the movement rallied.
Because schizophrenia demonstrated no discernible brain lesion, Szasz
believed its classification as a disease was a fiction perpetrated by
organized psychiatry to gain power. The state, searching for a way to
exclude nonconformists and dissidents, legitimized psychiatry's
coercive practices. Equating the resulting psychiatry-government
collusion with the Spanish Inquisition, Szasz (10) called it "the
single most destructive force that has affected American society
within the last 50 years." Such a conspiratorial link between the
government and psychiatry was an appealing concept to such
counterculture icons as Timothy Leary (11), who, preceding his
termination from Harvard, wrote to Szasz in 1961 that "the Myth of
Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of
psychiatry ... perhaps ... the most important book published in the
twentieth century."
Citing the principle of "separation of church and state," Szasz
argued for a similarly clear division between "psychiatry and state."
Otherwise, the state would ultimately corrupt psychiatry for its own
purposes, as occurred in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. As a
preventive measure, Szasz helped launch the Libertarian Party in
1971, and its platform called for a halt to government-psychiatry
mind control operations.
Others involved in the antipsychiatry movement were even more
condemning. In 1969, Scientology's charismatic founder, L. Ron
Hubbard (12), wrote, "There is not one institutional psychiatrist
alive who ... could not be arraigned and convicted of extortion,
mayhem and murder." Hubbard and Szasz cofounded the still powerful
Citizens Commission on Human Rights, which encouraged the arrest and
incarceration of psychiatrists for their crimes against humanity.
Alliances were formed with other contemporary activist groups. In May
1970, hundreds in the antipsychiatry movement joined gay activists in
forming a human chain barring psychiatrists from entering the
American Psychiatric Association's 124th annual meeting. During a
similar disruption the following year, gay activist Frank Kameny
grabbed the podium and declared war on psychiatry for its DSM
classification of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. Wanting
the protests to stop, the American Psychiatric Association formed a
task force, which, by a vote of 58 percent, officially deleted
homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973.
Psychiatry's purported abuse of patients was popularized in Kesey's
1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (13), which contributed
to reforms in mental health public policy. David Bazelon, a jurist of
the powerful United States Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia, deplored authoritarian psychiatric practices. In 1966, he
established in Lake v. Cameron that all psychiatric treatment must be
carried out in the least restrictive setting possible. In the early
1970s the antipsychiatry attorney Bruce Ennis created the "Mental
Health Bar." Its goal was to completely abolish involuntary
commitments or prevent them by making them too arduous to secure.
These and other initiatives heralded the release of hundreds of
thousands of patients from state hospitals.
Deinstitutionalization in Europe occurred over a decade later. The
Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, its leading proponent, while
working at the asylum in Trieste, came to believe that mental illness
was not a disease but rather an expression of human needs. Over the
next decade he personally mobilized an antipsychiatry movement in
Italy that culminated in the 1978 Italian National Reform Bill that
banned all asylums and compulsory admissions and established
community hospital psychiatric units, which were restricted to 15
beds. This reorganization of mental health services in Italy resulted
in the "democratic psychiatry movement," wherein hundreds of
psychiatric institutions were closed throughout Europe, New Zealand,
and Australia, including many in Ireland and Finland, where the
highest number of asylum beds were located.
Despite such notable successes and after nearly two decades of
prominence, the international antipsychiatry movement began to
dramatically diminish in the early 1980s, both in visibility and
impact. Organized psychiatry, by addressing some of the movement's
key grievances, was able to defuse it to some degree. The adoption of
the biopsychosocial model narrowed the gap between analytic and
biological practitioners. Neurotransmitter discoveries and
schizophrenia twin registries offered support that schizophrenia was
at least partially biologically based. As comparison studies failed
to support efficacy and as tardive dyskinesia became more apparent,
psychiatrists markedly reduced dosages of neuroleptics prescribed.
Electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery became marginalized as
treatments and compulsory commitments came under close judicial
scrutiny.
But by far the most important determinant of the movement's demise
was its loss of broad-based support. To a great extent, the
antipsychiatry movement was derived from its close relationship to
other progressive leftist coalitions that, by association and
overlapping membership, supported the movement. With the decline of
other student, feminist, gay, and black coalitions, the
antipsychiatry movement could no longer rely on counterculture
support. The radical left, with its utopian vision, was being
replaced, worldwide, by an emerging conservative political landscape.
Since the antipsychiatry movement's raison d'être was inherently
antiestablishment, it, like the other militant movements of the day,
was at risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant.
The mental health consumerist movement offered a struggling
antipsychiatry coalition the mainstream collaborator it needed for
rejuvenation. Since its inception in the early 1900s by former
patient Clifford Beers and through organizations such as the Anti-
Insane Asylum Society and the National Committee on Mental Hygiene,
the consumerist movement had achieved significant international
mental health reforms. Its tactics of forming political alliances and
lobbying instead of confrontation appealed to conservative
politicians who were weary of civil disobedience. The movement's
vision of patients helping one another addressed a growing concern
over the cost of mental health treatment.
But consumerists considered the antipsychiatry movement as "largely
an intellectual exercise of academics" (14). Consumerists wanted to
keep their movement in the hands of prior patients. They had no
interest in being led by psychiatrist intellectuals who had done
little during the antipsychiatry movement to "reach out to struggling
ex-patients" (14). As a result, as the antipsychiatry movement
evolved from being campus based to being patient based, its founders
were marginalized as bystanders to a movement they had begun.
Appelbaum (15) in 1994 observed, "Now, more than three decades
later, ... Szasz, Laing, and their colleagues are no longer
fixtures ... and ... most college and graduate students have never
heard of them or their argument that mental illness is a socially
derived myth."
With over a half million deinstitutionalized patients to draw from,
there was a potential for the new antipsychiatry consumerist
coalition to be extensive. Many former patients, angry about the
coercive treatment they had received and looking for support and
identity, would be ideal carriers of the antipsychiatry message. They
joined local consumerist radical groups, and new ex-patient leaders
arose. Leonard Frank, founder of Support Coalition International,
after undergoing over 80 insulin comas and electroshock treatments,
became electroshock therapy's new outspoken critic. Ex-patient Judi
Chamberlin, cofounder of the Mental Patients Liberation Front,
mobilized the movement with On Our Own: Patient-Controlled
Alternatives to the Mental Health System (16).
The formative years of this movement in the United States saw
"survivors" promoting their antipsychiatry, self-determination
message through small, disconnected groups, including the Insane
Liberation Front, the Mental Patients' Liberation project, the Mental
Patient's Liberation Front, and the Network Against Psychiatric
Assault. The fragmented networks communicated through their annual
Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression (held from 1973
to 1985), through the ex-patient-run Madness Network News (from 1972
to 1986), and through the annual "Alternatives" conference funded by
the National Institute of Mental Health for mental health consumers
(from 1985 to the present). Similar groups arose throughout Canada
and, later, Europe, where the name "survivor" brought more public
criticism because of its association with the holocaust. The movement
searched for a unifying medium through which to integrate.
The growing Internet "global community" offered just such a medium.
Numerous radical antipsychiatry Web sites, such as Support Coalition
International, Citizens Commission on Human Rights, the
Antipsychiatry Coalition, and MindFreedom International, linked
antipsychiatry movements in over 30 countries. Their capacity to
instantaneously reach millions meant that "despite its modest head
count, the consumer/survivor movement ... exerted a significant
sociopolitical influence on the mental health care system" (17). By
avoiding the antipsychiatry movement flaw of being radicalized
without being politicized, radical consumerists continued to maintain
informal ties with more conservative consumerist organizations such
as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in the United States
and the Mental Health Foundation in England. Mainstream consumerist
groups benefited from such unofficial relationships through increased
impact in grassroots lobbying and legislative advocacy efforts.
Such joint efforts exerted a palpable effect. In 1986 the survivor-
antipsychiatry-consumerist triumvirate succeeded in getting Congress
to mandate independent protection and advocacy programs for people
with mental illness in all 50 states. The mission to investigate
allegations of patient abuse came with a mandate that at least 60
percent of the membership of the governing advocacy councils be ex-
psychiatric patients or their families.
In 2000 the National Council on Disability, an independent federal
agency charged with making recommendations to the President and
Congress, heard strong antipsychiatry testimony from survivors
"describing how people with psychiatric disabilities have been
beaten, shocked, isolated, incarcerated, restricted, raped, deprived
of food and bathroom privileges, and physically and psychologically
abused in institutions." The council concluded that "People with
psychiatric disabilities are routinely deprived of their rights in a
way no other disability group has been [and] ... the manner in which
American society treats people with psychiatric disabilities
constitutes a national emergency and a national disgrace" (18).
Radical consumerists were instrumental in getting the United Nations
General Assembly to adopt its 1991 Principles for the Protection of
Persons With Mental Illness and the Improvement of Mental Health
Care. In 2002 the Scientology-funded Commission on Human Rights
successfully petitioned the Secretary-General of the United Nations
to report annually to the General Assembly on the progress of human
rights, including as it relates to persons with mental illness.
Organized psychiatry has found it difficult to have a constructive
dialogue with the evolving radical consumerist movement. Consumerist
groups are viewed as extremist, having little scientific foundation
and no defined leadership. The profession sees them as continually
trying to restrict "the work of psychiatrists and care for the
seriously mentally ill" (17). Psychiatry continues to fight
antipsychiatry disinformation on the use of involuntary commitment,
electroconvulsive therapy, stimulants and antidepressants among
children, and neuroleptics among adults.
Conversely, radical consumerists remain disinclined to soften their
antipsychiatry stance toward a territorial and biologically oriented
profession that, in their view, has profited from patients it
neglected and abused. Seeing themselves as "the last minority" (17),
unfairly stigmatized by psudoscientific classification, and denied
self-determination, they will undoubtedly continue to play an
assertive role in the delivery of mental health services worldwide.
Footnotes
Dr. Rissmiller is affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry,
School of Osteopathic Medicine, University of Medicine and Dentistry
of New Jersey, Cherry Hill, New Jersey 08002 (e-mail,
rissmidj at umdnj.edu). Mr. Rissmiller is attending Harvard College in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
References
1 Cooper D: Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry. London, Tavistock
Publications, 1967
2 Foucault M: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the
Age of Reason. New York, Random House, 1965
3 Fanon F: The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Grove Press, 1963
4 Lessing DM: The Golden Notebook. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1962
5 Goffman E: Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental
Patients and Other Inmates. New York, Anchor Books, 1961
6 Laing RD: The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and
Madness. Harmondsworth, England, Penguin, 1960
7 Robinson P (director): Asylum. Kino Video, 1972
8 Szasz TS: The myth of mental illness. American Psychologist
15:113-118,1960
9 Szasz TS: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of
Personal Conduct. New York, Hoeber-Harper, 1961
10 Szasz TS: The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the
Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement. New York, Harper and Row,
1970
11 Leary T: A letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961.
Available at www.szasz.com/leary.html
12 Hubbard LR: Crime and psychiatry, June 23, 1969. Available at
http://freedom. lronhubbard.org/page080.htm
13 Kesey K: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York, Viking Press,
1962
14 Chamberlin J: The ex-patients' movement: where we've been and
where we're going. Journal of Mind and Behavior 11:323-336,1990
15 Appelbaum PS: Almost a Revolution: Mental Health Law and the
Limits of Change. New York, Oxford University Press, 1994
16 Chamberlin J: On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the
Mental Health System. New York, Hawthorne, 1978
17 Satel SL, Redding RE: Sociopolitical trends in mental health care:
the consumer/survivor movement and multiculturalism, in Kaplan and
Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 8th ed. Edited by
Sadock BJ, Sadock VA. Philadelphia, Pa, Lippincott Williams and
Wilkins, 2005
18 Bristo M: From Privileges to Rights: People Labeled With
Psychiatric Disabilities Speak for Themselves. Washington, DC,
National Council on Disability, Jan 20, 2000
- end -
~~~~~~~~~~
ACTION:
Please forward this alert to media and others to debunk the American
Psychiatric Association's skewed version of our history.
~~~~~~~~~~
Join MindFreedom International, donate or renew your membership today!
Do you want to...
* Win human rights campaigns in mental health?
* End abuse by the psychiatric drug industry?
* Support the self-determination of psychiatric survivors?
* Promote safe, humane and effective options in mental health?
You are not alone! MindFreedom is a nonprofit human rights group that
unites 100 sponsor and affiliate groups with individual members, and
is accredited by the United Nations as a Non-Governmental
Organization (NGO) with Consultative Roster Status.
MindFreedom is one of the very few totally independent groups in the
mental health advocacy field with no funding from governments, drug
companies, religions, corporations, or the mental health system.
While most of MindFreedom's members are psychiatric survivors, *all*
who support human rights are invited to join and become active leaders.
JOIN, RENEW, DONATE, or give GIFT MEMBERSHIPS to MindFreedom
International today here:
http://www.mindfreedom.org/join.shtml
For a MAD MARKET of books and other products to support human rights
campaigns in mental health: http://www.madmarket.org
MindFreedom International office: 454 Willamette, Suite 216 - POB
11284; Eugene, OR 97440-3484 USA
web site: http://www.mindfreedom.org
e-mail: office at mindfreedom.org
office phone: (541) 345-9106
toll free: 1-877-MAD-PRIDE or 1-877-623-7743 fax: (541) 345-3737
~~~~~~~~~~
EVERY TUESDAY at 1 pm EST listen to the MindFreedom News Hour with
host David Oaks online live at the Progressive Radio Network: http://
www.theprn.org
Please forward.
More information about the MindFreedom-News
mailing list