NEWS: Psychiatry magazine skews our psychiatric survivor movement history

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Thu, 8 Jun 2006 09:58:18 -0700

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NEWS: Psychiatry magazine skews our psychiatric survivor

movement history

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEWS: Human Rights in Mental Health - 8 June 2006

http://www.MindFreedom.org - please forward

 

Psychiatry magazine skews our rights movement history.

 

Authors mention MindFreedom but get facts & perspective wrong.

 

Analysis by David Oaks, Director, MindFreedom International

 

An American Psychiatric Association official magazine, _Psychiatric

Services_, has published an odd article (see below) in their June 2006

issue attempting to analyze the origins and history of the movement to

challenge psychiatric human rights violations, especially the part of

that movement led by psychiatric survivors.

 

The authors mention MindFreedom International, and at least spell our

group's name correctly.

 

The authors of the essay, entitled " Evolution of the Antipsychiatry

Movement Into Mental Health Consumerism, " fail in many strange and

curious ways. Their perspective and facts just do not match reality.

 

BELOW is a list of some of the authors' most outrageous errors and

bias.

 

AT BOTTOM is the text of this _Psychiatric Services_ article so you may

read it yourself, followed by how you may submit letters to their

editor.

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

Top 15 Examples of Bizarre Bias in _Psychiatric Services_ Article About

Us

 

1. LABELING: The authors repeatedly impose their own labels on many

individuals and groups who work for human rights, such as the loaded

and undefined term " antipsychiatry. " Most of the individuals and groups

involved do not apply that that term to themselves.

 

The authors continue a long-standing psychiatric tradition by refusing

to ask us how we define ourselves, and make up their own labels

instead. This is the same magazine that ran an angry essay by E. Fuller

Torrey claiming we cannot call ourselves " psychiatric survivors. "

 

2. ORIGINS: The authors try to place the origin of our social change

movement solely in the books of a few campus intellectuals and

theoreticians, while many of us actually credit the civil rights

movement and other grassroots movements as inspiration for grassroots

psychiatric survivor and mental health consumer organizing. Believe it

or not, we can and do start our own organizations.

 

3. BIOPSYCHIATRY PROVEN? The authors claim that studies now prove that

" schizophrenia [is] at least biologically based. " That is

editorializing. Of course the authors' footnotes omit any citation to

sources or scientific studies on this point for a simple reason: There

are none.

 

4. LESS NEUROLEPTICS? The authors outrageously claim that psychiatry

has " defused grievances " such as, " psychiatrists markedly reduced

dosages of neuroleptics prescribed. " As just one example that refutes

this from this week's headlines, 6/6/06, the _NY Times_ revealed that

neuroleptic prescriptions have gone up more than five-fold on youth.

That's not a " reduction " for those youth. More neuroleptics are being

given to more people than ever, along with polypharmacy where five or

even ten psychiatric drugs are prescribed at the same time.

 

5. SHOCK AND PSYCHOSURGERY INCREASING! The authors also claim

psychiatry has " defused grievances " because " electroconvulsive therapy

and psychosurgery became marginalized. " Marginalized? He means " gone

undergrouund, " because shock and psychosurgery have both experienced a

huge resurgence in popularity within the profession, without adequate

media scrutiny.

 

6. COMMITMENT STANDARDS ARE LOOSENING! The authors claim " compulsory

commitments came under close judicial scrutiny, " whatever that means.

The reality is that countless US states have loosened and expanded

commitment to such an extent, that disagreeing with one's psychiatrist

is practically grounds for commitment today (such as " likelihood to

deteriorate in the future without treatment, " i.e., drugging).

 

7. DON'T PIGEON-HOLE PSYCHIATRIC CRITICS. The authors try to equate

psychiatric survivor human rights with the " radical left. " Then how do

the authors explain the historic role of conservatives and libertarians

in fighting psychiatric abuse, psychosurgery, commitment and

institutions?

 

For example, today conservatives and libertarians lead the way in

fighting the rise of " mental health screening " in the schools. The fact

is that psychiatric survivors and mental health consumers and others

critical of psychiatry come from a wide variety of political

perspectives. In fact, fighting psychiatric tyranny is one of the great

red-blue unifiers between all political perspectives... and the general

public is slowly catching on.

 

8. WHY LEAVE OUT TODAY'S ALLIES? The authors try to force a narrative

in which academic and intellectual critics of the psychiatric

profession started our movement and then disappeared. Actually, there

are more psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health professionals

criticizing their profession, writing books, starting alternatives and

speaking out than ever before.

 

These critics work in cooperation with psychiatric survivors and mental

health consumers, and don't dominate us. See the huge number of

practical books criticizing the mainstream psychiatric profession and

promoting alternatives. These books don't fit into the stereotype of

being purely " theoretical. " Attend a conference of the International

Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP), which

continues to work closely with and support psychiatric surviviors.

 

And what about the countless family members, advocates and general

public who are part of the movement to challenge psychiatric human

rights violations? MindFreedom is majority psychiatric survivors, but

open to all.

 

9. FACTUAL ERROR: LEONARD ROY FRANK. The authors imply that the amazing

activist Leonard Roy Frank was the founder of Support Coalition

International and then went on to became an electroshock critic. While

Leonard has been a wonderful activist in our group, neither he nor the

founders of the coalition consider him as " the founder. " And of course

Leonard has been a main critic of electroshock for decades before the

founding of the coalition.

 

10. FACTUAL ERROR: CONFERENCE NAME. The authors give the wrong name of

the conference that was actually called " International Conference on

Human Rights and Against Psychiatric Oppression. "

 

11. FACTUAL ERROR: MINDFREEDOM. Thanks for the double listing, but if

the authors had talked with any of us they'd find out that Support

Coalition International changed its name to MindFreedom International

in 2005. Instead the authors list these as two separate groups.

 

12. MYTH OF " OUTSIDE AGITATORS " : The authors try to portray a tiny

group of antipsychiatrists as somehow subverting mental health

consumers. It's the old divide-and-conquer trick of claiming there are

" outside agitators. " The reality is that the vast majority of the

mental health systems' own clients, and all the organizations that

truly represent them, speak out against human rights viololations on

their own, and oppose practices like expanded outpatient commitment.

 

The authors claim that the National Council on Disability report

somehow came out of the mouths of " antipsychiatrists, " when actually

dozens upon dozens of grassroots people who had experienced the mental

health system testified to the NCD at a meeting of the National

Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy. Note how the authors

change " advocacy " to " antipsychiatry " as a way to marginalize us.

 

13. APA CLOSED TO DIALOGUE: The authors claim that the American

Psychiatric Association has found it difficult to dialogue with

psychiatric survivor and mental health consumer critics. The reality is

that the APA and similar groups have refused countless efforts to

dialogue. A number of us even did a several-week hunger strike mainly

asking for real dialogue. It's not as if the American Psychiatric

Association can't find our office phone numbers. Difficult to dialogue

with us? How about being _closed_ to dialogue?

 

14. CLEAR BIAS: The authors brazenly give away their political bias

with 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. " Notice how our " human rights concerns " have

now become " antipsychiatry disinformation. " Why, one would almost think

this magazine and its publishers were heavily funded by millions of

dollars from the drug industry.

 

15. LET US TELL OUR OWN STORY: And finally, in the big pictture, the

authors essentially try to impose a story, narrative, world view and

paradigm upon us... without asking us what we think about our own

lives. This explains the petty factual errors.

 

In the authors' view a few antipsychiatry intellectuals gave birth to

antipsychiatry psychiatric survivor groups, and then faded away. Now

these subversive antipsychiatry psychiatric survivors are supposedly

manipulating mental health consumers to fight psychiatric power. It is

almost as if the authors got their bizarre perspective on this point

from extremist American Enterprise Institute psychiatrist Sally

Satel... and there indeed Sally sits in the authors' footnotes.

 

Psychiatry falsely labeled many of us as clients... and now tries to

falsely label us when we organize to speak out about inherent, rampant,

severe and deadly human rights violations within their profession. How

about honest dialogue, discussion, listening and communication... isn't

that supposed to be mentally healthy, for everyone?

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

BELOW is the text of this essay. At BOTTOM is how to submit a letter to

their editor.

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

_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 ).

Mr. Rissmiller is attending Harvard College in Cambridge,

Massachusetts.

 

References

 

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 -

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

ACTIONS:

 

* E-mail a civil letter to the editor of _Psychiatric Services_ at

psjournal.

 

From their guidelines: " Letters should not exceed 500 words with a

maximum of three authors and five references. Letters related to

material published in _Psychiatric Services_ should be sent directly to

the editor at psjournal ; or mailed: American Psychiatric

Association; Suite 1825, MS#4; 1000 Wilson Boulevard; Arlington, VA

22209; or faxed: 703-907-1095. They must be received within three

months of publication of the article to which they refer. "

 

* Forward this to others and help debunk American Psychiatric

Association DISINFORMATION.

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

For other recent -- and more fair -- mentions of MindFreedom in the

media see:

 

http://www.intenex.net/pipermail/mindfreedom-news/2006-May/000034.html

 

~~~~~~~~~~

 

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web site: http://www.mindfreedom.org

e-mail: office

office phone: (541) 345-9106

toll free: 1-877-MAD-PRIDE or 1-877-623-7743

fax: (541) 345-3737

 

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