Thesis ID: CBB575040905

Confronting the Power of Psychiatry: The Psychiatric Survivors' Movement, 1972-1986 (2018)

unapi

This thesis explores the history of the mental patients’ liberation movement in the 1970s-1980s. It shows how psychiatric survivors successfully contested the power and legitimacy of psychiatry via mutual support and self-help; activism as a grassroots social movement; and the creation of alternate conceptions of madness and patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system. Ex-patients utilized their distinct knowledge to make the personal political, moving beyond the critiques of anti-psychiatrists, to fight psychiatric abuses such as electroshock and forced drugging. It covers the movement’s tactics, most successful local and national activism, and cross-movement alliances – especially its anti-incarceration work with the prisoners’ rights movement. It offers a nuanced understanding of the tensions that led to the movement’s fracturing, and argues that activists adapted by retaining a “tempered liberation focus” that enabled them to work towards change and human rights within the psychiatric system while remaining true to their original liberatory goals.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB575040905/

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Authors & Contributors
Taylor, Barbara
Romano, Gabriella
Cahalan, Susannah
Golcman, Alejandra
Lynne Jones
Toms, Jonathan
Concepts
Psychiatry
Mental disorders and diseases
Psychiatric hospitals
Electroconvulsive therapy; electroshock therapy
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Human rights
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
21st century
20th century, early
19th century
Places
United States
Italy
Germany
Great Britain
Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Hamburg (Germany)
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