[5] Coalescing around the ex-patient newsletter Dendron,[6] in late 1988 leaders from several of the main national and grassroots psychiatric survivor groups felt that an independent, human rights coalition focused on problems in the mental health system was needed.
SCI's first public action was to stage a counter-conference and protest in New York City, in May, 1990, at the same time as (and directly outside of) the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting.
[3] Common themes are "talking back to the power of psychiatry," rights protection and advocacy, self-determination, and building capacity for lived experience leadership.
While activists in the movement may share a collective identity to some extent, views range along a continuum from conservative to radical in relation to psychiatric treatment and levels of resistance or patienthood.
"The most persistent critics of psychiatry have always been former mental hospital patients"[citation needed], although few were able to tell their stories publicly or to openly confront the psychiatric establishment, and those who did so were commonly considered so extreme in their charges that they could seldom gain credibility.
A number of ex-patients published pamphlets against the system in the 18th century, such as Samuel Bruckshaw (1774), on the "iniquitous abuse of private madhouses", and William Belcher (1796) with his "Address to humanity, Containing a letter to Dr Munro, a receipt to make a lunatic, and a sketch of a true smiling hyena".
[10] In the late 18th century, moral treatment reforms developed which were originally based in part on the approach of French ex-patient turned hospital-superintendent Jean-Baptiste Pussin and his wife Margueritte.
From 1848 in England, the Alleged Lunatics' Friend Society campaigned for sweeping reforms to the asylum system and abuses of the moral treatment approach.
However, while Beers initially blamed psychiatrists for tolerating mistreatment of patients, and envisioned more ex-patient involvement in the movement, he was influenced by Adolf Meyer and the psychiatric establishment, and toned down his hostility as he needed their support for reforms.
[9] In the UK, the National Society for Lunacy Law Reform was established in 1920 by angry ex-patients sick of their experiences and complaints being patronisingly discounted by the authorities who were using medical "window dressing" for essentially custodial and punitive practices.
[12] In 1922, ex-patient Rachel Grant-Smith added to calls for reform of the system of neglect and abuse she had suffered by publishing "The Experiences of an Asylum Patient".
At this same time, a young social worker in Detroit, Michigan, was doing some pioneering work with psychiatric patients from the “back wards” of Wayne County Hospital.
John H. Beard began his work on these wards with the conviction that these patients were not totally consumed by illness but retained areas of health.
This insight led him to involve the patients in such normal activities as picnics, attending a baseball game, dining at a fine restaurant, and then employment.
Fountain House had, by now, recognized that the experience of the illness, together with a poor or interrupted work history often denied members the opportunity to obtain employment.
[14] Originated by crusaders in periods of liberal social change, and appealing not so much to other sufferers as to elite groups with power, when the early reformer's energy or influence waned, mental patients were again mostly friendless and forgotten.
NAPA co-founder Leonard Roy Frank founded (with colleague Wade Hudson) Madness Network News in San Francisco in 1972.
Individuals such as Howard Geld, known as Howie the Harp for his harmonica playing, left Portland where he been involved in ILF to return to his native New York to help found the Mental Patients Liberation Project in 1971.
The ex-patients emphasized individual support from other patients; they espoused assertiveness, liberation, and equality; and they advocated user-controlled services as part of a totally voluntary continuum.
However, although the movement espoused egalitarianism and opposed the concept of leadership, it is said to have developed a cadre of known, articulate, and literate men and women who did the writing, talking, organizing, and contacting.
While sharing some of the goals of the earlier movement, consumer groups did not seek to abolish the traditional mental health system, which they believed was necessary.
The United States Massachusetts-based Freedom Center provides and promotes alternative and holistic approaches and takes a stand for greater choice and options in treatments and care.
The center and the New York-based Icarus Project (which does not self-identify as a consumer/survivor organization but has participants that identify as such) have published a Harm Reduction Guide To Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs and were recently a featured charity in Forbes business magazine.
[37] Research into consumer/survivor initiatives (CSIs) suggests they can help with social support, empowerment, mental wellbeing, self-management and reduced service use, identity transformation and enhanced quality of life.
The two groups were comparable at baseline on a wide range of demographic variables, self-reported psychiatric diagnosis, service use, and outcome measures.
After a year and a half, those who had participated in CSIs showed significant improvement in social support and quality of life (daily activities), less days of psychiatric hospitalization, and more were likely to have stayed in employment (paid or volunteer) and/or education.
They also noted that there were various barriers to this, most notably lack of funding, and also that the range of views represented by the CSIs appeared less narrow and more nuanced and complex than previously, and that perhaps the consumer/survivor social movement is at a different place than it was 25 years ago.
[41] A significant theme that has emerged from consumer/survivor work, as well as from some psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, has been a recovery model which seeks to overturn therapeutic pessimism and to support sufferers to forge their own personal journey towards the life they want to live; some argue, however, that it has been used as a cover to blame people for not recovering or to cut public services.
Organized psychiatry often views radical consumerist groups as extremist, as having little scientific foundation and no defined leadership, as "continually trying to restrict the work of psychiatrists and care for the seriously mentally ill", and as promoting disinformation on the use of involuntary commitment, electroconvulsive therapy, stimulants and antidepressants among children, and neuroleptics among adults.