To set the ball in motion for this conference I want to say something about how the campaigning issues of survivors have changed in the past decade or more. I am speaking from the perspective of a survivor and a benefit claimant. I want to take you back to the early 1990s when I first became involved in the survivor movement after a few unhelpful admissions to psychiatric wards. As you might know, the survivor movement opposes the medical model of mental distress and has been campaigning for decades for care to be provided from the perspective of a social model. We have also been fighting the power imbalance between healthcare provider and service user, an imbalance that is enshrined in law; I’m referring to the Mental Health Act.
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I mention this history because I want to emphasise the enormity of the shift we have already made in campaigning. We are now out in the world standing side by side with other oppressed people. We always knew that the medical model of what they called mental illness was based on denial of the social context of our distress and that that denial served a political ideology. We knew that mental distress was caused by social factors, poverty, discrimination, domestic abuse, bullying, and so on and we weren’t convinced that the chemical imbalance in the brain story was the whole story or even any part of it. We also knew that the big pharmaceutical companies were behind a lot of the drug pushing. We were arguing for our pain and madness to be contextualised.
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Psychiatry had been unable to bring an end to much mental distress. It wasn’t curing us. Survivors came up with a Recovery Model which was about finding fulfilment in our lives on our own terms. However this model was stolen from us, transformed, and used against us. It is re-presented to us as being about changing our attitudes and all the other negative things we are guilty of. The sole purpose of the Recovery Model now is to move us away from the benefits system and pretend we are moving towards work. It has no therapeutic purpose.
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By turning psychology and the caring professions into weapons of abuse the government is trying to destroy the institutions that help to uphold our values, our empathy and respect, and even our love for each other. As though it’s not enough that they want to abuse us, they want to delegate the abusing so that we abuse each other. We have to fight to save the integrity of these professional and academic disciplines. I don’t think it’s too extreme to say they are trying to annihilate our humanity.
