November 20, 1992

Advancing the Empowerment of the Survivors Movement

I want to talk about the mindset of the mental patients' movement, about what is needed to move it to a higher level. The self-help perspective has provided a tremendous boost to the movement, it has put us on the mental health "map." When the system responds to this, we see a system that is control-happy and unrealistic, but the deeper reality is that our perspective threatens them and challenges them to adapt. The conservative families' movement, which is bound and determined to deny things and play games, is also facing a reality that will make it reconstruct itself to accommodate our social values.

Both the the mental health system and the families' movement have fundamental weaknesses and contradictions in their work -- for them, this is crisis, for us, opportunity. We have already challenged the repressive character of their system and provided a self-help alternative that is more humane and practical. We are more and more developing peer counseling and various sorts of social advocacy -- setting models for mental health professionals who want to improve their attitudes and work methods. And just as we won't cop out on issues of abusive behavior or medical model psychiatric oppression, so too families will more and more have to face these things if they are to heal themselves.

I want to talk about the activity of the psychiatric survivors' movement, which has a lot of issues around how to relate to professionals. The movement has lifted itself up by putting down professionals, but this is a mixed benefit that can hurt as well as help. Our movement should come to appreciate how it is slowly redefining the direction of community psychology -- how it is pushing the usual run of dysfunctional professionals toward better attitudes and values. Our people have long promoted truth and poetry, and are now building stronger and more trusting links with those professionals who share our radical critique of conventional psychology, on the basis of strength.

At one time the problem was to clear out of the movement the Radical Therapists, that crowd of manipulative professionals who practice conservative psychology covered over by radical politics. Now, however, the problem has become one of networking with the professionals and family members who have truth and poetry in their hearts, and on our terms. Much of this is already happening, some here, some there, but what remains to do is to bring our experiences together in a broad unified view. The system is caught in its weakness: It is in trouble, its business doesn't measure up to its ideals, and it has money problems.

I want to talk about the vision of a progressive families' movement, where the psychiatric survivors are truly family. Of course the present families' movement is wasting time defending itself from the presumption that they have any responsibility for producing us. But they can't insulate themselves forever from the rise of an alternative families' movement with positive social values, that supports genuine self-help. Just think what will happen to the AMI's when their membership sees that there is something else than the present sterile possibilities for help that their leadership fosters!

Our thing works -- we now have self-help research which will show this in the research literature, while the mental health professionals are begging and hustling for our cooperation. We have experienced abuse and we have learned how to fight it -- we now have the ability to draw well-meaning professionals and family members out of the wilderness of denial and excuses. We can develop a tradition of struggle against abuse, learning the firmness to deal with abuse issues wisely and the kindness to act with good will. In effect, we are creating a new way to do psychology, where human rights is number one and psychological dysfunction is to be explained in terms of abusive behavior and bad social values.

I want to talk about the moral problem of the sixties generation and what the psychiatric survivors still have to do. Allen Ginsberg complained in his poem Howl! about the destruction of the beat generation, but the sixties' counter-culture learned and survived the hard times better. It partly survives the repression, partly is mainstreamed in conventional society, and, wherever, it engages social values like consciousness of racism, sexism and gay/lesbian issues. Yet, what never happened was the integration of our values, the psychiatric survivors' understanding of abusive behavior, into the values system of the counter-culture/the counter-culture survivors who now move in the general society.

This "Me" generation that plays facile self-serving psychological games was the Nixon/Reagan/Bush project for the present and future of the sixties experience. What remains for us to do is to utilize the Clinton era to bring this yuppie stupidity around and get people working on abuse and social values questions. Starting from diverse political activities, our impact should be to nudge the mental health system towards respecting our principles and nudge the families' movement towards the real business of mental liberation and improving social relations. And we have to bring the general progressive community to realize that our values are as necessary to them as the values of labor, ethnic and sexual minorities, and women have already become.

Andrew Phelps