23 - The Mental Health Consumers/Survivors Movement in the United States

Summary

The mental health consumer/survivor movement is the human rights movement devoted to securing the rights and just treatment of persons identified as mentally ill. This chapter reviews trends in the struggles of activists to achieve the rights. After describing early conditions and moments in the movement, it examines the modern mental health consumer/survivor movement, focusing on the expatients and other advocates who fueled the modern movement, the reformist turn from antipsychiatry to consumerism, forces that bolstered or challenged the movement, subsequent challenges and more recent developments. In a political climate in which National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) had acquired considerable influence, Community Support Program (CSP) was losing power and had become less favorably positioned to promote the consumer/ survivor cause. National and state organizations advance their consumer/ survivor agendas, and every state has a mandated consumer office through which consumers and survivors directly engage with policy makers.