Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
For the last 150 years in the United States, people who had been committed to psychiatric hospitals and treated against their will have championed the cause for social justice and the right of all persons to exercise self-determination and choice over their bodies and minds. These persons have mobilized political support for change through what is now called the mental health consumers/survivors movement. This chapter briefly reviews the early roots of that movement and then focuses on changes in its development and both its accomplishments and challenges faced in the modern period from about 1970 to 2015. It discusses how, despite differences within the movement, recovery has become a rallying theme, promoted by peer experts as well as non-consumer supporters. Why, then, are its decades of accomplishments and recovery agenda currently at risk of being dismantled by impending federal legislation?
Background
The mental health consumer/survivor movement is the modern expression of a 150-year-old social justice, human rights movement devoted to securing the rights and just treatment of persons identified as mentally ill. The movement was initially fueled by reformers in the mid 1800s wanting to improve services and treatments for the indigent insane; these reformers were calling for a person's right to treatment. A second impetus came from those seeking protection from incarceration and treatment against their will. It also had its early expression in the mid 1800s in the writings of women committed by their husbands, without due process, to asylums. These women and their legal backers were promoting the right to refuse treatment.
During the early 1800s persons involuntarily committed to asylums objected to “moral treatment” as an oppressive form of social control (Hubert, 2002). By the mid-century, as conditions changed, inmates objected instead to abusive treatment by asylum attendants and institutionalized “management” in oversized, impersonal, and inhumane settings. The restriction of human rights had its stark expression in differences in power between the committed and those who committed them – power defined by differences in gender, race, nationality, wealth, ideology, mental health status, and status in the family. Thus the mental health movement has been embedded from the start within deeper social and political struggles.
Review the options below to login to check your access.
Log in with your Cambridge Higher Education account to check access.
If you believe you should have access to this content, please contact your institutional librarian or consult our FAQ page for further information about accessing our content.