About the Project
If you have experienced harm through contact with standard practice in mental health services, whatever you decided to do later, this Web site is for you.
We are two people who, like you, have been harmed by mental health services. Our experiences were very different, and we have chosen to recover in different ways. We share a common interest in raising awareness of experiences like ours with the goal of improving how the system works.
This is not a “psych busters” project. We don’t believe that psychiatry is Nazi fascism and we are not trying to destroy it. One of us is involved in grassroots activism from outside the system by survivors who never want to be patients again, and the other is involved with peer support among voluntary consumers and providing mental health services as a social worker. We both support self-determination and recovery.
Studies have shown that the types of treatment that people are most likely to experience as harmful, particularly involuntary treatment, are appreciated by some people when they look back at what happened. These studies are currently being used by groups pushing for more force and coercion in the mainstream mental health system. We fear that they also make it more likely that treating professionals will be comfortable with the use of force for “the good of the patient.” Worse, a person refusing mental health care, or resisting involuntary care, is often seen as having no valid reason for doing so, no matter what they are saying or how rational their reasons may be.
The studies vary, but it is commonly reported that a small majority of people medicated involuntarily agree with that decision in retrospect. In the belief that one person harmed is too many, and that a substantial minority harmed cannot be ignored, we present this book.
This is not a study. We’re not making any effort to take a scientific sample. We believe that every person harmed is one too many. We would like to hear from you, in your own words, about what happened in your life and how it has affected you. We would like to honor the reality of your experience and share it with others in hopes of preventing similar harm from being repeated.
We’re not interested in lawsuits or bad publicity for any particular professional or facility. If you believe malpractice or crime occurred in your life, we encourage you to resolve that in whatever way you think is best for yourself and others who use those services. Our project is specifically concerned with reforming normal practices by professionals. We believe, based on our own experiences and talking to our peers over the years, that the problem of harm is so widespread that we want everyone to know about it without singling anyone out.
With your help, if you decide to participate, we hope to publish a book containing our own writings and a collection of narratives of personal experiences from around the world. We invite you to write a chapter for our book. We’re not in this for the cash, but if we achieve our goal and the book is published, we will get paid, and the contributors will get some money. We can’t tell you how much at this point. We can, however, promise a free copy of the book you helped to write. Our project also involves making presentations at conferences and media interviews. We want to spread the word about what really goes on.
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