LSE Business Review blog post, by Helen Spandler, 21 November 2016: Healing the rifts between mental health workers and psychiatric survivors
Many people who have used mental health services, especially if they have experienced compulsory treatment or detention, describe themselves as ‘psychiatric survivors.’ This doesn’t just mean they have survived a mental health crisis, or the damaging circumstances that may have led to it. It also means they have survived the very system designed to help them.
Sometimes it is claimed the psychiatric system caused more harm than their original ‘symptoms’. Many experience the system as traumatising, or re-traumatising, by mimicking previous experiences of abuse and neglect which contributed to their mental health difficulties in the first place. Some psychiatric survivors have referred any form of
psychiatric compulsion as a human rights violation, and this is now embedded in the UN convention of the Rights of People with Disabilities.
The poor treatment of service users is not only historical with the current mental health system still having a lot to answer for. This involves not only the use of coercive ‘treatment’ and confinement, including psychosurgery, ECT and often harmful psychoactive drugs, but also various forms of invalidation, or what has been called ‘epistemic injustices,’ where people’s self-knowledge and experiences are disbelieved and dismissed.
Just two examples will suffice. First, many survivors report their stories of abuse – both prior to, and subsequently within, the system – are not believed and seen as a ‘symptom’ of their mental illness.
Second, the psychiatrisation of conditions like Myalgic Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) where organic and physical conditions become ‘all in the mind’. Here, whilst there is a complex inter-relationship between the mind and body, psychiatric
reductionism has resulted in a catalogue of instances of maltreatment, neglect and abuse.
Read more about the experiences of patients and staff and possible ways people can respond to the hurt and damage experienced.
Helen Spandler, PhD, is reader in mental health in the School of Social Work, Care and Community at the University of Central Lancashire and one of the editors of Asylum: the magazine for democratic psychiatry. www.asylumonline.net/
LSE Business Review is a blog from the London School of Economics and Political Science
