ABSTRACT Title of Thesis: CONFRONTING THE POWER OF PSYCHIATRY: THE PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVORS’ MOVEMENT, 1972-1986 Madeleine Marie Parra Allen Master of Arts, 2018 Thesis Directed By: Professor Robyn L. Muncy Department of History This thesis explores the history of the mental patients’ liberation movement in the 1970s-1980s. It shows how psychiatric survivors successfully contested the power and legitimacy of psychiatry via mutual support and self-help; activism as a grassroots social movement; and the creation of alternate conceptions of madness and patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system. Ex-patients utilized their distinct knowledge to make the personal political, moving beyond the critiques of anti-psychiatrists, to fight psychiatric abuses such as electroshock and forced drugging. It covers the movement’s tactics, most successful local and national activism, and cross-movement alliances – especially its anti-incarceration work with the prisoners’ rights movement. It offers a nuanced understanding of the tensions that led to the movement’s fracturing, and argues that activists adapted by retaining a “tempered liberation focus” that enabled them to work towards change and human rights within the psychiatric system while remaining true to their original liberatory goals. CONFRONTING THE POWER OF PSYCHIATRY: THE PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVORS’ MOVEMENT, 1972-1986 by Madeleine Marie Parra Allen Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2018 Advisory Committee: Professor Robyn Muncy, Chair Professor Richard Bell Professor Saverio Giovacchini © Copyright by Madeleine Marie Parra Allen 2018 For my family, the Parras and the Allens. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my mother and father for their love and support throughout my life, and for always believing in me. I don’t think I can thank my advisor, Dr. Robin Muncy, enough for her patience, encouragement, feedback, and enduring optimism during the entire thesis process. I feel very fortunate to have had her support and wisdom to help guide me through this thesis. Dr. Muncy always helped me see the importance and value of my research. There were many times I came to her office clouded with doubt or hesitations about my work, but I always left feeling reinvigorated and ready to take on the world. Thank you for believing in me and my work. I also wish to thank my thesis committee members, Dr. Richard Bell and Dr. Saverio Giovacchini, for their time, assistance, and feedback. They helped make my thesis defense a meaningful and enjoyable experience. A very special thank you is reserved for my husband, Jackson. “Thank you” does not even seem to begin to show my love and gratitude for his support, encouragement, and patience throughout my entire graduate school journey. More than anyone else, he has listened to me discuss the details of my research. He and our corgi, Remmie, have endured my countless hours of grad school work and research. He always picked up the slack, cooking dinners, walking Remmie, and so much more so that I could focus on school. The completion of this thesis has been possible because of you. iii Tortures from an angry woman ex-mental patient veteran of shock-prolixin-lithium etc i’ve had no allegiance to the armies of social control. i spoke too openly in high school thought too deeply and lived with such high-risk being that i ended up with electrodes strapped to my temples and prolixin in my blood. i’ve had courage enough to do what i must in spite of real fears and i pay being mental patient-emotionally disturbed- labeled- discarded trash. 120 volts of current, thorazine, powerless, lithium, stelazine, against my will, artane, prolixin, yes, doctor, i agree, can i get out, mellaril, elavil, navane, luminal, blurry vision, swollen hands, submit enough to still us, shame us, control us. i bare a tortured fist, clenched in determination and fear. --rachel diana rose in Madness Network News 4, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 1 Much Madness is divinest Sense Much Madness is divinest Sense - To a discerning Eye - Much Sense - the starkest Madness - ’Tis the Majority In this, as all, prevail - Assent - and you are sane - Demur - you’re straightway dangerous - And handled with a Chain – --Emily Dickinson iv Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Poems ............................................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v INTRODUCTION......................................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: MUTUAL SUPPORT ........................................................................................ 16 Origins ....................................................................................................................................... 16 The Foundations of Ex-Patient Mutual Support and Empowerment ........................................ 18 Excluding Professionals, Separatism, and Mutual Support ...................................................... 20 Madness Network News: A Voice of Empowerment and Resistance ....................................... 31 The Importance of Mutual Support ........................................................................................... 37 CHAPTER 2: NATIONAL AND GRASSROOTS ACTIVISM ............................................. 43 National Activism Against the American Psychiatric Association ........................................... 43 Local Activism .......................................................................................................................... 50 California Bay Area Groups’ Anti-Shock Activism ................................................................. 52 CHAPTER 3: ALTERNATIVES, CROSS-MOVEMENT ALLIANCES, AND FRACTURING OF THE MOVEMENT .................................................................................. 67 I. ALTERNATIVES.................................................................................................................. 68 The Biomedical Model versus the Social Model................................................................... 69 Alternatives to the Traditional Mental Health System .......................................................... 73 II. CROSS-MOVEMENT ALLIANCES .................................................................................. 78 Connections to the Prisoners’ Rights Movement .................................................................. 80 The Coalition to Stop Institutional Violence ......................................................................... 85 Tensions with the Feminist Movement ................................................................................. 89 III. FRACTURING OF THE MOVEMENT ............................................................................ 94 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 111 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 120 v INTRODUCTION No, anger is not 'nice,' but it's real, it comes from the gut, and not to be angry at being shit upon is being dead – which is exactly what shrinks and their kind want us all to become. That's why they lock us up, drug us, cut into our brains with electricity and with knives if they possibly can – because our anger is POWER, and THEY ARE AFRAID OF US. And anyone who is not angry at what they do to us is as much as our enemy as the shrinks themselves. But anger is exhausting, and being put down for our anger is destructive. What we need is to be able to turn to one another for strength, for support, for understanding. There is a group in Boston called Mental Patients' Liberation Front that does this. -- Judi Chamberlin, 1975.1 In the early 1970s, throughout the U.S. and Canada, small and independent groups of ex- mental patients began organizing for mutual support and to share their common experiences of oppression within psychiatric institutions. Taking cues from other liberation movements of the era, and influenced by anti-psychiatry radicals, these ex-patients began advocating for their rights and speaking out against abuses of the psychiatric system, such as electroshock therapy, involuntary commitment, and forced drugging. These psychiatric survivors or ex-inmates, as activists called themselves, forged a grassroots movement that directly confronted the power of psychiatry. The epigraph above--by one of the movement’s most influential leaders, Judi Chamberlin--captures the radical spirit of the patient activists during the early period of the movement. 1 Chamberlin letter to Tom, 1975, box 6, folder Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression, Third 1975, Judi Chamberlin Papers (MS 768), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. 1 The goal of this thesis is to understand the activism of psychiatric survivors