Searching for a Rose Garden: challenging psychiatry, fostering mad studies

by Jasna Russo (Editor), Angela Sweeney (Editor)

Overview

This edited collection introduces and explores radical alternatives to mainstream psychiatric practices. Crucially, these are not alternatives developed by professionals; they are innovative, survivor-led and survivor-run grassroots approaches. The contributors describe their origins, how they were developed, the challenges they faced, and continue to face, and the politics that inspired and continue to inform them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781910919231
Publisher:	Global Book Sales
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jasna Russo comes from the former Yugoslavia and is based in Berlin, Germany, where she works as an independent researcher. She is a long-term activist in the international user/survivor movement. Jasna has an MA in clinical psychology and has worked on both survivor-controlled and collaborative research projects, including several large-scale international studies. Her articles have been published in anthologies and journals in Germany and the UK. In 2011 Jasna was the main organiser of the international conference “Searching for a Rose Garden. Fostering Real Alternatives to Psychiatry” which inspired this book. Her main interest is in exploring the accumulated knowledge of people treated as mad or ‘mentally ill’ and whether we can connect across the globe to jointly develop our own, first-person defined model of madness.

Angela Sweeney was part of her local survivor movement as a teenager and young adult, and conducted her first survivor research project as an undergraduate student in 1998. Sometime after graduating, she joined the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health to work on a study of the British Survivor Movement (On Our Own Terms, 2003) before moving to the Service User Research Enterprise at the Institute of Psychiatry where she gained a PhD in medical sociology. She has a particular interest in survivor controlled research, trauma-informed approaches, survivors' perspectives on and experiences of psychiatric services and treatments, and alternatives to mainstream biomedical psychiatry including trauma and social models of causation. She is currently undertaking a five year Post-Doctoral Fellowship exploring assessment processes for talking therapies.

Table of Contents

Foreword Brenda A LeFrançois v

Introduction 1

Setting the Scene

1 Responses to a legacy of harm Mary O'Hagan 9

2 Alternatives or a way of life? Bhargavi Davar 14

3 The haunting can end: trauma-informed approaches in healing from abuse and adversity Beth Filson 20

4 The role of survivor knowledge in creating alternatives to psychiatry Peter Beresford 25

5 The co-optation of survivor knowledge: the danger of substituted values and voice Darby Penney Laura Prescott 35

Survivor-Produced Knowledge

6 The transformative potential of survivor research Angela Sweeney 49

7 Towards our own framework, or reclaiming madness part two Jasna Russo 59

8 Whiteness in psychiatry: the madness of European misdiagnoses Colin King 69

9 Deciding to be alive: self-injury and survival Clare Shaw 77

10 Thinking (differently) about suicide David Webb 86

11 Community Treatment Orders: once a rosy deinstitutional notion Erick Fabris 97

Survivor-Controlled Practice

12 Becoming part of each other's narratives: Intentional Peer Support Beth Filson Shery Mead 109

13 We did it our way: Women's Independent Alcohol Support Patsy Staddon 118

14 Sexual violence in childhood: demarketing treatment options and strengthening our own agency Zofia Rubinsztajn 127

15 The Personal Ombudsman: an example of supported decision-making Maths Jesperson 134

16 Kindred Minds: a personal perspective Renuka Bhakta 142

17 The Sunrise Project: helping adults recover from psychiatric drugs Terry Simpson 152

Working in Partnership

18 More voice, less ventriloquism: building a mental health recovery archive Dolly Sen Anna Sexton 163

19 Teaching (like) crazy in a mad-positive school: exploring the charms of recursion Danielle Landry Kathryn Church 172

20 Peer workers in the mental health system: a transformative or collusive experiment? Celia Brown Peter Stastny 183

21 Dilemmas of identity and power Alison Faulkner 192

22 Is partnership a dirty word? Cath Roper 201

23 Co-creating the ways we carry each other: reflections on being an ally and a double agent Reima Ana Maglajlic 210

The Search Goes On

24 The search goes on 221

Contributors 229

Index 239