User:Antipsych/sandbox

Far from being dead, or an archaic relic of the rebellious '60s and '70s, in Canada antipsychiatry lives on, University of Toronto faculty member and feminist lecturer Bonnie Burstow and psychiatric survivor Don Weitz have been among the most outspoken and vocal of Toronto's antipsychiatry activists to come on the scene in recent years.

Weitz is co-founder of the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA). CAPA's website includes a fact sheet on antipsychiatry. [a] Weitz also published a book Rise Up/Fight Back - Selected Writings of an Antipsychiatry Activist available on kendel [b]. Burstow published on the Mad In America website [c} and in a volume she edited Psychiatric Disturbance essays on The Attrition Model of antipsychiatry.[d] More recently (2015) she published Psychiatry and the Business of Madness. In Psychiatry and the Business of Madness, Burstow uses institutional ethnography to analyze and critique the mental health system. [f]

Both Burstow and Weitz conceive of a time, although their efforts are focused primarily on ending psychiatric coercions, when the profession of psychiatry will be no more. In the USA, too, Weitz and Burstow are joined by a number of academics and psychiatric survivors who would characterize themselves as antipsychiatry activists. Lauren Tenney, for instance, is a psychology professor and psychiatric survivor from New York state who hosts an online talk radio show with an avowedly antipsychiatry twist, Talk with Tenney[g].

These and many other disparate forces from around the world, often in combo with the nascent mad pride movement, are presently coalescing in the name of antipsychiatry activism into a loose a network of organized resistance to the oppressive power of institutional psychiatry in collusion with federal governments and the multi-national pharmaceutical industry. In this fashion, antipsychiatry principals and ideas should continue to have an growing influence on the revolutionary, anti-authoritarian, social justice and social change movements of the future, as well as exerting a force all their own when it comes to actively opposing psychiatric oppression in the here and now.