Peter Beresford will be chairing a free webinar on Tuesday 13 September at 12pm: Challenging barriers to user involvement in mental health policy and provision. Register here.
There’s an irony in the fact that one of the most conspicuous arenas for the development of user involvement in policy, practice and research was psychiatry and mental health provision. In retrospect, this is trying to confront a problem at its most difficult. It’s not difficult to see why.
The ‘psych-system’ as many activists call it, has long been immensely powerful and its reach has greatly extended in recent years. It has gained in power with the international dominance of neoliberalism over the last half century and has long been in deep alliance with big pharma which distorted its response to emotional and mental distress. Both systems reinforce the explanation of political and social problems in individualistic and pathologising terms and divert attention from their structural origins.
Nonetheless, the international psychiatric system survivors’ movement made major inroads into the operation of mental health policy and practice from the 1980s. It has highlighted the importance of social approaches to madness and distress and condemned the failure to respond to diversity with equality. It has brought mental health service users/survivors into policy and practice to challenge the scientism of psychiatry and to act as a source of support, knowledge, and understanding for their peers, drawing on their experiential knowledge and lived experience expertise.
This webinar – Challenging barriers to user involvement in mental health policy and provision – builds on this, drawing on the activism of a diverse range of people with experience of using the psychiatric system. Importantly, it also offers an opportunity to extend the debate.
What we have been seeing in recent years – and this is an international development – is the power of the psychiatric system both to resist the inroads of service users and our movement and to subvert these challenges and turn them against us. As many discussions and writings by survivor activists highlight, mental health policy and practice have increasingly, and successfully, sought to incorporate and tokenise any progress that has been made. Innovative peer-support, has been pressed into becoming a handmaiden of psychiatric practice, involvement has been used to inhibit efforts to make change rather than to advance them, user-led research has been devalued as ‘unscientific’ and unreliable because of its valuing of lived experience. Efforts to decolonise global mental health meet powerful resistance; white privilege and institutionalised racism still rule.
The survivor movement and related survivor-led organisations struggle on, restricted by inadequate funding and status, the devaluing of their knowledge and the often overpowering and unhelpful role of traditional mental health charities, still invested in unhelpful over-medicalised approaches. This webinar offers us an important chance to articulate and explore these issues and maintain the challenge which mental health services have so far failed to address to any serious degree.
Peter Beresford is Co-Chair of Shaping Our Lives, Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia and co-organiser of the participatory social policy webinars with Policy Press.
Join our next webinar in association with Peter Beresford on Tuesday 13 September at 12PM: Challenging barriers to user involvement in mental health policy and provision.
Participatory Ideology: From Exclusion to Involvement by Peter Beresford is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £19.99. Browse all of Peter’s books published with Policy Press here.
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