A fragile revolution : consumers and psychiatric survivors confront the power of the mental health system / Barbara Everett.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-248) and index.

Nothing changes and no one gets better -- Becoming a professional helper -- What is mental illness? -- Help for the patients -- Nothing changes and no one gets better -- Control battles -- Who's in charge of the staff? -- Helpless and hopeless -- From insanity to mental illness to psychiatric disability -- Insanity -- Mental illness -- Anti-psychiatric thought and feminist criticism -- The therapeutic community -- Deinstitutionalization -- Psychiatric disability -- Power and protest -- Power inequity and oppression -- Dominance -- For your own good -- Power as protest -- Agency -- Power as a contractual relationship -- New social movements -- Personal empowerment and social action -- When things go wrong -- A new power contract? -- Partnership -- Another group of partners -- The making of policy -- The forgotten partners -- A special bond -- Telling stories -- Four stories -- Sadly mistaken -- A special bond -- The personal becomes political -- Them -- Invisibility -- They hate emotion -- It's just a job -- They are abusive -- But they're more like us than they think -- The system -- Us -- Getting involved -- Is this a social movement -- Consumer? Survivor? Consumer/survivor? Or just a person? -- When some of "us" joined "them" -- The Ontario Psychiatric Survivors Alliance -- Partnership -- The threat and the promise of partnership -- The problems with partnership -- The personal costs -- Feeling used -- If it's not partnership, what is it? -- Will mental health reform work?

Investigates the complex relationship between ex-mental patients, the government, the mental health system, and mental health professionals. It also explores how changes in policy have affected that relationship, creating new tensions and new opportunities. Using qualitative interviews with prominent consumer and survivor activists, Everett examines how consumers and survivors define themselves, how they define mental illness, and how their personal experience has been turned into political action.

Print version record.

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