24th April…I woke up singing today…it is Liberation Day…4 years ago (in 2009) on 24th April my Section under the Mental Health Act 2007 was lifted and I was discharged from Willow Ward at Park House, North Manchester General Hospital… I was compulsorily detained on Willow Ward at Park House for 3 months (28 January-24 April 2009)… Read more
My concern remains that the lived realities of the psychiatric patients about whom Szasz was writing seemed far less relevant to him than those more abstract notions of freedom and responsibility which it was his life’s work to defend. Read more
In the 1960s, the Myth of Mental Illness was hailed by those of us adamant that our experiences had nothing to do with ‘chemical imbalances’, though I never got beyond the first few pages of The Manufacture of Madness. In the mid 1980s I was drawn to the draft policy statement of the international Mental Health System Survivors (MHSSs) Mental health system survivors are people who are neither ‘crazy’ not ‘mentally ill’ nor genetically distinguishable from anyone else. Read more
Dear Readers… At the Centre for Women’s Mental Health, Manchester University (where I am based), we are offering a FREE half day workshop for female mental health service users from the North West of England who wish to improve their knowledge about sexual and reproductive health matters and their interaction with mental health. Read more
Dr Thomas Stephen Szasz 15 April 1920 (Budapest) – 8 September 2012 (Manlius, NY) with the death of Thomas Szasz, at the age of 92, psychiatry has lost its most vociferous critic. Asylum 19:4 began with an appreciation by Ron Roberts. Having called for contributions, we now mark the event with a collection of different perspectives on Szasz’s work and ideas. Read more
