Chamberlin, Judi, 1944-2010

Judi Chamberlin No, anger is not 'nice,' but it's real, it comes from the gut, and not to be angry at being shit upon is being dead -- which is exactly what shrinks and their kind want us all to become. That's why they lock us up, drug us, cut into our brains with electricity and with knives if they possibly can. . . But anger is exhausting, and being put down for our anger is destructive. What we need is to be able to turn to one another for strength, for support, for understanding. There is a group in Boston called Mental Patients' Liberation Front that does this. -- (MS 768 Series 2 Organization: Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric oppression, third, 1975)

Judi Chamberlin was a psychiatric survivor. Influenced by the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation, mental patients organized their own advocacy groups in the early 1970s. By referring to themselves not as "mental patients" but as "ex-patients," "ex-inmates," or "psychiatric survivors," they emphasized that their goal was to gain respect for their human rights just as their peers in other movements had before them. Why do "sane" people draw boundaries between "Us" and "Them?" Why is it ok to involuntarily commit those labeled "them" to psychiatric hospitals, to conduct forced drugging, electroshock, and psychosurgery, and to label "them" as "mental patients?" The Psychiatric Survivors Movement, the fourth wave of social change in America, challenged the power of psychiatry, the definition of madness, and the unquestioned bias against mental patients to seek true liberation and social justice.

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