Statement of support for 5/5: Occupy the APA
The National Coalition for Mental Health Recovery is composed of 32 statewide consumer/survivor-run organizations, as well as representatives of the three federally funded consumer-run national technical assistance centers. Our mission is to promote greater consumer/survivor voice and choice regarding the policies, programs, and services that affect us.
Today, as the American Psychiatric Association is due to vote on whether to send the new edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the DSM-5 – to press, we add our voices to the growing chorus of Americans, both psychiatrically labeled and not, who oppose the expansion of this so-called “psychiatric bible.”
With each successive edition, the DSM classifies more and more varieties of human suffering and emotional distress as mental disorders. Psychiatric diagnosis does nothing to address the social, economic, and political causes and conditions that have led to our suffering and our being labeled. These include trauma, poverty, abuse, and isolation. If society focused more on the injustices that cause emotional distress, we could do much more to prevent the conditions that get labeled as “mental illness.”
While some people find it helpful to have a psychiatric label for their suffering, such labels generally cause more harm than good. Upon receiving a psychiatric diagnosis, many of us found ourselves taking numerous powerful psychiatric drugs. While some people find such drugs helpful, for many of us the drugs caused horrific physical illness, destroying our quality of life and even causing premature and preventable deaths. In the name of “health” care, a great deal of damage is done.
As a result of our dysfunctional “mental health” system, we have many collective losses to mourn. But as the great labor leader Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn – organize!” And we are here, in person and in spirit, doing just that! We will not allow the APA to dictate to us what is and what is not “normal.” We reclaim what it means to be human, with all its challenges and its beauty.
We are here to promote recovery through respectful mutual support. We envision a new dawn in mental health care, where emotional distress is not met with the one-size-fits-all approach of psychiatry: a label and a pill. Instead, people experiencing emotional distress would have immediate access to peer support, from others who understand because of their own lived experience. Individuals would have the opportunity to move through emotional distress and regain a sense of hope and possibility. People should have access to an individualized array of natural community services and supports to help them address the circumstances that led to their distress. People should have access to healing and wellness, not just maintenance. People should be met with compassion so that they know they belong and that they are embraced by the community. Every human being deserves that.
We look forward to the day when there will be no more need for endless psychiatric classification – when love triumphs over labels and we all, collectively, care for one another. Together, we are bringing that day ever closer. Hope is blossoming as our collective power approaches the tipping point.
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