This book brings together psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists and users and survivors of services to propose answers to these questions. My core team of 30 counsellors and college students will all be reading this book because quite frankly it would be an outrage not to.

This is such a simple and obvious concept and so needed, it just shows how we (society) has been conditioned to think in limiting ways about mental wellbeing. And for every new personal story, there becomes a greater strength in number, and that increased collective weight encourages a belief that the ideology can start to penetrate.it also helps me understand where some of my frustrations in the more recent awareness of mental health manifest.

The support and feedback that we've received over the last 8 years is evidence that many people have had enough of the medical model paradigm and that it's time for change. And I have confidence that the idea of an alternative language to the medical process can start to filter through. Lucy then talked the audience—a mixture of professionals, current and former ‘service users’, carers and interested lay people—through a critique of diagnosis and an overview of the alternatives. As such it marks a refreshing and pivotal departure from the dominant ‘illness’ narrative we have come as a society to accept unquestioningly, and to impose on other cultures.These too are ways that the survivors of abuse decide not to face their own feelings, and instead to abuse other survivors. But it was the power of this interaction and the difficult feelings I experienced that encouraged me to start asking myself for the first time… “Exactly how am I helping these people I’m supposed to be caring for? K. is that the majority of the population have absorbed the myths of chemical imbalance, genetic ‘predisposition’ and all the rest of it as fact. Challenges your view of the medical model and shows the links with our current and past experiences, the traumas we’ve faced and the adversity we live with. What then pushed me over the edge was yet another celebrity-inspired media frenzy about a psychiatric “illness.

She represents the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP) on the steering committee for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence, is part of the `Mad in the UK' team and is a founding member of `United for Integrity in Mental Health' (UIMH). I guess I would say I hope other movements crop up with suggestions for future movement, in addition to cutting down a very bad system. Someone here once thought it was a great empowering thing for psych labeled people to be standing in the middle of the ghetto with signs saying things like “I am bipolar” and “I am schizophrenic. Jacqui is part of a collective voice demanding a radical shift in the way we understand and respond to experiences currently defined as psychiatric illnesses. Despite the progressive image conveyed by British critics of psychiatry (both professionals and survivors), the biomedical discourse in the UK is still deeply embedded in public consciousness and actively promoted in anti-stigma campaigns and media reporting.I imagine that professionally this must be like walking a tightrope high in the air with slippers on for therapists (and for the client), but it can be done. We share lots of great pieces by critics of mainstream psychiatry around the world, passionately promote appropriate events and publications as well as doing the crucial networking which makes our movement stronger by the day. It was because I couldn’t get away from the reality of how difficult the message it communicates so brilliantly still remains such a challenge.