Mental Patients Liberation Front

Back in the 1970s, I was a rebellious working class kid from the South Side of Chicago going to Harvard on scholarships, including the Teamsters. I ran into a lot of significant mental and emotional problems, and ended up inside locked psychiatric wards five time over three years on the sharp end of the needle. In brief, I found some of my experiences with mental health institutionalization traumatizing.In the beginning of my senior year in 1976, I attended a PBHA open house and said to someone behind a table, “You ought to have a volunteer program to change the mental health system. It can be medieval in there.” Kindly, a young representative from PBHA asked me to meet for lunch. She cautiously told me about a potential volunteer opportunity in one of the early radical activist groups run by “psychiatric survivors.” I remember showing up at my first meeting of Mental Patients Liberation Front in a storefront near Central Square that said “Vocations for Social Change” over the door. How true.I wrote my senior paper about how the experience, somehow graduating in 1977 with honors.For 35 years now I’ve been a community organizer of, by and for people who identify as having experienced harmful human rights violations while in mental health care.I direct MindFreedom International, and I’m on the board of a key USA disability alliance, USICD. Only recently have I discovered that PBHA had placed volunteers in past years as advocates in psychiatric systems. I look forward to hearing more about that history, and I hope future PBHA leaders keep that up. Congratulations and thank you, PBHA community!