Standing on a concrete island in downtown San Fancisco, David Oaks yells into a bullhorn the climactic line from the film "Network": "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore."
The line would be a cliche if it weren't for one thing: Oaks means to be taken literally.
On this sunny day, as thousands of mental-health professionals stream into the air-conditioned cool of the Moscone Center for the 156th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Assn., Oaks and his cadre of supporters are quite mad, thank you. They are former patients in what many would call a dysfunctional mental-health system.
Mental health -- The Los Angeles Times Magazine article Sunday on the use of drugs to treat mental illness, "Losing the Mind," incorrectly identified psychiatrist Loren Mosher as the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. He was the institute's chief for the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia.
The article on the use of drugs to treat mental illness ("Losing the Mind," Oct. 26) incorrectly identified psychiatrist Loren Mosher as the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. He was the institute's chief for the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia.
As protesters carry signs that read "Psychiatrists Cure Dissent, Not Disease" and "Self Help Works," Oaks invokes his holy trinity of social activists--Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and Justin Dart, the father of the Americans with Disabilities Act. "We're calling for a nonviolent, global revolution of self-determination and empowerment," he says, eyes dancing. "The inmates are ready to take over the asylum."
Soft-spoken and even-keeled in private, Oaks unleashes his rage publicly by tapping into the trauma he experienced as a patient in the mental-health system. In the 1970s, while he was a student at Harvard University, Oaks was diagnosed as schizophrenic. He was institutionalized and forcibly medicated. He recovered, he says, by rejecting drugs and getting support from family and friends. "I was put on Haldol and Thorazine, and it was torture," he tells the San Francisco crowd. "They took a wrecking ball to the cathedral of my mind."
Oaks, now 48, is executive director of MindFreedom Support Coalition International, a Eugene, Ore.-based umbrella group for the "Mad Pride" movement. The grass-roots campaign, also known as "MindFreedom," includes so-called psychiatric survivors and dissident psychiatrists who reject the biomedical model that defines contemporary psychiatry. They say that mental illness is caused by severe emotional distress, often combined with lack of socialization, and they decry the pervasive treatment with prescription drugs, sales of which have nearly doubled since 1998. Further, they condemn the continued use of electro-convulsive therapy--or ECT, also known as electroshock--which they say violates patients' human rights.
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