Deeply engaged relationships: alliances between mental health workers and psychiatric survivors in the UK

Abstract

This chapter explores the possibility of alliances between mental health workers and psychiatric survivor movements – a focus that has received little scholarly attention to date. Particular attention is paid to alliances between survivors and public sector trade unions in the UK. These alliances are replete with what, in a more general context, Wendy Brown (2000) has called perils and possibilities. The possibilities of such alliances will be framed in terms of the need to defend, as well as transform, health and welfare institutions from threats presented by neoliberalism and bio-psychiatry, as well as the need for a creative renewal of the activism of both the labour and survivor movements. Models of reciprocal community trade unionism and relational organizing will be presented as a potential way of developing “deeply engaged” and reciprocally beneficial relationships (Tattersall 2006) that, we believe, are necessary for the transformation of the mental health system.