C/S/X movement spaces have had various views of mental health medication/psychiatric medication. There are concerns that this medication is seen as offering a cheap and fast-acting way for psychiatrists to sedate individuals they see as non-normative. Additionally, there are worries from some about the short-term side effects and how some psychiatric medications can have lasting, damaging side effects and some have addictive properties. There is an acknowledgment in the c/s/x movement that mental health medication can be a helpful and live-saving intervention for some individuals but also calls for patients to have greater autonomy and options in addressing symptoms. 

View of Medication by Those in c/s/x Movement Spaces

- Medicalizing individual experiences through the creation of psychiatric diagnoses as a way of pathologizing behavior.
- Restriction of rights for individuals with diagnoses that are associated with violence and homicide.
- Use of drugs as a common psychiatric treatment.
- De-institutionalization.

The term c/s/x movement is used to encapsulate what has been known as the psychiatric, or mental-health, consumer, survivor and ex-patient movement. This movement is considered to have first emerged in about 1970 with a multi-national history with movement work happening in North America, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, South America, and Australia by the 1980s. The movement is mainly concerned with both the promotion of self-help and peer support models of mental-health care and also a reform of the psychiatric services model.

C/S/X Movement

Beresford, Peter. 2012. "Psychiatric System Survivors: An emerging movement" In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, edited by Carol Thomas, Alan Roulstone and Nick Watson. London, England: Routledge. p. 167-180.

Psychiatric System Survivors: An emerging movement

Key International Issues to the c/s/x Movement

Prior to the beginning of the c/s/x movement in the 1970s there were earlier patients who engaged in activism toward similar goals of the c/s/x movement. Two of the earliest examples are in 1868. In 1868 Elizabeth Packard published several books and pamphlets that detailed her forced commitment, at the hands of her husband, to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Jacksonville, Illinois. Packard went on to found the Anti-Insane Asylum Society. Around a similar time, in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Stone, who was forcibly committed to an asylum by her husband, tried to form public solidarity around stopping the unjust commitment and incarceration of individuals who were deemed insane.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After