In this study - in particular the initial survey portion- being a person with mental disability was defined as someone who has received mental health care and/or a mental health diagnosis. Participants did not have to identify as disabled to participate in the survey and participants were informed that they could otherwise identify with terms like mental-health services consumer, a psychiatric survivor, a person with mental illness, a psychocrip, or as someone with their particular diagnosis. 

Person with Mental Disability

The term psychocrip seems to have originated with Ephemeral Theory Collective member James Overboe who collaborated with Richard Ingram on a series of workshops entitled PsychoCrips the point of the workshop was to draw attention to the commonalities in experiences between those who have experienced disabling effects of psychiatric treatment and those who have experienced the traumatizing effects of medicalizing disability. The term was turned into an identity term - similar to the reclaiming of crip - by Erick Fabris who used the term to reclaim crip for individuals historically described by the word crip but who also identify with identities of madness and psychiatric survivorship. 

Price uses the term crip as defined in her work "The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain" to describe someone who engages in the act of cripping which is to use the disruptive potential of disability to call into question normative spaces, positionalities, and interactions. 

Crip

Fabris, Erick. 2011. Tranquil prisons: Chemical incarceration under community treatment orders. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Tranquil prisons: Chemical incarceration under community treatment orders

Price, Margaret. 2015. "The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain." Hypatia 30 (1): 268-284. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12127.

The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain

A subsection of disability studies theory, whose name was inspired by queer theory, that emphasizes creating a theoretical approach to disability that looks at how disability functions as an ideology, a paradigm, an epistemology, and a system of oppression in addition to an identity experience.

Crip Theory 

It is important to note that crip, similar to the term queer which was theorized to operate in a similar way to disrupt cis-hetero normativity, is based on the reclamation of a derogatory term. In this case, the term crip is a reclamation of the terms crip and cripple which have historically been used as derogatory terms to describe people with disabilities. 

Crip and Reclamation of Language

Whereas disability can be viewed as an identity group formed out of political definitions in the United States with people of various different lived and embodied experiences getting rights under the same law and protected class, crip does not aim to shore up disability rights but to disrupt the category of "ability" and the ideas based on that category.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After