Resistance Matters: The Radical Vision of an Antipsychiatry Activist
The book is available in PDF form on the Mad in America site here:
Resistance Matters: The Radical Vision of an Antipsychiatry Activist
Foreword by Irit Shimrat
September 2018
Vancouver
I had the enormous good fortune to meet Don Weitz – who now permits me to refer to him as the grandpappy of Canadian antipsychiatry – in 1986. Until then, I thought I was the only person in the world who didn’t believe in “schizophrenia” (with which we had both been diagnosed) and who saw psychiatry as a ravenous monster, chewing up human beings and spitting out mental patients. Before long, I was hired to edit Phoenix Rising: The Voice of the Psychiatrized, the phenomenal national antipsychiatry magazine that Don and Carla McKague had founded in 1980. The work of editing Phoenix, and the lifetime of activism to which that work led, have helped me more than anything else in finding my way back from the devastating effects of psychiatry.
It was Don who first made me realize the power of speaking out against injustice, of coming together with other psychiatric survivors
to tell and record and publicize our stories, and of showing off our talents and skills – rather than accepting psychiatrists’ judgement that we are inadequate, incapable and diseased. It was Don who gifted me not only with a forum for my own ideas, but also, and more importantly, with the opportunity to encourage others to step out from the shadows and find their own voices. Above all, it was Don who taught me that resistance matters. Even though psychiatry continues to damage the brains, bodies, hearts, souls and minds of those it captures, more and more people are realizing that it has no scientific basis, and that much of what is done in the name of “mental health” amounts to the deprivation of fundamental human rights. Every book, every website, every letter to the editor that tells the truth about psychiatry wakes more people up to these facts.
And Don does not limit his activism to combatting psychiatric abuses. He is a fierce defender of Indigenous rights, and has long been a dedicated member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and of the migrant justice organization No One Is Illegal (NOII). Both groups stand in solidarity with and in defence of Indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. Both stand in opposition to colonialism and oppressive politics. NOII’s website describes “a worldwide movement of resistance that strives and struggles for the freedom to stay, the freedom to move, and the freedom to return” – freedoms denied to psychiatric inmates within our own countries. Don has always known that the politics of psychiatry are the politics of oppression, and that it is the profit motive, above all, that drives psychiatry.
Don Weitz has been published extensively, and much of his work can be found online and in various anthologies and journals. Although most of what you will read in these pages has not previously been published, I have also included important material that has been published but not widely read. And Don has not slowed down – he continues to write letters to editors and others in response to biased reporting
on “mental health” and other political issues. Clearly, Don Weitz will keep writing and fighting for justice until he drops, because, as he once said at the end of an interview, “I just won’t keep silent. I can’t and I won’t.”
This book is for survivors of psychiatric oppression, but it is also for anyone who cares about human liberty and dignity.
If you don’t know much about psychiatry, Resistance Matters will begin to teach you about what really happens when police respond to “mental health” calls and when people end up in psychiatric “care.”
For readers who, like Don and me, have been subjected to forced psychiatric “treatment” and incarceration, I hope you will be heartened to know that there is an ever-growing number of people who understand and care about what you’ve been through, and who are working towards a world in which such things never have to happen to anyone again.
It is a privilege and an honour for me to have been entrusted with the task of compiling and editing the essays, articles, letters, poems and rants that you will read in Resistance Matters.
