From Patients to People:
Disability Rights and Survivor Narratives in Mental Health
The MISA Spring Seminar Series brings together international scholars, activists, artists, and psychiatric survivors to critically examine dominant mental health paradigms and foreground lived experience as knowledge.
Across three events, we move:
This series centers disability justice, Mad studies, survivor narratives, and Global South perspectives to ask:
Who defines mental illness? Whose knowledge counts? What happens beyond diagnosis? How do people survive — and even thrive — beyond psychiatry?
Beyond Diagnosis: An Introduction to the Power–Threat–Meaning Framework
Talk Description
The Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), published in 2018 by the British Psychological Society and co-produced by psychologists and service users, offers a conceptual alternative to psychiatric diagnosis.
Rather than asking,
“What’s wrong with you?”
the PTMF asks,
“What happened to you?”
The Framework demonstrates the links between contexts such as poverty, discrimination, and inequality — along with traumas such as abuse and violence — and the emotional distress that follows. It provides a way of developing more hopeful, socially grounded narratives about distress, instead of viewing people as defective, weak, or “mentally ill.”
Now available in seven languages and influencing practice in the UK and beyond, the PTMF offers practitioners a legitimate alternative to biomedical models and a tool for challenging psychiatric hegemony wherever it is imposed.
Dr. Johnstone will introduce the key principles of the PTMF and illustrate how it promotes social justice and survivor-informed practice across global contexts.
Speaker Bio
Lucy Johnstone
Dr. Lucy Johnstone is a consultant clinical psychologist and co-author of the Power Threat Meaning Framework with Professor Mary Boyle. She is the author of:
Users and Abusers of Psychiatry
A Straight-Talking Guide to Psychiatric Diagnosis
She is former Director of the Bristol Clinical Psychology Doctorate (UK), Visiting Professor at London South Bank University, Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She currently works as an independent trainer and speaker based in Bristol, UK.
Beyond Individual Compassion: Mad Experience, Disability Rights and Uncomfortable Truths
Talk Description
This seminar complicates not only traditional psychiatric models, but also alternative frameworks such as the Social Model of Disability and trauma-informed care.
Instead of asking:
“What’s wrong with you?”
“What happened to you?”
Hel Spandler invites us to ask:
“What matters to you?”
The talk will explore the limits of relying on individual clinician compassion and argue for building collective, compassionate systems rooted in Mad-identified people’s priorities and knowledge.
Hel will also discuss alternative spaces for sharing Mad experience — including zines, magazines, healing circles, and community-led practices.
Speaker Bio
Hel Spandler
Hel Spandler is Professor of Mental Health at the University of Central Lancashire (UK). They are:
Editor-in-Chief of Asylum: The Radical Mental Health Magazine
Principal Investigator of the Madzines research project
Co-lead editor of the International Journal of Mad Studies
Their work spans mental health history, politics, Mad studies, and survivor knowledge production.
Panel Discussion: Lived Experience, Survival, and Thriving Beyond Psychiatry
This international panel brings together activists, artists, educators, and scholars with lived experience of psychiatric systems to explore harm, resistance, and the creation of meaningful lives beyond diagnosis.
Panel Themes
1️⃣ Effects of Psychiatry
- Psychiatric harm and its disavowal
- Adverse effects (akathisia, withdrawal, long-term impacts)
- Work, relationships, and life consequences
- When “treatment” becomes harm
- Recovery outside the system
2️⃣ Survival
- Epistemic violence: whose knowledge counts?
- Lived experience as expertise
- What happens when psychiatrists don’t listen?
- Building work, meaning, and community around harm
3️⃣ Thriving
- Beauty in our lives despite harm
- Arts, poetry, literature as survival tools
- Spirituality and collective care
- Creating pockets of beauty and possibility
Panelists
Karin Jervert
Artist, writer, and Mad Pride activist. Founder of Woodland Sunflower Collective and liaison to Mad in the World at Mad in America. Her work centers art, spirituality, and non-pathologizing understandings of distress.
Alan Robinson
Author, theatre director, editor of Locura magazine (Argentina), advisor on accessibility and plain language. President of RedEsfera Latinoamericana.
Laura López-Aybar
Critical psychologist, psychiatric survivor, and researcher at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Co-founder of Mad in Puerto Rico. Her work integrates decolonial and feminist approaches.
Pranami Tamuli
Educator and systems thinker working at the intersection of community-based psychosocial wellbeing, Global South epistemologies, and mental health reform.