From Patients to People: Disability Rights and Survivor Narratives in Mental Health
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.
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