ABSTRACT
The psychiatric survivor movement is spreading around the world, creating more and more opportunities for people to recount their stories of mental illness. Survivor-run media companies, websites, and blogs have made oral histories the fastest-growing form of narrative. Speak-out pages, published interviews, and videotapes in oral history collections now contain dozens of first-person accounts. The British Library's Mental Health Testimony Project is the largest with fifty videotaped testimonies, each four to six hours long. John Hart doesn't look like a man who has spent much of his life attending to the nuances of consciousness, someone who'd have a subtle analysis of the politics of gender. When John emerged from his self-imposed isolation, he was startled to find that he could now communicate telepathically. In his Testimony Project interview, John readily admits the physical benefits of forced hospitalization. A core assumption of psychological theory, from psychoanalysts to neuroscientists, is that early experiences of trauma indelibly shape both brain and personality.
