ABSTRACT
Mental patients are taught to think of their difficulties as ‘symptoms,’ which require professional expertise to treat. Even practical problems, such as finding a job or a place to live, tend to be handled by social workers within the overall psychiatric framework. Mental Patients’ Association (MPA) serves several hundred members through its various facilities and activities. Funding for MPA has been obtained from a number of Canadian government sources, local, provincial, and federal, over the years. MPA’s nonbureaucratic, nonhierarchical structure is an essential element in fulfilling the model. Participatory democracy works to ensure that needs are articulated and plans are made to deal with them. The MPA Riverview Extension Program raises a number of questions about the relationship between a self-help group and an authoritarian mental hospital. The program wants to establish a patients’ council, in which current and former patients would meet regularly with hospital staff to discuss patients’ rights issues.
