L. D. Green - Weve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health—Stories and Research Challenging the Biomedical Model

This books message honors the diversity of each persons mind and body by moving us outside the limited scope of the biomedical model. This message needs to be spread to counter the stigma, labeling, and pathologizing entrenched in the current mental health system. I share the vision of this book: a mental health system that is not based on forced treatment as its default, where people choose services and supports because they serve their needs as defined by them. This would be a system that does not reduce people to chemical imbalances but sees them holistically with myriad needs and influences. Weve Been Too Patient moves us all toward this substantially different perspective of mental health.

Sally Zinman, pioneer of the consumer movement and executive director of the California Association of Mental Health Peer Run Organizations

Weve Been Too Patient is a must-read for all. Through mad rage, mad resistance, and mad pride, this brilliant collection creatively and provocatively challenges the structural oppression, stigma, and sanism in our everyday lives as well as within the very mental health services that are purported to support us. This book is not only silence shatteringit moves adeptly beyond revealing the harm and shame experienced by so many of us to expose the triumphs, creativity, dignity, and self-agency attached to mutual aid and other alternative approaches to healing. In short, Weve Been Too Patient is a courageous, powerful, and important contribution to radical mental health and to the field of mad studies.

Brenda A. LeFranois, social work professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and coauthor of Mad Matters and Psychiatry Disrupted

This powerful anthology shines a spotlight on the mental health system, highlighting serious flaws. The authors, often retraumatized by the care they received for real and perceived mental illnesses, explore their journeys in rich, vivid language. Rather than accepting victim roles, the writers detail call-to-arms epiphanies that allow them to embrace their experience and emerge as activists. This powerful book is a game-changer for anyone serious about looking at the mental-health system from a patients perspective. An excellent read.

Nicki Breuer, owner of Odin Books, a mental health, education, and special needs bookstore

For too long those living with mental health conditions were marginalized, dismissed, and distrusted by the very communities in which they lived leading to isolation, often in the name of treatment. The power to overcome this forced isolation and faulty identification to instead construct a community built on mutual trust and support has taken enormous faith and courage. You can hear the courage in the voices found throughout this anthology. The courage they inspire is contagious and serves as a guide to building the healing communities that those living with mental health conditions need and deserve.

Joseph Robinson, program manager of Each Mind Matters

Justice is not possible unless we make space for the stories of the margins. What more powerful elucidation can there be than to cast light on the margins of the mind? Weve Been Too Patient shreds stigma and replaces it with dignity, autonomy, and power. This anthology heralds the necessity of our messy radical neurodivergent brains so that we might call forth a world where we are never again forced to be too patient.

Sonya Renee Taylor, activist and author of The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

Nothing beats the advocacy and ideas of someone with lived experience in a subject and this book is proof. The insights and ideas might be radical to some, but anyone who has lived experience with mental illness and/or suicide can see this is actually a long-overdue and very reasonable plea for basic human dignity, compassion, support, and sense of community. This is how we should treat people who are suffering. Whether you are a loved one, someone who suffers, a politician, or a mental health worker, please read it.

Paul Gilmartin, comedian and host of Mental Illness Happy Hour

Copyright 2019 by L. D. Green and Kelechi Ubozoh. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books
Berkeley, California
Cover art gettyimages.com/Vadimas Lisicinas
Cover design by John Yates
Book design by Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States of America

Weve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental HealthStories and Research Challenging the Biomedical Model is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

DISCLAIMER: This book contains personal stories that include institutional and interpersonal trauma, self-harm, and abuse of all kinds. We believe these stories and contexts are important, and they may be triggering. We encourage you to take care of yourself as you take this book in.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the publisher upon request.

This book includes material from well-managed forests and from recycled materials. North Atlantic Books is committed to the protection of our environment. We print on recycled paper whenever possible and partner with printers who strive to use environmentally responsible practices.

Robert Whitaker

Robert Whitaker is a science journalist and the author of several books about the history of psychiatry, including Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic. He is also the publisher of the webzine Mad in America.

There is a risk, I think, in writing a foreword to an anthology written by those who have beenas the title of this fine anthology cleverly notestoo patient. The problem is that you have been invited to add your voice into the mix, even though what this book calls upon a reader to do is to listen.

Indeed, after having finished the book, I was struck mostly with this one thought: from the first page forward, I simply wanted to empty my mind of my own thoughts, and quietly listen to the writers tell their personal stories and to their thoughts for creating a new narrative of radical mental health.

With that hesitation in mind, I thought I would simply write a bit more about listening to this book, and why I believe, from a societal perspective, that we need to become much better listeners to the voices present in these pages. In the past, we as a society have regularly turned a deaf ear to those deemed mad, and for the most part, that societal deafness continues today. This is one reason why Weve Been TooPatient demands that readers, first and foremost, just listen to this group of talented writers.

There are many aspects to the act of listening, and my first response with this book was to simply enjoy and often marvel at the use of language in the poems and essays. The writing is direct, clear, and most important of all, authentic. You can easily recognize that the writers are striving, with their choice of words, to be true to their own life stories, and how that authenticity then lends a moral authority to their arguments for radical interventions.