Introduction

This chapter will look at the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and continue to ask whether or not mental health service-user/survivors are best served by becoming subsumed within a broader disability movement (Plumb, 1994; 2012a). I am concerned that the service-user user/survivor/mad movement, in trying to exploit the CRPD to address our situations, may leave us ‘jumping out of the frying pan into the fire’. I will look briefly at some limitations of the social model of disability and identify some aspects of mental health service users’ and survivors’ experience, which I believe differ to people with physical impairments/disabilities and yet are central to the CRPD, namely autonomy (self-determination) and responsibility. I address these issues from my experience of ‘extra/non-ordinary experiences’ (what psychiatry calls religious psychosis), depression and suicidality and, also as a long standing ally of the disabled people's movement, and an activist in the survivor movement in the UK.

Limitations of the social model of disability

People with ‘mental disorders’ have been included in disability legislation in the UK alongside people ‘substantially handicapped by illness, injury or congenital deformity or any other such disability’ since the amendment, in 1974, of the National Assistance Act 1948. It is therefore fitting for mental health service users/survivors (with a psychiatric diagnosis, in particular) to join with disabled people/persons with disabilities when making use of, or challenging, disability legislation as it can provide access to provisions, benefits and rights. My purpose, however, in writing ‘Distress or disability?’ in 1994 was to draw to the attention of disabled activists, eager to include us in their movement, the long history of, and distinctive issues facing, the mental health movement. I also wanted to highlight problems with the social model of disability (as derived from the social definition of disability proposed by Finkelstein, a member of the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (Finkelstein, 1975) which relates, by definition, to persons with physical impairments (UPIAS, 1981).

This issue is still pertinent as the CRPD includes us as persons with mental impairments (Article 1). The term ‘psychosocial disabilities’ is now being promoted by some mental health activists (WNUSP, 2008, 9), instead of impairment, but what is meant by ‘disabilities’ here?