Advocacy Defined

The Lay of the Land:

There are a couple of things to be aware of when speaking of the current advocacy climate. Advocates run the gamut from the fairly conservative to the radical and all steps in between. At the extreme right you'll find people and groups who actively seek to limit the rights or make more coercive the laws that govern the patient. In the middle are people who just want to maintain and strengthen the psychiatric patient's rights as they exist now. At the far extreme left you'll find the anti-psychiatry movement that wishes to change the very definition of what it means to be mentally ill. The latter group has strong beliefs about coercive or rights-restricting laws and attitudes. In effect, what you have is a state of conflicting rights.

What does it mean to say rights conflict? Well, in this case the conflict is between the public's right to safety and the patient's right to self-determinancy and protection. Is it right to force a person to take drugs that have serious physical side-effects when there is no evidence that said person is a danger to other people? Is it the public's right to coerce this same person into complying with medication regimes in the community, or so-called CTO's (community treatment options)? Is there adequate statistical evidence that the mentally ill are more or less violent than the average person? And by the way, there is no such evidence. But this serves to give you an idea of the various interests that are at stake. I've collected some relevant articles below that will allow you to self-educate yourself on the issues involved before you decide where you sit on the activist continuum.

You may choose either of two ways to be an advocate. You can choose to be a personal advocate for an individual, or a very public advocate out in the trenches so to speak. Of the public advocates there are those who advocate only online and in their personal circle of friends and acquaintances. You can also be a very public advocate offline by attending rallies and doing all of the necessary grunt work that goes into keeping an offline organization up and running. Whichever you choose, it is important to inform yourself and decide where you sit on the issues. Some of the Public Advocacy online resources will have a range of activists in them, and some of the folk will hold very different views from your own. The important thing is to keep your mind open and be respectful of other's beliefs in the same way as you'd expect them to be about yours.