Recovering our Stories: A Small Act of Resistance

This paper describes a community event organized in response to the appropriation and overreliance on the psychiatric patient personal story. The sharing of experiences through stories by individuals who self-identify as having lived experience has been central to the history of organizing for change in and outside of the psychiatric system. However, in the last decade, personal stories have increasingly been used by the psychiatric system to bolster research, education, and fundraising interests. We explore how personal stories from consumer/survivors have been harnessed by mental health organizations to further their interests and in so doing have shifted these narrations from agents of change towards one of disability tourism or patient porn. We mark the ethical dilemmas of narrative cooptation and consumption and query how stories of resistance can be reclaimed not as personal recovery narratives but rather as a tool for socio-political change. We all have stories. Many of our stories are deeply personal. Some of our stories are painful, traumatic, hilarious, heroic, bold, banal. Our stories connect usthey reflect who we are and how we relate to one another. Stories are extremely powerful and have the potential to bring us together, to shed light on the injustice committed against us and they lead us to understand that not one of us is alone in this world. But our stories are also a commodity-they help others sell their products, their programs, their services-and sometimes they mine our stories for the details that serve their interests best-and in doing so present us as less than whole. - Becky McFarlane, Recovering Our Stories event, June 2011