Not being mentally ill: Social movements, system survivors and the oppositional habitus

Much of the social scientific work on psychiatry and mental health, from a variety of competing perspectives, has focused upon power and the social construction of 'mental illness'. Very little attention has been paid to resistance or to the various ways in which 'patients' or 'survivors' (as some now prefer to refer to themselves) have sought to socially deconstruct 'mental illness'. This paper seeks to redress that balance by way of a detailed examination of some of the key practices of resistance which have developed within the context of the UK mental health survivors movement. Using key concepts from Bourdieu's theory of practice, it examines the challenge which survivors have mounted to the symbolic power of psychiatry, and the resistance habitus which their opposition has given rise to.