Survivor research in Canada: ‘talking’ recovery, resisting psychiatry, and reclaiming madness

Abstract

Beginning with discussion of what constitutes survivor research in Canada, this paper presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of published accounts of survivor research over the last twenty-five years. Though they are varied, these texts demonstrate a rhetorical shift from a focus on the individual mind/body out to the social world experienced by psychiatric consumer/survivors. Findings indicate that survivor research engages with recovery discourse in numerous, sometimes problematic ways, in order to push back against dominant biomedical and psychiatric discourses. Further, new language is being generated for understanding madness and distress, rooted in a survivor perspective.