The politics of psychiatric self-help: Political factions, interactional support, and group longevity in a social movement

Abstract

This paper examines data from a national sample of 104 groups in the former mental patient self-help movement in terms of how differences in group longevity are related to patterns of interactional social support within the different political factions in the movement. Community organization theory, which explains self-help group longevity in terms of interactional support from external community organizations, would suggest that the oldest groups should be the most conservative groups. This contradicts the de facto existence of old radical groups. Mental patient movement activists claim that the oldest groups are the most radical groups that began the movement in the early 1970s. This ignores the existence of some equally old conservative groups and offers no explanation of group longevity. Data are presented that show the longevity of conservatively affiliated groups to be an artifact of their propensity toward external community interactional support and their lack of involvment in organizational interaction within the self-help movement. The data also show that the existence of some of the oldest groups in the movement within the most radical factions is associated with the perpetuation of radical, anti-psychiatric ideology within the movement. These groups are shown to be actively involved in radical social movement activities (organizational interaction) and to eschew involvement in the development of institutional interaction. Thus, these findings show that some self-help groups can and do find needed social systemic and moral support within the movement itself and do not require external official institutional support for their long-term survival. These data explain the bi-modal distribution of group longevity within the movement from the perspective of social movement theory in sociology. The data provide explicit empirical support for the notion that there is an inverse relationship between organizational activities and institutional activities, and that this factor intervenes between dimensions of political structure and ideology, on the one hand, and group longevity, on the other.