Searching for a Rose Garden

Jasna Russo comes from former Yugoslavia and is based in Berlin, Germany where she works as an independent researcher. She is a long-term activist in the international user/survivor movement. Jasna has an MA in clinical psychology and has worked on both survivor-controlled and collaborative research projects, including several large-scale international studies. Her articles have been published in anthologies and journals in Germany and the UK. In 2011 Jasna was the main organiser of the international conference "Searching for a Rose Garden. Fostering Real Alternatives to Psychiatry" which inspired this book. Her main interest is in exploring the accumulated knowledge of people treated as mad or 'mentally ill' and whether we can connect across the globe to jointly develop our own, first-person defined model of madness. Angela Sweeney was part of her local survivor movement as a teenager and young adult, and conducted her first survivor research project as an undergraduate student in 1998. Sometime after graduating, she joined the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health to work with Jan Wallcraft on a study of the British Survivor Movement (On Our Own Terms, 2003) before moving to the Service User Research Enterprise at the Institute of Psychiatry where she gained a PhD in medical sociology. She has a particular interest in survivor controlled research, trauma-informed approaches, survivors' perspectives on and experiences of psychiatric services and treatments, and alternatives to mainstream biomedical psychiatry including trauma and social models of causation. She is currently undertaking a five year Post-Doctoral Fellowship exploring assessment processes for talking therapies. She has two young children, a partner, and a cat.

Searching for a Rose Garden is an exceptionally insightful collection, in which contributors reflect on the successes, setbacks, and ongoing challenges in contesting and supplanting psychiatry. There is an arresting quality to these essays, which express the urgency of needing to find other ways of caring, and are grounded in a deep appreciation of other ways of being. The transformative effects of the collective knowledge woven together in this book will reverberate for decades to come. Dr Richard Ingram, Independent Mad Studies researcher. Searching for a Rose Garden is a profoundly important volume. Comprehensive. Modern. Bold. Accessible. Survivor-produced research, knowledge, and practice offers concrete examples of people rejecting and altering mental health systems around the world. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever heard the word psychiatry. Lauren J. Tenney, PhD, MPhil, MPA, Psychiatric Survivor A vital contribution to the building of Mad Studies as a discipline grounded in activist scholarship. This is a comprehensive and accessible must-read for those interested in building real alternatives to the limited, and often damaging, approaches to madness and distress that dominate today. Its scope is impressive, drawing together a wide range of contributions to show the best of survivor knowledge and practice, whilst raising questions concerning the politics of inclusion, identities and co-production within this field. Searching for a Rose Garden serves as a record and celebration of, and a challenge to, survivor knowledge and activism; in doing so it preserves and provokes in equal measure. Dr Brigit McWade, Sociology Department, Lancaster University.

• Foreword by Brenda A. LeFrancois. SETTING THE SCENE: 1. Responses to a legacy of harm, Mary O'Hagan; 2. Alternatives or a way of life? Bhargavi Davar; 3. The haunting can end: trauma-informed approaches in healing from abuse and adversity, Beth Filson; 4.The role of survivor knowledge in creating alternatives to psychiatry, Peter Beresford; 5. The co-optation of survivor knowledge: the danger of substituted values and voice, Darby Penney and Laura Prescott. SURVIVOR-PRODUCED KNOWLEDGE: 6. The transformative potential of survivor research, Angela Sweeney; 7.Towards our own framework, or reclaiming madness part two, Jasna Russo; 8. Whiteness in psychiatry: the madness of European misdiagnosis, Colin King; 9. Deciding to be alive: self-injury and survival, Clare Shaw; 10. Thinking (differently) about suicide, David Webb; 11. Community Treatment Orders: once a rosy deinstitutional notion, Erick Fabris. SURVIVOR-CONTROLLED PRACTICE: 12. Becoming part of each other's narratives: Intentional Peer Support, Beth Filson and Shery Mead; 13. We did it our way: Women's Independent Alcohol Support, Patsy Staddon; 14. Sexual violence in childhood: demarketing treatment options and strengthening our own agency, Zofia Rubinsztajn; 15.The Personal Ombudsman: an example of supported decision making, Maths Jesperson; 16. Kindred Minds: a personal perspective, Renuka Bhakta; 17.The Sunrise Project: helping adults recover from psychiatric drugs Terry Simpson; Working in partnership:18. More voice, less ventriloquism: building a mental health recovery archive, Dolly Sen and Anna Sexton; 19. Teaching (like) crazy in a mad-positive school: exploring the charms of recursion, Danielle Landry and Kathryn Church; 20.Peer workers in the mental health system: a transformative or collusive experiment? Celia Brown and Peter Stastny; 21. Dilemmas of identity and power, Alison Faulkner; 22. Is partnership a dirty word? Cath Roper; 23. Co-creating the ways we carry each other: reflections on being an ally and a double agent Reima Ana Maglajlic. THE SEARCH GOES ON.