Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sharon Beder for her constant support throughout the many years of this project. Without her willingness to discuss ideas, read drafts, and offer advice and encouragement I could never have completed it. I would also like to thank Brian Martin, my PhD supervisor from the Science, Technology and Society Program at the University of Wollongong, for his guidance and many suggestions during the preparation of my doctoral thesis. I also want to thank David Cohen, Professor of Social Work at the Florida International University, for the sound advice he gave after reading my PhD thesis.

I am also greatly in debt to many members of the Support Coalition, World Network of (Ex-)Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, and MadNation email discussion groups. My research has benefited immeasurably from the privilege of interacting on a daily basis with these extraordinary international networks of psychiatric survivors. In this regard I want to particularly thank the co-ordinators of these organisations—David Oaks, Sylvia Caras and Vicki Fox Wieselthier—for their tireless work in bringing these vibrant electronic communities into existence.

I would also like to thank Chris Bowker for sharing her experience as a human rights advocate in the mental health field; Heather Nolan for her wonderfully descriptive letters and poignant arguments against the injustice of psychiatric coercion; and Don Weitz, for allowing me to reproduce parts of his passionately written personal story of psychiatric abuse.

I’d like to express my appreciation to my editors, Caroline Williamson and Gillian Fulcher. I’m also in debt to my courageous publisher, Henry Rosenbloom, for his willingness to take a chance. The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia taken from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, are reprinted here with the permission of the copyright holders, the American Psychiatric Association (© 1994).