What is CAPA? The COALITION AGAINST PSYCHIATRIC ASSAULT

Formed in 2003, CAPA is a coalition of people committed to dismantling the psychiatric system. Radical and visionary, we are comprised of psychiatric survivors, social justice and human rights activists, dramatists, academics, graduate students, and health professionals.  We see problems in living, which are currently pathologized as largely created by capitalism, sexism, racism, ableism, sanism, and other systemic oppressions. We see the very concept of “mental illness” as unscientific, fraudulent, and stigmatizing.

We strongly object to incarceration (involuntary committal), electroshock, forced drugging, and the vast array of brain-damaging drugs – particularly the antidepressants and neuroleptics. We oppose many human rights violations, which are endemic to psychiatry. We see a connection among globalization, bigotry, homelessness,poverty, iatrogenic disease (treatment-caused), and the mass marketing of the mental health industry including the multinational drug companies (‘Big Pharma’). CAPA has successfully organized several public educational events and strategic nonviolent resistance.

For example, in 2005 we successfully organized public hearings on psychiatric drugs and electroshock. Since 2007, we organized three anti-shock rallies and protests on Mother’s Day in Toronto. And in 2010, we organized PsychOUT, an international conference for organizing resistance against psychiatry. The world which we strive to co-create is one where people and their problems are not pathologized, where care is neither commodified nor professionalized, where choice and integrity are respected, and where we are all joined in a caring and creative community to each other and to the planet earth.

On May 6, 2012 at 1:00pm, the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault is organizing Occupy Psychiatry: A nonviolent action during which survivors and activists will occupy the front grounds of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Ontario’s shock shop located at 250 College St (near College and Spadina). Please join us in the fight to end fraudulent diagnoses, forced drugging, forced electroshock, and psychiatric incarceration.

Read more at Occupy Toronto