The activist/advocacy movement has had disagreement about what to call people who have experienced mental health services without having chosen those services, and people who are caught up in the mental health service system. The words range from patient to prisoner. Some people write a phrase that looks like consumer/survivor/ex-patient/inmate/recipient The phrase consumer/survivor has become somewhat acceptable as a referent. c/s/x stands for consumer/survivor/ex-patient, another acceptable version Note that the health care reform committee explicitly chose to write survivor first, survivor/consumer. We talked on the list about survivor/consumer/ex-patient and survivor/consumer/recipient, but the acronyms that develop are unacceptable. Date: Fri, 7 Oct 1994 04:28:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Quinn D Rossander The abreviation c/s/x stands for three concepts at the same time. Let me explain: c = consumer s = survivor x = expatient The reason for this acronym is that people who deal with the Mental System in the US are exposed to a situation of "forced treatment" and in that situation the term "consumer" is an oxymoron. The word consumer implies that a person actually has a choice, free choice with regard to the course of his/her hospital stay, type of therapy, selection of medication, etc. The Asylum movement that began in America around 1840 was built on the total removal of a person from his community and placing him/her in a rigidly structured closed facility. Every moment and every decision was regulated and the rules came to resemble more of a prison than a place of healing. Because of these conditions many people came into such Asylum and never left alive. Are you familiar with the fantastic film, "Man Facing South East." Perhaps more than any film I have seen it presents the dilemma of a devout, pious man of God (or perhaps to be more faithful to the story line, I should say man of the universe). His struggle to befriend those patients in the Asylum and the final conduction of the Ode of Joy to forment liberation of his friends and comrads in the Asylum. The point I am making is that to be able to leave such a facility alive is nothing short of a miracle. Hence the second term survivor. The third term to my way of thinking is the most powerful of these three for expatient expresses the hopefulness of one who can see that it is possible to pass through Madness and become better than well. Madness is not the end, but rather a place of darkness in one's life and the opportunity for spiritual growth is ever present so that one comes out on the other side with a knowledge of self and the God within that makes one stronger, healthier, more sensitive to one's fellow man, and more in touch with the endemic suffering and pain from being human. You can not walk past the man in winter lying under a coat and blanket on the street without the question, "do I know him, were we in the hospital together?" Ruth, a lurker (one who watches and listens in silence on Internet) has added a final icing to this term c/s/x by the following explanation: c/s/x means listening with your heart respecitng the experience and the person you're dealing with. To be even more explicit the term c/s/x comes about because no one seems to agree that there is yet a term that expresses the idea of 1) receiving services (choice or forced) 2) surviving what for many is an iatrogenic nightmare 3) maintaing hope in the face of a label "mentally ill" that beggers even the possibility that one can ever get well, let alone pass thru Madness to a state of heightened humanity There is a commonality of suffering among people who use the term c/s/x that brings us all together at the same table. Most come with a deep sense of hurt and outrage not at being hurt, but at what was done to them by a system of oppression that took away their freedom and left them with only a vast limitless horizon of hopelessness. For many of us there is a recognition upon first meeting that our common experience has broken us in ways that only we can understand as we share our experiences going through the Mental Death System where every attempt to reason, to express oneself, to reclaim self dignity is re-interprited as an act of rebellion that must be heavily suppressed. I am sure you have seen the Movie, "On Flew Over the Cookoo Nest" that won an Academy award in America several years ago. The sense of shared suffering reflected in that psychiatric hospital is a good examply of how c/s/x can relate to each other. Ross [;-) qdr@bach.udel.edu  This file came from anonymous ftp sjuvm.stjohns.edu cd MADNESS The MADNESS ftp site is a service of MADNESS, an online discussion on LISTSERV@sjuvm.stjohns.edu Please credit the list if you copy this file.