PO Box 623 Northampton, Massachusetts 01061 USA (413) 582-9948
thefreedomcenter@hotmail.com

Freedom Center challenges the mental health system's widespread despair, abuse, fraudulent science and ineffective toxic treatments with compassion, advocacy, holistic alternatives and activism.

Our goals are to end all force and coercion in the mental health system; to ensure that all treatment decisions are based on true informed consent; to replace reliance on toxic medications with effective holistic alternatives and social supports; to make peer-based client empowerment the center of all mental health services; and to end the marginalization and repression of "madness" and extreme states of consciousness.

If you are labeled with 'mental illness,' are a psychiatric abuse survivor, or have the extreme mental and emotional states called 'madness,' we invite you to join us. Allies and supporters willing to share their personal experiences with emotional pain are also welcome.

Freedom Center offers weekly support groups, free weekly yoga classes, advocacy against coercion and dehumanization, activism against dehumanizing treatment in area psychiatric facilities, effective holistic alternatives education, help reducing/going off medications, support against housing discrimination, general resource referrals, and public education about the psychiatric abuse survivor movement.

We are a member of the Support Coalition International, a global network of grassroots groups working to transform psychiatry and the mental health system.

Check the upcoming events page for latest news.

In order to learn more about the problems of psychiatric disability, the National Council on Disabilities conducted a hearing specifically on this topic and heard testimony from mental health professionals, lawyers, advocates, and relatives of people with psychiatric disabilities. However, unlike most investigations on the topic of psychiatric disability, the primary participants in this hearing were people with psychiatric disabilities themselves...

The testimony pointed to the inescapable fact that people with psychiatric disabilities are systematically and routinely deprived of their rights, and treated as less than full citizens or full human beings.

-- National Council on Disabilities Report:
From Privileges to Rights: People Labeled with Psychiatric Disabilities Speak for Themselves

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought.

-- Article 18,
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.