International Peer Respite/Soteria Summit

Compassionate Alternatives for People in Crisis and Distress

Home > Resources

Resources

Below, we’ve collected some resources about peer respites, Soteria, and related movements. If there is a resource that you would like to see added to our list, please feel free to send us a message!

Jump to a section:

Advocacy Organizations & Groups

  • Critical Psychiatry Network — a group of psychiatrists, mostly based in the U.K., who exchange ideas and information about critical psychiatry, which they describe as “a broad critique of mainstream psychiatry that has emerged in recent years which challenges some of psychiatry’s most deeply held assumptions.”
  • European Network for (Ex-)Users and Survivors of Psychiatry — a group of European psychiatric survivors, founded in 1990, with the goal “to promote the human rights of (ex-)users and survivors of psychiatry and to influence European policy.”
  • International Network Towards Alternatives and Rights-Based Supports (INTAR) — a group of psychiatric survivors, advocates, and progressive practitioners with a mission “to identify and promote effective, non-coercive, rights-based alternatives and supports that contribute towards establishing a new paradigm that displaces the biomedical psychiatric system.”
  • Mad in America (MIA) — a webzine that uses a mix of journalism, education, and discussion to pursue their mission “to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad).”
    • For similar websites based in other countries, see the list of MIA Affiliates.
  • MindFreedom International — a majority-psychiatric survivor organization with the mission to lead “a nonviolent revolution of freedom, equality, truth and human rights that unites people affected by the mental health system with movements for justice everywhere.”
  • National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA) — a U.S.-based organization with a mission “to support people with psychiatric diagnoses to exercise their legal and human rights, with the goals of abolishing forced treatment and ensuring autonomy, dignity and choice.”
  • National Empowerment Center — a consumer/survivor/expatient-run organization in the U.S. with a mission to “carry a message of recovery, empowerment, hope and healing to people with lived experience with mental health issues, trauma, and/or extreme states.”
  • PeerRespite.com — now archived and inactive, the website was created as a source for information and research on peer respites in the U.S.
  • Rethinking Psychiatry — a volunteer-run organizations whose mission is to be people who “are rethinking psychiatry, creating community, educating and activating for choices.”
  • Soteria Network U.K. — a network of people “promoting the development of drug-free and minimum medication therapeutic environments for people experiencing ‘psychosis’ or extreme states.”
  • Weglaufhaus (Runaway House) Villa Stöckle (Berlin, Germany; website in German) — an anti-psychiatric crisis facility, which “offers people who are endangered or acutely threatened by lack of housing in crises the opportunity to escape the psychiatric system and take their lives back into their own hands [translated from German].”
  • Wildflower Alliance — formerly the Western Mass Recovery Learning Community, Wildflower is “a grassroots peer support, advocacy, and training organization with a focus on harm reduction and human rights” in Massachusetts, U.S.

Current Support & Crisis Alternatives

See also Locations of Peer Respites & Crisis Alternatives and Locations of Soteria & Alternatives.

Peer Respites

About Respites & Crisis Alternatives

Legislation & Policy

Locations of Peer Respites & Crisis Alternatives

Running Peer Respites

Support for & Research About Peer Respites

Soteria Houses

About Soteria

Locations of Soteria & Alternatives

Running Soteria Houses

Support for & Research About Soteria

Workshops, Webinars, & Further Learning

The Movement

Alternative Approaches

Models of Mental Health/Madness

  • Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (by Robert Whitaker)
  • Models of Madness: Psychological, Social and Biological Approaches to Schizophrenia (by John Read, Loren R. Mosher, and Richard P. Bentall)
  • Psychiatry in Context: Experience, Meaning & Communities (by Philip Thomas)
  • Punishing the Patient: How Psychiatrists Misunderstand and Mistreat Schizophrenia (by Richard Gosden)
  • The Straight Talking Introduction series (published by PCCS books)
  • This is Madness: A Critical Look at Psychiatry and the Future of Mental Health Services (edited by Craig Newnes)

Organizing and Connecting

Personal Experiences, Stories, & Solidarity

Psychiatric Drugs

  • Coming Off Psych Drugs: A Meeting of the Minds (on coming off psychiatric medication) (by Daniel Mackler; a video)
  • The Zyprexa Papers (by Jim Gottstein) — this book covers the story of a legal battle and the work of psychiatric survivors to expose a psychiatric company that concealed evidence that their top-selling drug was known to cause diabetes and other metabolic issues.

Peer Respites

Soteria Houses

Videos

About Peer Respites

About Soteria Houses

The Movement

Support for & Research into Alternatives