The Psychiatric Survivor Oral History Archive

In 2022 Project LETS initiated a Community Oral History project, as a part of our Mad Justice and Psychiatric Abolition programming, in which we began gathering video, audio, and transcribed oral history narratives from survivors of ECT, medical coercion/neglect, and other accounts of psychiatric incarceration and systemization.

Since the project's inception we’ve been working steadily towards the goal of making these narratives publicly accessible for individual education, healing work, and other relevant cultural work; with the dream of creating a free and accessible "for us by us" database for resource sharing between Mad folks — setting a precedent for what a completely Mad, peer-led, community archival project can accomplish.

The oral history team is indebted to the support of our incredibly talented and dedicated archival volunteers who are helping us transcribe, edit, code, and organize our archives. This project is a sacred and deeply spiritual mad spell, democratized mutual aid resource, and just one beautiful example of psych survivors’ radical bravery and generosity when it comes to keeping each other safe and alive.

Our Principles In Practice

• Compensating oral history participants: Since the beginning of our project, we have conducted 105 oral histories through Zoom and audio recordings and compensated narrators for a total of $21,000.

• Global focus: Oral history narrators have shared with us from the so-called United States; Mexico City; Goa, Delhi, and Bangalore (India); Whangārei, New Zealand; Canada; Sweden; Australia; United Kingdom; and the Philippines.

• Collaborative community co-design process: In 2023 we started working with Research Action Design (RAD) to create the physical web archive that will house these already, relatively extensive, archives. We’ve now completed a thorough community co-design research process, in which we conducted focus groups of previous oral history narrators to gain critical input and feedback that will help us co-create the most accessible and, hopefully impactful archive made by and for Mad, Disabled survivors of the psychiatric harm.

• Slow pace to ensure integrity: We have been working to collate anonymous data about oral history narrators, such as age, marginalized identities, geographic location, relevant diagnoses, and emerging themes from interviews. In addition, we continue to transcribe, collate, edit, and archive interviews and continue to consensually share quotes and clips of some of these narratives while we work on the completion of our fully accessible web-archive.

FAQ