Words matter.

The language we have around mental ill-health, distress and trauma is limited and limiting.

Many of us have experience of being labelled, of other people telling us who we are and what we’ve experienced. A core principle of Antinormality Club is that everyone should own their own story, including the language they use to describe themselves.

We’ve defined some of the terms we use below. If glossaries are your thing, you might like NSUN’s glossary and Madness Network News’ definitions.

  • Intentional Peer Support is a transformative approach to mental health support, rooted in the psychiatric survivor movement, which builds relationships rooted in empathy, mutual learning, multiple perspectives, accountability, and radical hope. Find out more here.

  • For centuries, words like mad, crazy, nutter and lunatic have been used to stigmatise people whose experiences aren’t judged to be ‘normal’.

    The Mad movement seeks to reclaim the term for ourselves, as a source of pride, rather than shame. Mad is a socio-political identity that embraces the whole of ourselves and our experiences, emotions and mental states. We are beautiful humans, just as we are.

  • The medical model of mental health sees distress and suffering as having only internal causes, like chemical imbalances or differences in brain function. It neglects the relational, social, cultural, economic and environmental drivers of distress and trauma.

    The medical model focuses on classifying, diagnosing and treating mental ‘illness’, by experts who hold power over ‘patients’. This sometimes involves forced treatment and incarceration.

  • This is a term we have adopted from the National Survivor User Network to recognise the different ways in which people describe their identity and experiences. It recognises that there is no one ‘right’ form of language to describe suffering and distress, and that we should all be able to use the words that honour who we are.

    Many people have been harmed by being put into rigid categories with fixed labels, so it’s important that we try to make space for everyone within our language. This makes some of our phrases a little wordy, but there’s no snappy way to communicate the complexity of human experience.

  • A movement of people who have experienced harm in the mental health system and who fight to change the system. This may involve speaking up about their experiences, forming support groups, advocating on behalf of themselves or other survivors, highlighting cases of mistreatment, and protesting against the violation of human rights in the mental health system.

    Members of the survivor movement may also call themselves users, consumers, clients, ex-patients, ex-inmates or Mad.