Eds: As a member of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (WNUSP) you have been instrumental in developing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Can you explain why you decided to use the Convention as an avenue to advance the rights of users and survivors?

TM: The opportunity that came about with the CRPD converged with preparation that I had inadvertently undertaken through my legal studies. In law school I studied disability rights law and concentrated on international human rights law in a third-year clinical placement. I began thinking about how to combine the two – disability non-discrimination and international human rights – to combat psychiatric oppression. One of my professors, Rhonda Copelon, had set an example through her work on women's human rights, which also required bringing a non-discrimination lens to human rights violations in order to make them cognisable in international law. In my third year clinic when we were researching the relevance of the norm prohibiting torture to the definition of rape and sexual slavery as international crimes, I began to apply the international criteria for torture to forced psychiatric interventions and found that it was a good fit.

When the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry (WNUSP) learned about the opportunity to contribute to developing the new treaty, I outlined a proposal for advocacy that was accepted by the WNUSP board. At the beginning of the process I had no expectations for success but felt strongly that the opportunity to speak also implied a responsibility. Since the treaty was about our rights (and the rights of other people with disabilities) our silence would have given up power that we had, and would have made us complicit with the failure to achieve our own goals. I have written elsewhere about the CRPD process and what made it successful from a user/survivor point of view in my article in Psychiatry Disrupted (Burstow et al, 2014), and in a paper entitled ‘The emergence of a user/survivor perspective in human rights’ (Minkowitz, 2012).

Eds: Can you explain why you specifically chose to work within a disability rights framework?