Welcome to the Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault (CAPA) website. Here you will find information about CAPA’s mandate, events, and other relevant information about antipsychiatry in Canada and worldwide.
Mandate
Formed in 2003, CAPA is a coalition of people committed to dismantling the psychiatric system and building a better world. Radical and visionary, we are comprised of activists, psychiatric survivors, dramatists, academics, and professionals. We see problems in living which are currently pathologized as largely created by sexism, capitalism, racism, ableism, heterosexism and other systemic oppressions. We see the very concept of mental illness as flawed. We object to incarceration, electroshock, and the vast array of brain-damaging drugs. We oppose the violation of human rights which is endemic to psychiatry. We see a connection between globalization, intolerance, and the mass marketing of the mental health industry. The world which we strive to co-create is one where people are not pathologized, where care is neither commodified nor professionalized, where choice and integrity are respected, and where we are all joined in caring and creative community to each other and to the planet earth.
CAPA is an organization that is focused on strategic activism. As such, CAPA does not deal with direct service. If you are interested in accessing services, please visit our links page for resources. Strategic activism involves developing actions that are part of a larger campaign aimed at achieving specific goals. Currently, CAPA members are working on developing strategies and actions aimed at curtailing the use of psychiatric drugs and electroshock. If you share these goals and you are interested in joining CAPA, please review CAPA’s membership requirements.
Membership
Who Is Eligible to Be a Member?
Anyone who is either antipsychiatry or who is critical of psychiatry but accepts that CAPA is an antipsychiatry organization is eligible to become a member. The route to becoming a member is to attend two meetings, and to be approved by the members who have attended these meetings.
This is an inclusive organization. If you are dissatisfied with any part of the psychiatric system, if you want to combat human rights abuse, we need you– your skills, thoughts, and presence. And you are welcome in CAPA.
Contact
If you would like to contact CAPA, please email: capacommittee@gmail.com
Click here to view CAPA’s Antipsychiatry Fact Sheet
Click here for Burstow article on antipsychiatry myths and facts, named “Antipsychiatry Revisited”
Coalition Against Psychiatric Assault 