Mental Health Action

Campaigning to transform public sector mental health services

Mental Health Radical Histories – Greater Manchester

Tony Baldwinson writes:

This new book traces Greater Manchester’s radical mental health campaigning from 1960 to 2011. Survivors, activists and sympathetic workers challenged coercion and discrimination, creating alternatives based on rights, mutual support and control over care.

Examples include Manchester Mind, 42nd Street and the Hearing Voices movement. The book explores how institutional pressures weakened radical approaches and erased their history. For today’s campaigners, its message is clear: empowering services require shared decisions, attention to social injustice, and learning from earlier struggles.

The 160-page pdf version is free, Creative Commons.

Read it online here

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Allied Voices

Campaigners, clinicians and writers we work alongside.

Campaign

Keep Our NHS Public

The parent campaign defending the NHS from privatisation — where Mental Health Action began as a working group.

Campaign

Socialist Health Association

Our founding partner organisation, whose London branch mental health sub-group co-created this coalition in 2021.

Regional campaign

Save Mental Health Services, Norfolk & Suffolk

A long-established local campaign fighting cuts and closures across Norfolk and Suffolk’s community mental health provision.

Practitioner blog

Glenda O’Brien — Substack

A retired Registered Mental Health Nurse writing on thirty years’ experience across the full spectrum of NHS mental health care.

Research

Michael Scott — CBT Watch

Ongoing independent scrutiny of the gap between what short-term behavioural therapies promise and what they deliver.

Media

The Common Good — YouTube

Our channel on the politics of mental health, featuring interviews and discussion on the crisis in NHS provision.