Thomas S. Szasz Award
for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil
Liberties.
Poppy Buchanan-Barker
and Phil Barker were this year's winners of
the Professional
Category of the “Thomas S. Szasz Award for
Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil
Liberties".
They received their Award at
the University Club, 5th Avenue, Manhattan, New
York. Pictured with Poppy and Phil are Lew Randall
and Andrea Miller Rich from the Center for
Independent Thought, New York.
The award citation
acknowledged “their work over many years in
reclaiming the human context of mental health
care, and especially their
important and
influential contributions to removing psychiatric
care from the purview of medicine, repositioning it
as a type of secular-spiritual, humane service”.
Over the past decade the couple has been involved in
establishing recovery-focused mental health projects
around the UK and abroad, emphasising the need to
view so-called ‘mental illness’ as problems in human
living Over the past decade they have
enabled the development of various projects in
Canada, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Germany the
Netherlands, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, as
well as the UK. Next year they will address major
conferences on Spirituality and Mental Health
in Canada and Australia.
The Szasz Award, named for
the prominent opponent of psychiatric coercion and
other forms of oppression in the name of health, is
a tribute conferred annually on persons or
organizations, American or foreign, judged to have
significantly advanced the cause of civil liberty.
The award is intended to encourage civil
libertarians to persevere in the battle to protect
personal autonomy from state encroachment. Recent
winners of the award have included Soviet dissident,
Vladimir Bukovsky, Australian philosopher
Robert Spillane and American sociologist
Irving Louis Horowitz.
