Freedom Center (mental health organization)

Founded by Will Hall and Oryx Cohen, the Freedom Center is a Northampton, Massachusetts-based support, activism, and human rights community run by and for people diagnosed with severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The Freedom Center is part of the international psychiatric survivors movement and was founded to provide mutual aid and support to people facing emotional distress who have not been helped by mainstream hospital and professional care. The Freedom Center works to defy stereotypes of helplessness, break the silence around psychiatric abuse, expose the corruption of pharmaceutical companies and work for change in mental health care.

Freedom Center exposes psychiatric abuse experiences locally and challenges the 'disease and disorder' medical model of mental illness. It favors a recovery model approach and creating dialog that encourages personal exploration of the uniqueness of individual experiences of "madness" instead of diagnostic categories. Freedom Center does not present one interpretation of what gets labeled as "psychosis," mental illness or personality disorder, and its members reflect a diversity of explanations, such as trauma and abuse, holistic health, spirituality, cultural difference, and social oppression.

By presenting the work of journalists, scholars, and scientists such as author Robert Whitaker, Elliot Valenstein, and Paula Caplan at public forums, Freedom Center works to educate about the lack of scientific consensus behind biological, "chemical imbalance" and genetic theories of what gets labeled as mental illness.

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