Ted Chabasinski

Ted Chabasinski (1937 – 2025) was an influential American psychiatric survivor, human rights activist, and attorney based in Berkeley, California.

(Photo Credit: MindFreedom International)

  • Early Life & Institutionalization: At age six, Chabasinski was removed from his foster home and committed to a New York psychiatric facility, where he was diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia and subjected to experimental electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) by psychiatrist Lauretta Bender. He remained institutionalized in state psychiatric facilities until the age of seventeen.
  • Activism & Legal Career: Chabasinski later trained as a lawyer and emerged as a prominent leader in the consumer/survivor/ex-patient (c/s/x) and psychiatric survivors movements starting in the early 1970s. He served as a board member and former president of Support Coalition International (now MindFreedom International), and worked as the directing attorney for Mental Health Consumer Concerns.
  • Key Achievements: He is best known for leading the successful 1982 campaign that passed a ballot measure to ban the use of electroshock in Berkeley, California. Throughout his life, he remained an outspoken advocate against forced psychiatric treatment and human rights abuses in mental healthcare.

Sources: Wikipedia, MindFreedom International

Additional Information:

Writing

While he did not author published books, his primary written contributions took the form of essays, activist publications, blog commentary, and critical correspondence addressing psychiatric abuses and human rights.

  • Letters and Critiques in Professional Journals: He published critical commentary and letters in peer-reviewed medical and psychiatric literature, most notably his 2006 letter in the American Psychiatric Association’s journal Psychiatric Services (“Letter to the Editor”), where he challenged inaccurate historical narratives about the psychiatric survivors movement and detailed his firsthand experiences.
  • Activist Publications and Columns: He was a frequent contributor to movement newsletters, human rights bulletins, and advocacy platforms, writing extensively for organizations such as MindFreedom International (formerly Support Coalition International) and Mental Health Consumer Concerns.
  • Essays and Blogs: In later years, he actively wrote essays, opinion pieces, and blog commentaries (such as Still crazy after all these years) focusing on individual legal freedoms, the abolition of forced psychiatric interventions, and critiques of experimental treatments on children. He wrote extensively for the Mad In America blogsite: https://www.madinamerica.com/author/tchabasinski/

Multimedia

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