Remembering Consumer-Survivor Activists

This year has been saddened by the loss of leaders whose outreach and inspiration forged a rights-based advocacy in policy and practice, and led to the 1999 Supreme Court decision Olmstead v. L.C. All built bridges, guaranteeing that their accomplishments would be sustained. Among those pioneers we remember are:

Sherry Jenkins-Tucker (March 25, 1956 - July 11, 2022) who loved to include ITE, “I’m the Evidence,” among her honorary titles. I first heard that boast in 2009, at a banquet in Washington, D.C., where she was receiving the Clifford Beers Award from Mental Health America. At the time, she was five years into what would become her life's work, building the Georgia Mental Health Consumer Network (GMHCN) into one of the nation’s premier peer-organized advocacy recovery centers. Growing from a staff of four to more than 100, the GMHCN sponsored training for certified peer specialists, developed a peer-to-peer warm line, built a peer-operated respite program, and held annual state conferences attended by people setting their own personal agenda for mental health recovery, as well as priorities for the state of Georgia to implement for everybody. Her influence included collaboration with the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to appearances at national and international conferences. Tall, with short blond hair, she personified a fun-seeking vitality while supporting the whole health recovery of the people she served. She died in her sleep, and is survived by her husband Randy.

Sally Zinman (1937 – August 25, 2022) became a powerhouse from her earliest days of street protests over psychiatric overreach, to spreading the word through co-writing Reaching Across (1987) or the alternative underground paper Madness Network News (1972-1986). She showed visionary foresight by organizing the California Network of Mental Health Clients in 1984, at a time when peers were fighting for recognition. Combining a mission-driven tenacity with an unwavering pursuit of consumer-survivor rights, her voice was sought by community and political power brokers, and the numerous rights organizations with which she was affiliated. When California drafted an innovative tax to build services in 2012—called the millionaire’s tax—her guidance was sought by politicians wanting to hear consumers’ priorities. A recipient of Mental Health America’s Clifford Beers Award, and SAMHSA’s Recovery Hero, Zinman was respected and revered as much for her unwavering principles as for her humble strength. She died after a 15-year battle with cancer and is survived by a daughter.

Lois Curtis (July 14, 1967 – November 3, 2022) was determined to leave the institutional life into which she had been rotated involuntarily since childhood. Doctors, family, and advocates agreed that neither her disability nor a mental illness warranted her continuing lockup in segregated treatment. When she was in her late twenties she told Atlanta’s legal aid attorney Sue Jamieson, “Get me out of here.” The subsequent lawsuit the Atlanta Legal Aid Society brought against Georgia’s mental health commissioner in 1995 led to a Supreme Court decision four years later, for which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg delivered the 6 to 3 opinion known as Olmstead v. L.C. Ginsburg called out the “unjustifiable isolation” of confining someone who was capable of community living with appropriate accommodations. The Olmstead decision affirmed the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and provided the legal scaffold to end the use of needless institutionalization to discriminate. The decision furthered the aspiration of “community integration for everyone.”

After her release from institutional life at the age of 32, Curtis lived in an apartment in the community, developed herself as an artist, and became an advocate for people with disabilities. She died from cancer in November at the age of 55.

Celia Brown (1952 -Dec 4, 2022) told interviewer Leah Harris that in the late 1980s she "stumbled into" activism after attending a self-help conference with pioneers of the disability rights movement. At the time she was living in supported housing. After that opportunity, Brown made history. On one end of the spectrum, she provided board leadership to MindFreedom International. On the other, she was a civil servant, a respected psychiatric survivor assisting New York State Office of Mental Health in building out peer services, a founder of Surviving Race, and led workshops at the United Nations based on the "Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities." Friends and colleagues noted that five days before the end of her life (from cancer), she was responding to the needs and priorities of other activists in the peer services and consumer-survivor movement. She is survived by a brother and sister.