[Anti-Psychiatry] Prima Luce: Journal of the MP Renaissance Vol. 1, Nos. 1-2

New York: Mental Patients’ Renaissance. 1975. Two issues. Each 8 ½ x 11 in., spirit-duplicated. Side-stapled. 14, 15 pp. 

The only two issues we’ve been able to locate, and likely the only ones released, of this remarkably illustrated anti-psychiatry newsletter published by mental patients.

Featuring poetry, essays, and striking spirit-duplicated illustrations, this is undoubtedly one of the more beautiful documents we’ve come across of the alternative and anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s. Influenced by the philosophies of Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Lacan, and RD Laing, and alternative therapy communities like the La Borde clinic in France, SPK in Germany, and Kingsley Hall in Philadelphia, a number of patients’ rights groups like MPR formed in the early 1970s to combat the horrendous conditions of mental hospitals and lack of committed peoples’ rights. An explosion of underground publishing, aided by the cheaper means of production, allowed for alternative press networks to form. 

Prima Luce attacked the patriarchal, classist, and racist assumptions of mainstream psychiatry, elucidating the links between poverty and mental illness and criticizing a lack of research regarding mental illness in Black communities, in a two-part article by Tony Colletti. The first issue also features an essay by Kathleen Cummings examining the origins of psychiatry as a means to control poor women, prostitutes, and “wives whose husbands no longer found use for them.” Cummings also writes about incidences of sexual assault and forced sterilization experienced by women in mental health institutions -- legal in 24 states at the time. The first issue ends with an editorial describing how mental health diagnoses could be used to justify the detainment and silencing of the poor and politically radical. Quotes from R.D. Laing, Valerie Solanas, T.S Eliot, and several others are sprinkled throughout the journals, which include writings on the Conference on Human Rights and Psychiatric Oppression in Detroit, and promotes then-forthcoming books such as Reality Police: The Experience of Insanity in America.

Incredible artifacts of mental patient organizing, feminism, anti-psychiatry theory, and outsider art. No copies located on OCLC as of March 2021.

Toning to edges of wraps, and holograph notation to front wrap of issue one; otherwise very good.