The mode of client participation in jurisdictional contestation we call ‘escape’ is shaped by the exclusive emotional resonance of a movement’s disruptive framing efforts. By escape, we mean withdrawing from established arrangements to pursue a peer-driven, alternative project. We argue that clients enact the escape mode of participation because they feel very proud of supporting the movement’s alternative, peer-driven institutional project, as well as somewhat afraid of relying on the profession’s established arrangements, ashamed of complying with the profession’s prescriptions, and angry at the profession for breaching its duty. Clients who experience this configuration of emotional resonance come to see the movement’s experiential knowledge as highly trustworthy. They become strongly attached to the movement as a collective actor. This configuration of emotional resonance is illustrated in Figure 2.

Exemplifying this mode of participation are adherents to what has been variously known since the 1970s as the psychiatric survivors or mad movement. Judi ( Citation: Chamberlin, 1977 Chamberlin, J. (1977). On our own: patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system. Hawthorn Books. ) ’s On our own is a profoundly emotional first-person account of having “survived” what she describes as oppressive psychiatric treatments. It is also a forceful manifesto advocating for the “liberation” of psychiatric patients through their mobilization for an alternative institutional project of mutual aid among experiential peers. In the conclusion of this text, which to this day remains a foundational reference for movement adherents, ( Citation: Chamberlin, 1977, p. 239 Chamberlin, J. (1977). On our own: patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system. Hawthorn Books. ) wrote:

We must support the establishment of neighbourhood crisis centers, drop-in centers, community residences, and group homes (…). And we must welcome back into our communities even those people so damaged by years of psychiatric incarceration that they may always remain a bit different, a little odd.

Through multiple passages like this one, Chamberlin communicates her own pride and that of her peers in supporting the alternative project promoted by the psychiatric survivors’ movement and her trust in the experiential knowledge of her fellow movement adherents:

“People who have been patients know from their own experience that warmth and support (…) were helpful and that being thought of and treated as incompetent were not. Even when a person is experiencing distress he or she still can be helpful to others,” she writes [- ( Citation: Chamberlin, 1977, p. 6 Chamberlin, J. (1977). On our own: patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system. Hawthorn Books. ) .

Recent research by mad activists has noted that this pride of supporting the movement’s alternative project is cultivated among movement adherents through “personal narratives of surviving, outwitting, or avoiding psychiatry [which] appear regularly in movement publications and provide an important segment of programming at annual conferences” ( Citation: Morrison, 2005, p. 101 Morrison, L. (2005). Talking Back to Psychiatry: the Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Movement. Taylor & Francis. ) . Such “heroic survivor narratives” strengthen the trust of adherents in their experiential knowledge. In the introduction of her manifesto ( Citation: Chamberlin, 1977 Chamberlin, J. (1977). On our own: patient-controlled alternatives to the mental health system. Hawthorn Books. ) , Chamberlin also wrote:

Many ex-patients are angry, and our anger stems from the neglect, indifference, dehumanization, and outright brutality we have seen and experienced at the hands of the mental health system. Our distrust of professions is not irrational hostility, but is the direct result of their treatment of us in the past. We have been belittled, ignored, lied to. We have no reason to trust professionals, and many reasons to fear them.

In this quote, Chamberlin describes the fear felt among movement adherents at the idea of relying on the established arrangements upheld by the psychiatric profession and their distrust of its expert knowledge which they see as irrelevant, dangerous, and unreliable. She also states the anger felt by movement adherents towards the profession for breaching its duty—an anger at ‘them’ that attaches adherents to the ‘we’ of the movement and leads them to consider deviance from the profession’s prescriptions as a righteous imperative. Research on the history of the mad movement describes how the shame of complying with the profession’s prescriptions led mad activists to become detached from the psychiatric profession and to see compliance with its prescription as morally flawed and self-degrading, creating tensions between the movement’s radical and reformist segments ( Citation: Scott Campbell, 2011 Scott Campbell, D. (2011). Unsettled: Discourse, practice, context, and collective identity among mad people in the United States, 1970-1999.  (Doctoral dissertation). York University, Faculty of environmental studies ; Citation: Morrison, 2005 Morrison, L. (2005). Talking Back to Psychiatry: the Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/Ex-Patient Movement. Taylor & Francis. ) .

Similar emotional dynamics have been described among the feminist founders of a peer- driven crisis center for rape survivors ( Citation: Zilber, 2002 Zilber, T. (2002). Institutionalization as an interplay between actions, meanings, and actors: the case of a rape crisis center in Israel. Academy of Management Journal, 45(1). 234–254. https://doi.org/10.2307/3069294 ) , as well as in mutual aid groups for women who practice breastfeeding and proximal mothering ( Citation: Weiner, 1994 Weiner, L. (1994). Reconstructing Motherhood: The La Leche League in Postwar America. The Journal of American History, 80(4). 1357. https://doi.org/10.2307/2080604 ) , transgendered people ( Citation: Schrock, Holden & al., 2004 Schrock, D., Holden, D. & Reid, L. (2004). Creating Emotional Resonance: Interpersonal Emotion Work and Motivational Framing in a Transgender Community. Social Problems, 51(1). 61–81. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2004.51.1.61 ) , and stutterers ( Citation: Borkman, 1999 Borkman, T. (1999). Understanding self-help/mutual aid: experiential learning in the commons. Rutgers University Press. ) . Fueled by pride in their newfound community but also specific forms of anger, shame and fear, adherents to these movements seek to withdraw from a profession’s jurisdiction to pursue alternative, peer-driven arrangements.