What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement by Pelka Fred

Author:Pelka, Fred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2013-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

David Oaks

“Forward goes the vanguard of the lunatic fringe.”

David Oaks was born in September 1955, and grew up on the South Side of Chicago. “All of my grandparents came from Lithuania, and both of my grandfathers were coal miners in rural Illinois, so I grew up in a working-class family and was very affected by Lithuanian American culture. My parents were clerical workers. My dad worked for the trucking and rail industry as a clerk, and he was in the Teamsters union. They were a very supportive family, very loving.”

Oaks graduated from a private Catholic high school, winning scholarships that enabled him to enter Harvard. He did a double major in government and economics, and in an effort to lessen the financial strain on his family, he hoped to complete his undergraduate degree in three years. “Above all, I wanted to make sure that I got into a profession that was economically secure, and that created a lot of stress.”

Oaks cites this stress as a major reason he began to experience what he calls “altered” or “extreme” states of mind. “I saw and heard things that other people didn’t … where I would think a space ship was in front of me, or a neighbor was with the CIA, or that the TV was only talking to me. This would go on for weeks at a time. For instance, I would get into a state of mind—this was very common for me—where I would look at technology as kind of an alien force on the planet: electricity and telephones and computers and radio and machinery. I would be riding in an airplane and become convinced that my mind could somehow affect the bolts in the airplane. That I had these superpowers.” The doctors at Harvard had Oaks committed to McLean, a prestigious private psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. “I was locked up five times, from a few days to five weeks.”

In his senior year Oaks discovered a local group—the Mental Patients’ Liberation Front—that was on the cutting edge of the psychiatric survivor movement. Though he would at times become immersed in other political causes—for example anti–nuclear power activism—his involvement with the MPLF proved to be the beginning of a lifelong commitment to campaigning for the rights of psychiatric survivors. At the time of this interview Oaks was the executive director of MindFreedom International, based in Eugene, Oregon.

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