David Oaks

David William Oaks (born September 16, 1955, Chicago, Illinois) is a civil rights activist and founder and former executive director of Eugene, Oregon-based MindFreedom International. The organization includes psychiatric survivors and dissident psychiatrists who reject what they say is the "domination" by the biomedical model that defines contemporary psychiatry. 
Oaks says that the psychiatric drugs that patients take have harmful side effects, and people can often recover without them.
Biography.
In the 1970s, David Oaks was a student at Harvard University. He was diagnosed as having schizophrenia. He was hospitalized in an institution and forcibly treated with medications. He recovered, he says, by rejecting drugs and getting support from family and friends. Oaks says he "maintains his mental health with exercise, diet, peer counseling and wilderness trips — strategies that are well outside the mainstream thinking of psychiatrists and many patients".
Oaks is on the board of directors for the United States International Council on Disability.