Without freedom to criticize, praise means nothing.
Before the Spring Festival, the WeChat accounts "Community Mental Health" and "Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind)" published Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi, referred to below as "the article." Although it didn't name us directly, its line of argument and choice of issues can be read as an indirect response to the criticisms in our translator's preface and editorial afterword to Invited to the Table but Unable to Speak: The Co-option of Experiential Knowledge, a translation we submitted to the WeChat account 双相躁郁世界.
As the people who submitted that translation, we're writing to clarify several central disagreements and develop our observations and concerns about mental-health gongyi in China.
1. Demystify the "first" and restore local histories of practice
The article and its author's earlier work repeatedly invoke "first," "inaugural," and "China." We argue that this account overlooks more than twenty years of accumulated local work. From the Sunshine Project in 2000 to grassroots organizations flourishing around 2010, progress has been built through many people's sustained efforts, not one organization's "formal debut."
2. Reject double standards in talk of "the West"
The author's organization translates and introduces a great deal of Western theory, yet treats local qinlizhe demands for powers of naming and interpretation as a potential "political risk." Empty truisms about the dangers of following a "Western path" imply that grassroots groups are parroting others rather than drawing on local practice and observation. This double standard maintains existing authority in the name of collaboration and preventing division.
3. Examine the structural inequalities beneath "collaboration"
The appeal "we all have few resources, so why not cooperate?" conceals enormous differences between institutionally situated professionals and grassroots qinlizhe. When one side converts action into career capital while the other bears threats to livelihood and social exclusion for speaking out, abstract "collaboration" is a castle in the air.
4. Reassert qinlizhe agency
Qinlizhe isn't merely a choice of vocabulary, or a clumsy Chinese rendering of "service user." It carries locally grounded practices of depathologization and epistemic justice. We refuse to be absorbed as safe, docile "models of recovery." We also refuse narratives of "love and reconciliation" that deny continuing, concrete violence and inequality.
This is an argument grounded in intellectual reflection and public discussion. Given unequal access to intellectual resources, it also tries to build a barrier against the co-option of knowledge and appropriation of local culture, for qinlizhe communities and grassroots participants. There hasn't been a widespread demand within these communities for us to do this. Even so, we feel an urgent need to write and leave a record of these initially jarring, out-of-step voices.
Finally, we understand that our earlier submission platform, 双相躁郁世界, may have rejected this piece because it could affect friendly relations between civil-society organizations, or involve other issues difficult to discuss. We've decided to publish through our own channels to keep public discussion open. We also thank its editors for choosing to reflect on their own work after receiving such a sharply targeted piece. We'll continue submitting translations or discussions we consider suitable, if any arise.
亲历者疯狂研究共同体
Address the issue. Make accountability concrete.
Qinlizhe Mad Studies Collective
Make Accountable Demands
Several curious, locally rooted qinlizhe with years of practical involvement
We insist on taking things seriously because we regard qinlizhe as whole people.
Action has begun to move beyond a single diagnostic condition, involving qinlizhe with many different conditions.
This includes qinlizhe with depression and bipolar disorder, eating-disorder communities, Tourette's syndrome, the autism spectrum and neurodiversity... schizophrenia...
Source: Yao Hao (姚灏), Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
If diagnostic categories remain the basic unit of action, "moving beyond a single condition" is an expansion, not a move beyond.
Going from one condition to several still stays within psychiatry's classificatory framework. In this logic, qinlizhe are presumed to identify through a diagnostic condition. Diagnostic divisions are legitimate, natural, taken for granted; progress means increasing the number of conditions represented.
This understands diversity through statistical classification without asking who makes the categories, or how they produce difference and inequality. In the Chinese context, qinlizhe itself is a depathologizing response to the identity of "patient." Reinterpreting it as the representative of a condition pathologizes it again.
What we hope to move beyond isn't the number of diagnostic categories included. It's the power of diagnostic classification and its unequal consequences. Criticizing this framing doesn't deny the distinctiveness or necessity of qinlizhe organizing.
There's also a neglected piece of dark humour here, which psychiatric professionals should theoretically recognize: any one of us could move beyond a single condition on our own. The diagnoses received by this piece's authors could fill an entire multi-condition conference.
In their early stages, communities organized around different "conditions" often take on science communication themselves, trying to make a particular condition more visible. These bottom-up communities don't begin by trying to increase diagnosis rates or help produce and manage psychiatric patients. They begin by helping people with similar lives recognize their distress and ease isolation and helplessness.
Just as romanticization is a pleasing form of stigmatization, psychiatry can offer qinlizhe something sweet: recognition of pain, resources and help from a particular discipline and profession, less self-blame... until the intuition that "something isn't right" becomes harder and harder to shake.
In a society that widely disregards emotional suffering, the psychiatric hospital becomes the only refuge. As qinlizhe, we once believed that too, until we began weaving more resilient support networks into our lives. But does the logic that treats "having somewhere to go" as a gift conceal coercion within diagnosis and treatment?
We're expected to obey expert authority unconditionally, with no space even to question it. We cooperate at every turn, rationalize our discomfort and confusion. This one-way education in gratitude strips us of agency. We must break with the assumptions that distress is an evil disease to eradicate, psychiatric experts are benevolent and know what to do, and qinlizhe are pitiable people waiting for rescue. We need dialogue between equals, not unquestioning compliance.
What qinlizhe experience isn't only bipolar disorder, eating disorders, neurodiversity, or other things cast as "mental illnesses." It also includes the epistemic injustice of being a "mental patient." The more specific violence of psychiatric practice, borne by so many individuals, is discussed even less, and rarely addressed adequately.
Last year's publication of An Introduction to the Mental-Health Gongyi Field, published by the Sany Foundation and compiled by Erkun (二坤), can be described as the first formal introduction of the concept of mental-health gongyi, its scope of action, and its principles to a wider audience in philanthropy. It was a more formal debut for the field, a landmark event.
...
This meeting mattered greatly to us. It should be the first symposium on qinlizhe involvement in China's mental-health field. As we said at the opening, we had waited almost ten years for this meeting. Over at least the past decade, mental-health gongyi has gone from nothing to something, or from invisibility to greater exposure...
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
This overlooks accumulated history. Mental-health gongyi didn't emerge from nowhere, or begin with one publication or public appearance.
The Sunshine Project's charitable action initiative began at Peking University in March-April 2000, organizing university outreach, talks, and support groups. Its online psychological mutual-support forum was once very active.
The Red Cross Society of China launched its Mind Sunshine Project in 2004.
The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake has been called a watershed for psychology and social work in China. Many psychological-support initiatives emerged, advancing professionalization and local development and bringing concentrated attention to voluntary work.
In 2010, after several years working on involuntary psychiatric admission, Huang Xuetao (黄雪涛) founded Hengping (衡平). The organization published China's first civil-society investigation into psychiatric admission and repeatedly submitted proposals during the development of the Mental Health Law, helping establish a dangerousness principle for involuntary hospitalization in place of the previous standard based on insight.
In 2012, with Hengping's support, the Chinese network of users and survivors of psychiatry, CNUSP, was established. It continued mutual-support work and wrote a report on experiences of psychiatry. Earlier that year, Shenzhen hosted a national gathering of people with first-hand psychiatric experience. Also in 2012, Mao Aizhen (毛爱珍) founded the Beijing Shangshan Foundation, working on depression and families who had lost their only child.
In 2014, Chen Wei (陈巍) and colleagues, who had already run support groups for several years, registered Shanghai Yujinxiang (郁今香). That year Aimi (爱咪) launched Hangzhou Yujinxiang Companionship (郁金香陪伴), which later expanded. Their names are similar, but their emphases differ.
In 2015, Zhang Jin (张进) published Duguo (渡过) and started the WeChat account of that name, later building a community. From 2018 onward, Shangshan and several grassroots anti-depression organizations jointly initiated collective action, holding thousands of activities.
From around 2018, the growth of WeChat publishing also made more online individuals and groups working on self-advocacy, mutual support, and science communication visible.
Across those twenty years, there were numerous qinlizhe gatherings, and organizations produced a flourishing variety of their own publications.
These are examples, not an exhaustive list. This work forms the field's actual foundations, yet disappears from narratives of "firsts" and "formal debuts." The past decade hasn't been a passage "from nothing" or "from invisibility." Deepening and wider circulation might be more accurate descriptions. Perhaps the author has focused only on younger people's WeChat-based work, or the particular ecology of Shanghai and nearby areas, overlooking the continuing history of mental-health gongyi.
We don't deny the handbook's distinctive and original contributions, the collective effort behind it, or the importance of systematically mapping the field, building shared understandings, and providing practical tools. We respect that effort.
Yet the frequent use of "China," "first," and "inaugural" elsewhere in the article and the team's previous work keeps positioning them at the beginning. That's puzzling.
Do these words reinforce a centralized way of writing history? Visibility has never been created by one organization. It comes from many people's sustained work. Reducing a complicated history to an organization's "first" distorts the account and concentrates symbolic power. Attention can generate noise, but noise isn't influence; being central in discourse doesn't mean depth in practice.
The designation qinlizhe seems to be finding tacit acceptance among more different groups in civil society. Civil society needs emphasis here: within the wider system of mental-health services and policy, the term is still little known, let alone recognized. Being in civil society shouldn't lead us to think it is already widely used, or even appropriated, inside and outside the system.
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
"Widely used" and "appropriated" aren't the same. Even before entering mainstream policy, a concept can be redefined, depoliticized, or institutionally rewritten in different settings. Appropriation doesn't require widespread adoption. It turns on positions of power and the transfer of interpretive authority. What matters isn't how common a word is, but who uses it and how.
"We're in civil society" doesn't mean we occupy the same position. Some can enter policy discussion, some speak within professional settings, others can express experience only at the margins. Smoothing over those differences with one "we" conceals the very distribution of power that needs discussion.
If the author works within the mental-health system, he doesn't occupy a wholly non-institutional position, whatever his personal identification with a community perspective. He also holds professional standing, institutional backing, and greater opportunities to speak. His access to authority, resources, and legitimacy differs from that of many qinlizhe and grassroots participants.
Calling qinlizhe a "designation" reduces its positions and meanings to vocabulary. This goes beyond wording: who can define experience, who holds interpretive authority, who can speak in what capacity? We have discussed this extensively in earlier work, and won't repeat it all here.
Critical Psychiatry: Politics in Mental Health
A Thousand Names for a Rose: Naming and Its Contest with Psychiatry
When Survivor Knowledge Is Co-opted: The Danger of Displaced Values and Voices
Epistemic Violence: Once You're Treated as a Mental Patient, Do Your Words Still Count?
Overseas qinlizhe communities and global mental health seem very sensitive to terminology, with a certain political and ideological colouring.
We don't want qinlizhe involvement to manufacture division, separation, or even opposition between so-called qinlizhe and non-qinlizhe, or between qinlizhe and mental-health workers, erecting an artificial wall like those Western countries have experienced and continue to experience.
Qinlizhe involvement needs to take a Chinese form. Its Western development has entirely different historical, social, and political contexts. Simply copying the Western path in China is completely unworkable.
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
The article repeatedly stresses "political" and "ideological colouring," warning against "manufacturing division" or "artificial walls." But placing a discussion of naming and participation within a framework of political risk before it begins is itself a political act.
Disputes around qinlizhe, patient, user, consumer, survivor, and lived experience don't arise from a predetermined ideology. They arise from actual experience.
When a group is repeatedly diagnosed, represented, and spoken for, people begin fighting for the right to name themselves. That's a basic social process. An analysis of concepts and power could be an intellectual and practical discussion. Describing it as a potential source of opposing camps subtly changes what kind of discussion it is.
The author repeatedly sets up a binary between Western countries and the Chinese context, placing conceptual questions within a geopolitical opposition. A discussion about knowledge positions and participation is recast as the possible replay of Western experience. Yet while criticizing "copying the West," the article promptly maps qinlizhe onto established international, Western terminology. That doesn't hold together logically.
We were emphasizing the local development of qinlizhe in China. We weren't the ones actively slotting it into existing Western conceptual frameworks. If transplanting a path is to be avoided, shouldn't the local history and practice of a concept first be respected? Why not listen to us?
And aren't the many theoretical translations and introductions the author and team have produced also from "the West"? If all conversation across contexts is simply "copying," intellectual and practical exchange becomes impossible. Waving "the West" around whenever convenient is a double standard.
The author doesn't want division or confrontation. But the divisions already exist. We're pointing them out.
"Not manufacturing opposition" sounds reasonable. Yet it assumes that relations were harmonious and consensual until "those qinlizhe, who know they don't represent every qinlizhe, said something" and created a crack.
In fact, divisions run throughout mental-health and psychiatric systems.
- Whose experience counts as "knowledge"? Whose judgement is objective and scientific? Whose feelings are weakened or dismissed as "part of the symptoms"?
- Who can define the problem? Who understands suffering as a reasonable response to social injustice, and who prioritizes understanding it as pathology and abnormality?
- Who decides whether someone is hospitalized, medicated, or assessed as "a risk"?
Our speaking isn't an attempt to manufacture opposition. It responds to locally grown practices that have long existed without adequate recognition. These practices weren't led by the literature. They developed through community interaction and sustained experience.
Some of us had never read the relevant theory, yet developed our own language through living and acting. Yes, we translated some things together. Nobody said translations must be swallowed whole. Independent prefaces, afterwords, and translator's notes are traces of critical thinking.
Our histories and contexts differ. Nobody proposes simply copying a path. The question is whether local qinlizhe are ignored, overmedicalized, labelled, or overmanaged; whether people here have been battered by mental-health systems; whether they lack room to speak.
If so, there is room for conversation with the texts we translated. In fact, we selected them precisely because we thought they could help us think about local problems.
When doctors and scholars discuss longstanding problems, they can convert the discussion into papers and symposia. When qinlizhe or grassroots participants discuss them, their first concerns are malicious misreading and the possibility of being unable to continue working. What we hadn't expected was to have labels pinned on us by an author claiming to speak from a fellow civil-society organization.
The article draws on disability practices and theory. But those achievements themselves developed through action and public argument. The Japanese practice of tojisha-kenkyu, for instance, is closely connected to disability movements in Japan and has a clearly critical orientation. It wasn't a gentle, conflict-free product.
The author says he admires Irving Kenneth Zola. Zola challenged medical elites' monopoly of discourse, understood medicalization as social control, and wrote about the language of disability, self, identity, and naming. That's exactly the kind of work we're doing. The irony is that the author dismisses our concerns about language being co-opted while admiring someone who advocated the very work we're undertaking.
To be more direct: the achievements cited aren't "neutral knowledge." They're products of deeply political histories. The "reference experiences" being invoked were built through the very disagreements, conflicts, and struggles over discourse we're being warned about.
This makes the earlier warnings about "politics" and "manufacturing division" particularly interesting. Local conceptual discussion is treated as potentially ideologically divisive, while highly political international experiences rooted in collective action are invoked to support the argument.
The implicit assumption seems to be: a concept from elsewhere can be a mature theoretical resource; a concept emerging from local practice needs scrutiny for its political implications.
Perhaps the more important questions are these: why does conceptual discussion among local practitioners so quickly become a political risk? Why does analysis of role boundaries, knowledge positions, or participation mechanisms become a possible source of division?
Closer proximity to institutional resources, professional authority, and public platforms often makes unity and order a priority. From there, discussion of unequal power can readily be misread as damage to solidarity.
Before the discussion has even begun, it's described as potentially "building walls." Critics become possible destroyers; the speaker becomes the guardian of the whole and its order. Anyone familiar with the fragile ecology of civil-society work knows that being labelled "Western" can put that work in difficulty, or stop it altogether.
The issue isn't who talks politics, but who has the power to define what is political. The author seems to occupy the position of the mature, rational party, while other practitioners' challenges are inspected for ideological implications. That inequality is itself a power structure.
Borrowing theory rooted in radical practice while blunting actual critical voices: consuming the fruits of critique and disciplining its emergence. Brilliant.
The domestic situation seems more complicated. Some qinlizhe care greatly about what they are called, while some of our qinlizhe friends think the name may not matter so much. What matters more is the core beneath it. Any name, even one originally well meant, can be stigmatized, appropriated, or given entirely different meanings and judgements. They may care more about what communities and individuals are really like, what the name refers to, and their more practical needs.
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
The discussion is reduced to sensitivity about "the name itself." The claim that any term can be stigmatized or appropriated then redirects attention to a "core" and "more practical needs." Another elegant substitution.
First, we're discussing the powers to define and interpret carried by language, not merely names. Language concerns who may name, who may define experience. Reduce this to whether names matter and its power dimension disappears. Treating us as fixated on wording misses the point.
Second, differences among qinlizhe about the importance of naming don't invalidate the discussion. Some people's priorities don't make others' concern with language excessive. Public concepts need clarification through differences, not a halt because attitudes vary.
In everyday practice, we don't turn every word into a matter of ideological principle. Work on the ground requires practical responses, and language is contextual. But when discussing an organization trying to construct a sector's story and define its framework, language isn't merely an everyday tool. It becomes public narration. Definitions have consequences and deserve attention.
Nor does "any term can be stigmatized or appropriated" imply "therefore there's no need to discuss it." Quite the opposite: that risk requires vigilance about boundaries and use. Treating risk as the end rather than the beginning of discussion is a logical leap. The author's team has itself published guidance on media reporting about mental disorders. Why did language matter then but not so much now?
Finally, setting some people's "practical needs" against others' concern with language falsely opposes them. Naming and material circumstances aren't mutually exclusive concerns. Language is part of action. Calling it an abstract distraction ignores how language shapes reality.
The article later offers the mild reassurance that "both concerns are important," apparently bringing the discussion to a balanced close. We don't think this addresses the tension. To some extent, it softens the central problem instead.
Since our missions and goals are similar, and none of us has many resources, why can't we call for more collaboration and cooperation?
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
"We all lack resources, so why not cooperate more?" sounds reasonable, but changes the premise.
It compresses different resource structures into one scarcity, as if positions differed only in degree. "Few resources" isn't an abstract quantity; it's structural. For institutionally based people, it may mean limited project funding or research time. Even then, someone with stable employment, institutional backing, and professional standing can turn action into projects, publications, and public speaking. Choosing an issue may itself attract funding and platforms. There are buffers between different risks.
For many grassroots participants and individual advocates, scarcity is a specific condition of survival: unstable income and social protection; lost jobs because of diagnostic records; years of work without credit or recognition; labour provided to institutions without appropriate payment. These aren't merely isolated cases, but differences arising from structural positions.
"Collaboration" plainly doesn't mean the same thing in these circumstances. Some can turn action into career capital; for others, action itself adds risk. Surely professionals don't need another lesson from us about the social judgements and institutional restrictions faced in daily life by someone long marked as a "severe patient"?
Organizations with more resources and authority often choose safer issues, within permitted bounds, avoiding much structural tension. Riskier questions, such as removing a psychiatric label, misdiagnosis, coercion by families, and exclusion after discharge, have long fallen mainly to grassroots participants and individual advocates. For them, this isn't an academic exercise. It's life.
When risk is so unequally borne, "collaboration" is too easy a word. If the better-resourced party continually avoids high-risk issues while demanding solidarity in principle, the appeal is hollow: all words, little substance.
And a basic point: criticism doesn't equal refusal to collaborate. Naming a problem doesn't mean rejecting everything. Discussion of structures and mechanisms is essential to genuinely sturdy collaboration. If even elementary questions count as damaging solidarity and attract the label "uncooperative," cooperation may be a one-way expectation: you may respond, but not question.
When these experiences are shared, people are often required to keep proving their logical clarity and legitimate motives. This constant self-justification is an additional burden in itself. Like this article.
Many mental-health workers within the system have first-hand experience themselves, but for various reasons cannot choose to disclose it.
We don't want qinlizhe involvement to become an identity politics of deciding who is a true qinlizhe. Anyone might be a qinlizhe; anyone might become one.
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
Concern about "identity politics" calls for some conceptual clarity. Identity politics originally describes public action grounded in particular groups' shared experiences and structural conditions: gender equality, disability rights, anti-racist movements. These appear to be issues the author and team care about. During the global public-health emergency beginning in late 2019, Chinese people abroad spoke out against discrimination on the basis of shared identity and experience. Should that too be viewed as the "identity politics" or "ideological colouring" we're repeatedly warned against? Or does an identity issue cease to be identity politics when it fits mainstream values?
Perhaps there's an implicit fear that qinlizhe identity grants moral immunity, as though identity permits people to speak or act without restraint. Reality suggests otherwise. If qinlizhe truly did whatever they pleased on the authority of identity, the mental-health landscape wouldn't look like this.
People harmed by mental-health systems aren't rare. Yet we see restraint and self-regulation, not an excess of confrontation. Many who have suffered injustice still choose collaboration, negotiation, even silence. They repeatedly lower the intensity of their speech to avoid being read as emotional or antagonistic, preserving communication so they won't be accused of "damaging solidarity." Pre-emptively treating conceptual and structural discussion as an identity-political risk underestimates their long restraint and care.
"Anyone might be a qinlizhe" sounds inclusive and universal, but is logically imprecise. It points to a possibility, while qinlizhe refers to actual situations. Possibly becoming something isn't already being in that position. Expanding possibility into a universal condition dissolves real differences and inequalities. "Anyone might become ill" doesn't erase the consequences of stigma, misdiagnosis, or institutional power. Potential isn't a substitute for experience.
Meanwhile, treating discussion of conceptual boundaries as a competition over "who is a real qinlizhe" presumes antagonism. Public concepts need some definition to mean anything. If every discussion of experiential position becomes identity competition, the concept can't be taken seriously.
Even in the disability field the author values, a social model stressing common structural conditions has always involved internal argument: how can structural commonality be emphasized without erasing concrete differences? How can abstract universality avoid covering actual inequalities? Such discussion has been understood as theoretical maturity, not manufacturing division. "Anyone might become a qinlizhe" isn't enough to end the discussion.
We needn't dispute that mental-health professionals can have undisclosed first-hand experience. Our sustained contact with professionals and those with experiential backgrounds, and hearing their institutional difficulties, has helped us understand the complexity and begin this discussion.
Without knowledge of voices inside institutions, we couldn't have written this. "Many professionals are qinlizhe but aren't public about it" raises another question: why can't they disclose? What makes these experiences something to conceal? If even professionals must hide them, that further demonstrates tension between professional identity and experiential knowledge.
Individual lives exceed simple identity divisions. We have never denied that institutions contain people with first-hand experience. But having experience and occupying an institutional position are different matters. A person can have several identities and take different roles in different settings. Discussing structures, resources, and agenda-setting isn't a moral charge against an individual, nor a claim that institutional employment is an original sin.
This is therefore a discussion of positions and power, not an attack on a group. Recognizing qinlizhe within institutions doesn't let us skip structural analysis. Structural analysis doesn't equal personal attack.
We have our shortcomings, our limits, and our vulnerabilities.
Source: Yao Hao, Xinsheng Mind (心声Mind), Life Like Water, Always Moving: Our 2025 in Mental-Health Gongyi.
Acknowledging limits requires more than verbal humility. It means awareness of one's privileged position and redistribution of resources, opportunities to publish, and agenda-setting power. Real reflection might involve sharing room to speak, acknowledging structural advantages, and addressing inequalities in practice, rather than adding an abstract "we're vulnerable too" after a grand narrative.
We aren't the only people questioning this work. Much dissatisfaction has existed without being voiced publicly. Putting questions on the table is an attempt to find clearer boundaries through public discussion, not confrontation for its own sake. If discussion is "division," is silence the only recognized way to collaborate?
An organization frequently invoking "China" and "first" should be careful about the reach of its representation. Nobody naturally represents all Chinese practice. Many local efforts aren't visible, don't necessarily want inclusion in a central story, or actively refuse greater exposure. Respecting diversity means allowing practice outside the mainstream to exist without being gathered into a single account.
Finally, vulnerability mustn't become a shield against criticism. Acknowledging it matters, especially in mental health. But when an organization emphasizes its pioneering status, importance, and landmark contributions, then retreats to "we're vulnerable and need understanding" when questioned, the switching is uncomfortable to watch.
If "vulnerability" can request understanding but can't accommodate questions or disagreement, it stops being only an expression of experience. It becomes a tool for limiting discussion.
I'm tired of writing and haven't worked out an ending. In any case, pointed as this piece is, it doesn't reject all the work of any organization or individual in mental-health gongyi. We're writing because we believe many people doing real work have grown enough to make room for more discussion, rather than swallowing every grievance in pursuit of harmony.