PALA: A 1970s Radical Alternative to Psychiatry

Gemma Lucy Smart

Experiencing a mental health crisis can be both frightening and liberating. While hospitals and in-patient settings can provide acute care for those in distress, they lack the rich supports that, ultimately, some folks need. Imagine a live-in house where those in crisis have the opportunity, time, and the safety they need to fully explore their experience? This is exactly what the PALA Society in Australia was inspired to create.

During the 1960s and 1970s, following the rise of anti-psychiatry and critical psychology was more American, alternatives for inpatient mental hospital-based psychiatric care became important parts of Australia’s mental health care system. Community-based mental health initiatives became a central component of the provision of mental health services in Australia, but so too were alternatives that went well beyond mainstream medical ideas of what the experience of mental distress, illness and crises meant and could be.

PALA (Positive Alternatives to Psychiatry) was a radical democratically formed and run humanistic ‘self help community’ of psychiatric survivors and activist practitioners, some of which were from The University of Sydney and UNSW (Tharunka, 1976; Allan, 1978). “Pala” is the name of the utopian society of Aldous Huxley’s “Island” and the organisation was idealistic, motivated and in a strong sense revolutionary (Tharunka, 1974).

Established in 1974, the PALA society represented a group of people who were passionate about developing alternatives to mainstream psychiatric care. They were past and present psychiatric patients (consumers), mental health professionals and students, and other interested people (Pala Society, 1974; Pala Society, nd.).

Influenced by the work of prominent anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing in Britain[1], the group’s primary aim was to set up an autonomous live-in facility that operated as a home rather than a hospital ward. Their target population was those who had experienced a “crisis-in-living” and former psychiatric patients but wished to explore their experience in a non-institutional setting (Pala Society, 1974).

The concept of asylum was central to the project. While traditionally asylums in the context of psychiatry were places of control and containment, PALA and organisations like it sought to reclaim the word’s original meaning – as a place of sanctuary, safety, and tolerance without institutional structures or medicalisation of their situation(s) (Pala Society, 1974). The idea was a radical one that echoed the political movements of the time. In an informational flyer PALA described the democratic structure of the house:

The notion of delegated authority is rejected in favour of co-operation, thus avoiding the artificial separation between people by roles, hierarchies or credentials. The community ethic is to stay in close relationship with, to try to understand and aid a person in his [sic] struggle, rather than objectify him [sic] as a safely remote “patient”. (Pala Society, nd.)

A key feature of these homes was therapeutic community. That is, they provided the option to individuals to take medications if only if and when individuals in distress actively wanted to do so. Some within PALA were focussed on therapy alternatives to medication, and others were more directly opposed. In a 1978 article in Social Alternatives, Gerard Allan describes the overarching distrust of medical approaches to psychiatric care:

Medication is strongly discouraged and we reject the traditional “quick-fix” approach of psychiatry with its near automatic use of a wide range of mind suppressant drugs. Certainly these drugs often lessen the “symptoms” and at times bring a valid relief from psychic suffering but their longterm [sic] use is counterproductive. (Allan, 1978 p. 15)

PALA’s first house opened in Glebe 1974. It ran for a year and a half, with a second house running in Rozelle for six months. Both houses closed at the same time due to funding shortages. They were volunteer run, relying on donation of time, money, goods and services to function. Pala offered refuge and support for those who had previously had past psychiatric admissions and diagnoses, but prioritised those in distress without previous psychiatric history where the alternative model could operate without complicating factors of dual care, major tranquiliser medication and shock treatments.There were a mix of these two groups of residents.

By the end of the 1970s, PALA became a mental health project initiative within the service range of Bondi Junction Community Health Centre, called the Council Street Project, located at 9 Council Street. It provided evidence-based services intersecting with PALA philosophy in a day program community. In 1980 Honi Soit described the group as looking “…seriously at current literature on alternatives to psychiatry” and advertised a number of study groups they were setting up at that location (p. 7). 

Much later a house was set up around 1982 in Waverley with government assistance. It closed sometime in the 1980s. This house was run in association with the Bondi Community Health Centre and functioned as an information hub focused on patient rights, opportunities and referrals, and the initiation of co-operative housing ventures of mental health consumers. The same year the PALA Society in Australia made a submission to the ‘Public Inquiry into Health Services for the Psychiatrically Ill and Developmentally Disabled’ (The Richmond Report) arguing that:

There is local evidence at the early stages of decarceration that inadequate community facilities exist to support people out of hospital. About one half the people who contact the mental health system do not seek further contact except in emergencies and the most common form of treatment after hospitalisation is a mixture of medication and entertainment… The prospects for change in this situation are not optimistic. (PALA Society in Australia, 1982)

While the dream of providing alternative autonomous housing for those experiencing a crisis-in-living that was based on the principles of participatory democracy, therapeutic community, and radical tolerance was not fully realised in the long-term, the PALA ideals live on in community psychiatry, critical perspectives in mental health, and peer research and activism. The Re;Minding Histories Research Group at The University of Sydney is currently exploring the history of this period with an eye to inspiring the activists of today by connecting them with the heroes of the past.  

With thanks to Trish Kenny and Hans Pols for their assistance in writing this article.

This article first appeared in Honi Soit 25 Oct 2021.

References

Allan, Gerald. "PALA: An Alternative to Psychiatric Hospitalisation and the Medical Model." Social Alternatives 1, no. 2 (1978): 14-15.

“Anti-Psychiatry” Tharunka Wednesday 4 September (1974): 5.

“PALA: A Self Help Community” Tharunka Wednesday 1 September (1976): 5.

"PALA: Is There a Madness in This Method?" Honi Soit, no. 8 (1980): 7.

Pala Society. “THE PALA SOCIETY” Informational Sheet (nd.)

Pala Society. “Submission to the Federal Government request on financial assistance to facilitate setting up a household where people in emotional crisis can go to get help and live as an alternative to mental hospitals” Prepared by the Pala Society (1974).

[1] You can watch video footage of one of R.D. Laing’s attempts to establish an autonomous house for psychiatric patients in his seminal documentary Asylum (1972). Some clips from the documentary can be found on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8-Z4clSrRM&t=22s
Cw: this footage includes people in mental distress and descriptions of violence.