Background on Darby Penney
Darby Penney’s outspoken nature and unwavering principles made her a fierce activist for the psychiatric survivors movement. Penney brought the voices of patients and survivors to the forefront, advocating for their inclusion in psychiatric history, policy- making, and program development, all of which to that point featured the views of doctors and scientists over all else.
A psychiatric survivor herself, Penney was born in 1952 in Oceanside, N. Y. Having trained and worked as a librarian at the SUNY University at Albany in 1980, she shifted careers in 1987 and took a job at the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH). Shortly after her work there began, she married Dr. Kenneth Denberg, an English professor and widely published poet with whom she co-edited a poetry magazine called The Snail’s Pace Review.
In 1989, Penney attended a state advisory committee meeting and for the first time internalized how little say patients had in their own psychiatric care; she realized that she identified more with those patients than she did with the staff at the meeting. Seeing Penney’s drive for the cause of patient inclusion in treatment and policy, OMH created a new position for her, the Director of the Office of Recipient Affairs, in 1992. Over the next decade, Penney devoted herself to the consumer/survivor/ex-patient (C/S/X) movement, using skills she had developed as a librarian to research and collect information about controversial topics like involuntary treatment and electroconvulsive therapy to affect policy and program development within OMH. She was also active outside of her professional job, as a founding member and president of the National Association of Consumer/Survivor Mental Health Administrators (NAC/SMHA) and a board member of the National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA). In the late 1990s, she helped found the Peer Accreditation Association to help peer-led therapy groups, and she also founded the Consumer/Survivor/ Ex-Patient Oral History Project to preserve the voices of those affected by mental health issues and psychiatric institutionalization. Because of this work, she became the Director of Historical Projects at OMH, where she was a liaison to the State Archives of New York. She was contacted by Willard State Hospital in Ovid, N.Y., where more than four hundred suitcases belonging to past patients had been found in the hospital’s attic. Penney used this opportunity to showcase the lives of these patients and provide a platform for their voices in what would later become museum exhibits and the basis for her 2008 book, The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic.
Penney’s vocal activism against coercive psychiatric treatment put her at odds with the OMH, and she lost her job in 2003. Though she regretted she could not do more from within the state system, she came to terms with the fact that she and her colleagues could not fight against such a strong system that did not want to change. Outside of the system, she continued her research-intensive approach to ex-patient advocacy and became the president and executive director of Community Consortium, a nonprofit, peer-run organization to help with advocacy and representation in the mental health community. She also helped found the International Network of Treatment Alternatives for Recovery in order to help patients find alternatives to overly prescribed medications. Her museum exhibits, conference presentations, and oral history projects allowed the voices of the C/S/X community to be heard on a level never accomplished before. Penney continued her work until her death from cancer in 2021.
