Siv Helen Rydheim, is an author, survivor and a former activist. Winner of a Freedom of Speech prize in Mental Health Care in 2013. Siv was also one of the Joint actions members who lobbied for medication-free treatment. Now she works as a special adviser at the Recovery Academy. Activism has been an obligation and a kind of a life mission to contribute to ending the horrors of coercion. Her way into activism were her experiences from coercive psychiatry and the forced medication in a hospital, done with mechanical restraint – not the historical straitjacket, but with a bed belt with wrist and ankle cuffs tied to the bed. She says: ‘I needed to be empowered, but they tried to rob my integrity’.