Break-through!

international | education | news report Sunday October 03, 2010 21:36 by Sean Crudden - impero Jenkinstown, Dundalk, Co Louth 0879739945

A New Paradigm?

I travelled by Malev Airlines through Budapest from Dublin Airport to Thessaloniki on Tuesday for the first assembly in 6 years of ENUSP (European Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry). A conference; workshops; an election of a new board representative of all the regions of Europe; and an open air concert in Aristotle Square, the principal civic square in Thessaloniki, on Thursday night at the end of the conference. The theme of the conference was the future for users and survivors. The motto of the concert was Stop Psychiatric Violence. I reversed my journey on Friday evening reaching Jenkinstown at 23.55.

I was the sole Irish representative at the conference although there were several representatives of Mind the British advocacy outfit and they insisted the title of their country was Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I told them I did not care what they called themselves but that I considered myself representative of all of Ireland.

There were representatives there from Czech, Latvia, Greece, Portugal, Russia, France, Italy, Spain, Georgia (home to Joseph Djugashvili), Israel, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Serbia, England, Germany, Spain. And I don't think that that is an exhaustive list. The conference took place in and around the main assembly hall of Aristotle University. The psychology department of the university took care of all the arrangements, accomodation, travel, food, entertainment.

I was impressed by the leader of the Greek delegation. Listening to simultaneous translation (by a young female student) through headphones I gather he thought that a psychiatric diagnosis wrecks one's life; the drugs are poison; psychiatry is over-rated.

At the end of the conference during the closing ceremony one of the academics referred to psychiatry as a scientific monologue. A failed paradigm built by careerists on the bodies of sensitive people.

In the public square that night a banner declaring, "Stop the psychiatric violence!" was slug across the apron of the stage dominating the city square, films of violent psychiatric intervention were blazed across an outdoor screen. A heavy wall constructed of cardboard boxes displaying the logos of all the prominent global pharmaceutical companies was unveiled. At a signal users and survivors rushed the wall, demolished it, kicked it asunder; with shouts of triumph. The music and singing was of a quality to be found no-where else in this small globe except Greece. Users and survivors danced and jived in the square for over an hour. The square is bounded on three sides by impressive buildings and on the fourth side (behind the stage) by the Aegean Sea.