Toronto Mad Pride Week, designed to educate, raise awareness, diminish isolation and diffuse the power of the stigma of mental illness.
psychiatric survivor
Surviving the psychiatric complex
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People with mental illnesses are often forced into the Canadian psychiatric complex, whether through inpatient detainment, prescription of drugs or other ways. Mad movements in Canada mirror much of the same principles as the disability rights movement, by using mental illnesses as a source of pride and an identity.
Though there is nothing wrong with voluntarily seeking counselling or drug treatments, when these are interventions taken on behalf of people's well being by the system things become problematic. Often the rights of people in the psychiatric complex are trampled, they are manipulated and coerced.
.jpg "Jesse McLaren is a physician, activist and blogger, who like Virchow believes that if medicine is to accomplish its great task, it must intervene in political and social life. He blogs at yourheartsontheleft.blogspot.com, and tweets @HeartsOnTheLeft.")
Nameless and homeless: Affordable housing -- if not now, when?
Remember their names:
Eugene Upper
Erwin Anderson
Mirsalah Aldin-Kompani
and hundreds more who died
on Toronto streets since '97
- From Nameless-Homeless, an unpublished rant in progress
Here's the grim context. Today, it's widely acknowledged that the "deinstitutionalization" of psychiatric survivors has been a total failure and fraud; it was from the very start. Why? Because of government incompetence and negligence, poor urban planning, and public indifference to "discharged" psychiatric survivors and other poor, marginalized and stigmatized people in our communities.
