What a wild week I've had here in the Coming Out Crazy cranny.
We made it onto several American blogs. Have a look at the fiery comment thread on my last post about Mad Pride Day. Some exciting, dramatic and intense emotions were flying fast, back and forth, from people on both sides of the Great Divide.
This is great. Just what a blog should stir up. Reaction. Emotion. Anger. Disagreement. Controversy.
All about Mad Pride.
So, let’s reflect.
Mad Pride fights oppression. Like Black Pride that evolved from the history of Black oppression and Gay Pride that fights discrimination against Gays and Lesbians.
Women have been and still are oppressed, so International Women’s Day on March 7 is an international holiday – and a day off in many countries – to celebrate women and recognize the history of the oppression and maltreatment of women, particularly in the labour force.
“Pride” movements are social-change movements and Mad Pride is no different. It’s a Human Rights crusade.
Mad Pride has a political agenda not universally accepted and hotly political.
If you believe the biomedical approach to “mental illnesses” – that they are lifelong, incurable conditions like diabetes, “brain diseases,” that must be diagnosed, managed and treated with medications and other therapies, Mad Pride will seem odd, perhaps trivializing.
In July 2007, Respectives, McMaster University’s Human Rights and Equity Services Newsletter devoted a whole issue to Mad Pride.
Worth reading. It refers to “so-called mental illness.” A philosophical issue. As yet, there is no scientific evidence that proves mental illnesses exist organically, in the brain, as “chemical imbalances.”
There are still a lot of assumptions widely considered to be truths. They have to be questioned.
Positron emission tomography or PET scans can show some differences in the brains of people with schizophrenia diagnoses, but Pet scans are not yet used for diagnostic tools.
Furthermore, "difference" doesn’t necessarily mean "disease."
Many people question the existence of schizophrenia as a “mental illness.” Between 30% and 50% of people with schizophrenia diagnoses get better with no medical intervention at all.
The World Health Organization did two very conclusive studies comparing schizophrenia recovery rates between developing and developed countries. Recovery rates in the developing countries were 50% higher than the developed countries.
Mad Pride may date back to the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1950s and 1960s when psychiatric patients often were subjected to cruel, inhumane treatments.
• Electroconvulsive “Shock” Therapy
• The earliest “typical” anti-psychotic drugs replaced lobotomy – Thorazine or Chlorpromazine were called chemical lobotomies and they were utterly dehumanizing, turning people into zombies and they had serious, sometimes irreversible side effects.
• Involuntary hospitalization and treatment
• Physical restraints
I lived through all of these “treatments” in the mid-1960s. Unfortunately, I remember them, though I wish I could forget. I can empathize, though I’m more critical of psychiatry than anti-psychiatry.
Mad Pride Day is on July 14, Bastille Day.
Relevant because two of the seven prisoners freed by the crowd of French peasants in 1789 had been detained solely because they were considered ‘mad’.
Last year, Toronto Mayor David Miller officially proclaimed July 14 “Mad Pride Day” and a week of activities around it winds up this year’s events this weekend.
Tomorrow, the 2nd Annual Mad Pride Bed Push and Parade begins at 1 p.m. at the Ossington and Queen entrance of Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
On Sunday, a workshop and discussion about Mad Pride takes place from 1 to 3 p.m. in Room 560 at the Sally Horsfall Eaton Building at 99 Gerrard St. E.
Mad Pride is all about social-change and empowerment. It's for the public and for people who've been hurt by the mental health system.
It’s gone global since it started in the 1990s in the U.K.
Mad Pride fights fear and ignorance with public education. It raises awareness through serious and witty, often theatrical, creative events that celebrate the people who have been oppressed by a mental health system that was not always humanistic.
Mental hospitals or institutions were historically run more like prisons than places promoting recovery and well-being. Remnants of that prison model still exist today, though they’re slowly disappearing. In many psych wards, you have to earn a pass to leave with good behaviour. I remember having my clothes locked up.
Mad Pride is against psychiatric labelling, which works well for doctors but can destroy a person’s sense of self, his or her feelings of uniqueness.
Labelling can promote denial – toxic when it comes to mental health and wellness. And Recovery.
To be continued...
Hello Sandy,
First, a correction for IWD (International Woman's Day) is March 8 - not March 7. I know this because that is also the day my father committed suicide. The day of his death is also when I learned about IWD.
Then, a comment about treatment in the 70s and 80s for children who 'just can't stop crying' - a sign of mental instability that people did not want to explore too deeply.
For as long as I could remember, sexual abuse had been part of daily life, so going to school where sexual abuse wasn't happening was a shock. I can remember waiting for the other shoe to drop, and at school, it never did.
People in shock often break down and cry. Being too young to understand the situation (grade 2), and not having the words to describe why I was crying, I was left to sit at my desk, crying day after day. A few years later, I was sent to hospital for two weeks of testing. The doctors found nothing wrong with me, so part of their solution was that if I were to start crying, just shock me out of it with either a slap in the face or a splash of cold water.
I was later told I had depression, and having looked that word up in the dictionary, I knew I wasn't depressed. My will to live was just as strong as my conviction that something was wrong.
It took years to find the words to describe the abuse, by which time both parents had died.
Speaking the words is still not possible, so writing stories and poems (some were published in "Stress (Full) Sister (Hood)" in 2001), and a play that was performed at Thorneloe Theatre, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario is the way I chose to express my feelings and emotions, which range from rage through anger and frustration to disappointment and disillusionment.
Madness comes in many colours as a coping mechanism when facing horrible circumstances. Madness is also something from which we can walk away with support from friends, and without medication.
Posted by: Sonia | July 19, 2008 at 03:26 PM
Hi Sonia,
How embarrassing. And I teach Women's Studies!
I confused the date of International Women's Day with another monumental date – the day my sister, Glorianne, saved my life by donating a kidney. On March 7, 1994, I had my transplant.
My kidney disease was iatrogenic. Treatment caused. The treatment? Lithium carbonate. A psychiatrist neglected to monitor my Lithium levels carefully enough. As a result, after 16 years on this drug, I almost died of acute endstage kidney failure. The transplant gave me back my life after more than two years on dialysis – lifesaving but no way to live.
More importantly, you are absolutely right when you say one can walk away from madness with support from friends, and without medication. You can. Madness is relative, different for everyone.
We each have our own madness, whether diagnosed, labelled or not.
I am unwilling at this time to risk going off my medication. I wish I could, but I can't. "Them's the breaks!" For now.
We all deal with madness in different ways, hopefully effective ways. At the same time, all of us cannot to talk or verbalize the inner murmurings our of souls, minds and hearts. Or our nightmares, either. I can, but it's a long process, peeling the layers of the onion.
Others draw or dance or write, as you powerfully do, or seek other means that may or may not be healthy. Everyone finds their own way. Or not. No one said madness was easy.
We are always evolving, if we allow ourselves to grow and learn and change.
In your courage and candour, here, you reflect several sequences from the kaleidoscope that was your madness. You have left it behind. Mine, because of the kidney disease, will always be part of my life. Three times a day, I must take pills to prevent my kidney from rejecting. Every time I swallow those pills, I remember why I lost my kidney in the first place. My manic depression diagnosis, as it was known, back then. Can never make a clean break from that, I'm afraid.
Writing is one of your gifts.
Thank you, for so intimately sharing your insights and your wisdom here!
Posted by: Sandy Naiman | July 19, 2008 at 08:01 PM