My presentation strapline (thanks to Guilaine Kinouani):
Coercion, Psychosis, Medication & Power: A personal formulation of liberation
Abstract
"I was very
fortunate to have a mother who was a homemaker, seamstress, knitter, gentlewoman,
a good listener, kind, bonnie, had a sense of humour, intelligent, financially
astute, hardworking, organised, and who lived with a Schizophrenia diagnosis
and a Depixol depot injection every 3 weeks for over 20 years until the day she
died with dignity in March 1998, aged 68, before her time.
My family
are in solidarity, 8 of us in 3 generations over 60 years (that I know of),
having experienced psychoses and coercive drug, and shock, treatment, taking
each other in and out of psychiatric hospitals because we had no other choice:
my mother and father, two younger sisters, three sons and me.
I will speak
about the pain of living, expressing pain through psychoses, being silenced by
psychiatry for feeling pain and being forced to take the medicine if resistant. The
patriarchy of psychiatry which claims to act in loco parentis, takes away
agency but fails to protect or keep safe their offspring. The infantilisation of their conscripts. Patients and staff.
I don’t
believe in mental illness after seeing my mother in the locked ward of our
local mental hospital in 1970 when I was 17.
Distressed women shut in together, including a mother who had killed her
child. I came away from visiting crying
myself. Meeting with male psychiatrists
who said I had an old head on young shoulders.
I probably told them what they wanted to hear.”
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12 January 2016: resilience: nature or nurture?
28 June 2015: my family: the solidarity of being in psychosis and surviving psychiatric treatment (no scapegoating)
