Activism

First Nations Ojibway activist and psychiatric abuse survivor Stella Montour of Thunder Bay Ontario, Canada talks about colonialism and racism against native people, how they affect mental health, and her work for change.

http://www.cmha-tb.on.ca

Two interviews on psychiatric abuse: Angela Bischoff’s husband Tooker Gomberg died in a suicide after taking anti-depressants; both were prominent Toronto environmental and peace activists. Wayne Lax survived 80 shock treatments and multiple hospitalizations over thirty years.

Today both Angela and Wayne are waging campaigns to reform the mental health system.

http://www.greenspiration.org
http://www.ect.org

Latin America Program Director Alison Hillman of Mental Disability Rights International talks with Will Hall in Buenos Aires Argentina about the campaign to reform the country’s brutally abusive mental health system, and the work she and Will have been doing with the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales to support the emergence of the user/survivor movement.

http://www.mdri.org
http://www.cels.org.ar

Icarus Project organizers Madigan Shive, Molly Sprengelmeyer, Will Hall, Neil Gong, and Sascha DuBrul visit Virginia Tech, site of the violent tragedy, and discuss campus mental health issues with students.

Psychiatric survivor and leading advocate Leah Harris reads her powerful poem “I Was a Teenage Mental Patient” and discusses how communities can work to prevent suicide by looking beyong mainstream approaches and rethinking our alienating school system.

Riot Grrl instigator Bonfire Madigan Shive talks about her family, the mental health system, living outside the mainstream and her creative inspiration as a visionary musician.

http://www.bonfiremadigan.com

Ed Knight, schizophrenia and homelessness survivor, has become one of the leading advocates of a recovery-based approach in mental health, and is one of the main organizers of the consumer-survivor movement.

Ed is the Steward of The Healing Circle, a Zen Peacemaker Circle, and a Senior in the Buddhist Zen Peacemaker Sangha, as well as Vice President of Recovery, Rehabilitation and Mutual Support at Valueoptions, and a mentor in the Prison Dharma Network.

http://www.professored.com

Self-injury and cutting with Ruta Mazelis, psychiatric abuse survivor and editor for 17+ years of the acclaimed newsletter “The Cutting Edge”. Cutting, burning, head banging and other self-harm are discussed from the point of view of people doing them — as coping mechanisms that need compassion and understanding, not the force and judgment of mainstream psychiatry.

Check out http://www.healingselfinjury.org

Delphine Brody is a psych survivor and advocate with the California Network of Mental Health Clients who has years of experience working for substantial policy change on the local, state, and national level.

Delphine also addresses efforts to stop forced outpatient commitment laws in California in the wake of the recent tragic murder of psychiatrist Dr. Wayne Fenton.

Leading survivor advocate Darby Penney on the exhibit created from suitcases found in the attic of the old Willard State Hospital asylum in New York, illustrating the forgotten lives of patients there.

http://www.suitcaseexhibit.org

John Judge was active in the 1970s psychiatric survivor movement and is now special assistant to Congressperson Cynthia KcKinney. John discusses MKULTRA and other US psychiatric mind control experiments, which involved torture of thousands of mental patients. Judge also looks at the Jonestown massacre, LSD, and the convergence of Nazism with the roots of biomedical psychiatry.

Ireland Activist and Poet John McCarthy, Mindfreedom International representative to the United Nations, discusses being “normally mad,” recovery, the UN Disability Convention, and challenging system abuses, in dialogue with Will Hall and co-host Oryx Cohen.

John also responds to callers, and reads a very moving poem about the death of a friend in the system. A very popular show.

Judi Chamberlin is a leading organizer with the psychiatric survivors’ movement and one of its earliest initiators. She is author of On Our Own: Patient Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System and staff with the National Empowerment Center. Show is co-hosted by Cheryl Alexander.

http://www.power2u.org

Laurie Ahern, Associate Director of Mental Disability Rights International, on advocacy efforts to end human rights abuses in psychiatric facilities in Turkey, Romania, Paraguay, Kosovo, and world-wide.

Check out their website at http://www.mdri.org

Peter Bullimore, of England’s Hearing Voices Network, on his experiences with madness diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia, including violence and extreme deterioration.

Peter discusses sexual abuse and how he worked with his voices to recover and become one of the world’s leading psychiatric survivor activists. He also tells the story of how he got the Paranoia Network of support groups started.

http://www.psychminded.co.uk/news/news2005/sept05/recoveryposition.htm