Youth

Community organizer and writer Michael Gennarelli talks about his 8 years of psychiatric treatment as a child and his stays at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. Michael reads his poetry about these painful experiences and discusses his activism, including an after school program for kids and the Misled Youth Network.

http://www.misled-youth.org
http://www.123communityspace.org
http://www.fountainhouse.org
http://www.theicarusproject.net

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.

17 year old Sonia Peterson speaks with great insight about being locked up and forced to take drugs at age 12 and living with a bipolar diagnosis. Plus a short documentaty produced by Darbey Penney and Peter Stastny on Nazi killings of psychiatric patients, and an interview with original Freedom Center leading organizer Vikki Gilbert.

Activist Carey Lamprecht on her experiences as a staffperson in high security locked facilities with violent children and adolescents, and her creation of successful alternatives to restraints and coercion, alternatives that were blocked by facility administrators. Carey is herself a psych survivor with a bipolar diagnosis.