3 ottob 1973 anni - Mental Patients’ Union

Descrizione:

Idea collectively coined by a splinter group of mental health patients and advocates in December 1972. A pamphlet was produced (colloquially known as the “Fish Pamphlet” due to its imagery of a fish struggling on a hook) which bore a strongly Marxist subtext.

Its primary arguments held that psychiatry was a form of social control of the working classes in a capitalist state, and that the psychiatrist was the "high priest" of technological society, exorcising the "devils" of social distress through electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), lobotomy and medication. The primary ideological thread was that, in the same way that workers formed trade unions, mental patients also needed a union to safeguard their rights against political oppression and social control.

Six were involved in setting up the union: Andrew Roberts*, Liz Durkin, Brian Douieb, Lesley Mitchell, Eric Irwin*, and Valerie Argent* (* denotes those who were mental patients at the time)

The union received an overwhelming influx of public support after an interview conducted with Andrew Roberts on Radio 4’s Today programme where he shared his contact details. (Initially, the station had reached out to Liz Durkin for the interview, being as she was a social worker, but the group declined to follow up on this unless a patient was to be interviewed) More than 100 people showed up to the group’s inaugural meeting at Paddington day hospital.

Some of their 24 demands included: the abolition of compulsory treatment, irreversible psychiatric treatment, and isolation treatment, the right for patients to have unrestricted access to their case notes, and to retain all of their personal possessions whilst hospitalised, “psychopath” as a medical or legal category to be abolished, and denying “that there is any such thing as ‘incurable’ mental illness and demand the right to investigate the circumstances of any mental hospital patient who believes he or she is being treated as incurable”

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