On Boxing Day the West Australian reported that a man fitting the description of an escaped patient from Graylands Hospital in Perth was detained at the hospital, given antipsychotic drugs and suffered an adverse reaction which landed him in the general hospital. Click here to see the report. The return of an escaped psychiatric patient or an adverse drug reaction do not usually make the news, except that this time the authorities got the wrong man. The state’s Minister of Mental Health exp... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Thursday, December 2, 2010,
In :
Psychiatry
Twitter
delivered an announcement this week from the Royal Australian and New Zealand
College of Psychiatrists (RNZAP) proudly stating it had appointed a ‘consumer
and carer representative’ to its governing body. The Australians have the
irritating habit of tethering consumers and carers with each other in the same
way that the song proclaims, ‘love and marriage go together like horse and
carriage’. We all know ‘consumers’ and ‘carers’
are two distinct stakeholder groups whos... Continue reading ...
Many years ago, soon after I got out of the mental health
system I applied to see my hospital notes. They arrived, two inches thick,
inside some tidy brown folders.
I was shocked. I knew that the psychiatrists’ main interest
in me was my psychopathology. I knew they found me frustrating, because their
treatments didn’t work and I kept coming back. I knew they were irritated when
I questioned their expertise. But what I
don’t know until I read my notes is how little regard they had for... Continue reading ...
Western culture places a high value on freedom of the individual. We only justify the removal of freedoms when citizens transgress or are regarded as not fully human. Since the eighteenth century enlightenment, rationality has become the pinnacle of full humanity. People seen to lack rationality are easily denied full human status and full human freedoms; among them are slaves, women and mad people. There is a growing international movement to abolish special legislation allowing compulsory ... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Saturday, October 23, 2010,
In :
Peer Support
In the last two years I’ve been involved in
two reviews of peer support and peer led responses in Canada – one for Ontario (click
to download) and the other for the whole of Canada (which has yet to be
released by the Mental Health Commission of Canada).
Services run by and for ‘mad’
people have been a small but growing part of the landscape since the 1970s.
Peers have supported each other informally since they were first thrown
together into the lunatic asylums, and probably even be... Continue reading ...
Click here to find the full article.
The international mental health user/survivor movement has been around for nearly 40 years. It started as a protest movement but it has over time become more absorbed into the mental health system. The movement has created leadership opportunities in its independent activities, and the idea of leadership in one’s own recovery, but the policy of service user participation in mental health services has failed to deliver consistent participation, let alon... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Wednesday, October 6, 2010,
In :
Services
The mental health sector, like any other,
is crowded with bureaucracy, politics, standards, indicators, jargon, gossip
and other day-to-day diversions. In this atmosphere it’s difficult to
disentangle oneself enough to burrow down and explore the bedrock of beliefs the
mental health system is based upon. These beliefs drive our thoughts and feelings,
our behaviour and our systems, but we are often barely aware of them.
Occasionally I get the time to dig down
into these bedrock beliefs. I d... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Saturday, September 25, 2010,
In :
Treatments
Psychiatric drugs are controversial. There’s the good story
and the bad story. In his book ‘Anatomy of an Epidemic’, Robert Whitaker puts
it like this: ‘There is a famous optical illusion, and depending how you
look at it, you either see a beautiful young woman picture which tells of a
revolutionary advance in the treatment of mental disorders. Or you see an old
hag picture which tells of a form of care that has led to an epidemic of
disabling mental illness.’
When I used mental he... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Saturday, September 18, 2010,
In :
Employment
People with major mental distress often suffer multiple personal,
social and economic losses. Our personal loss of power and self-esteem does not so
much derive from the condition itself, but the attitudes we and others have
towards it. We may feel shame. Those around us may feel pity and fear. Our paid
helpers often reinforce these responses by pathologising our experience. Once our
personal losses have taken hold, a cascade of social and economic losses tends
to follow, such as isolation, u... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Monday, September 13, 2010,
In :
Suicide
Welcome to my first blog.
David Webb is a friend and colleague as well as a survivor of many suicide attempts. He has recently written 'Thinking About Suicide: Contemplating and comprehending the urge to die.'
The book is based loosely on David's PhD, the world's first PhD on suicide written by someone who has survived it. It is not an academic book, though David does have a cerebral approach to the issue. He writes of the absence of interest in first person accounts in the suicidology literat... Continue reading ...
Posted by Mary O Hagan on Sunday, September 12, 2010,
Regular blogs coming very soon. Continue reading ...
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