From: target@batstar.net
To: psysr-disc@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sat, November 27, 2010 10:03 pm
Subject: Re: [psysr-disc] Re: Two social change projects that need your support
Hi
Engaging discussion.
Some additional points/connections, Pqr.
You can access the Italian Democratic Psychiatry website
HERE. If you google and ask for an English translation, that's accessible.Basaglia became M.H. Director in Trieste in 1971. Today after 40 years of deconstructing the system by challenging "clinical gaze" with "social responsibility," forced treatment has been abolished in Trieste. The main factor besides Foucault's critique has been community organizing - not by the vapid theoretics of "social learning theory" but by the realpolitik of Gramsci's "democratic communism" approach to city government: There's a "community organizer on every block," so to speak.
In the U.S.A. things don't have the same basis in community organization, which provides us with a complexity. In the Silicon Valley, following an "educational retreat" on "trauma of treatment," where 20 client/survivors engaged 20 senior managers of the mental health system, there was a dialogue shift. Ultimately the managers reflected on the matter and quite a few of them "defected" or separated from the system, so that they could "do treatment 'right'." The website
HERE reflects the alternative "clinical gaze critique" approach some are now applying. My advocacy here is that if PsySR took an interest, the level of the internal discussion on social responsibility could be raised there - there's substantial openness for such activity today.This takes us from the Freire/Vygotsky sociohistorical critique of the behavioral system to grassroots implementation. In Trieste, the treatment purpose is not "to fix a person up so they can behave normally" but to find out about their "life project" and then support that activity. When I visit Nueva Vista today (that's Psynergy Programs, Morgan Hill, CA) I can see the people receiving services wandering around asking, "Did I fully realize the existential nature of my being by that action/behavior?" Changing the social relations of "madness work" engenders a relational approach which can brought to the level of an effective collaborative, one by which the client/survivors progressively attain operational dignity of being.
Dr. Robert Okin, psychiatrist at U.C.S.F., now preaches the "clinical gaze critique." In the late 70s, when he was M.H. Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, he engaged in a lawsuit Rogers v. Okin against choice in taking prescribed medications. Today he says (I've heard him speak twice to it) that he made a "clinical gaze error" when he challenged the advocacy of the client/survivor movement then and there. [I asked that Dr. Okin be considered as a keynote speaker at the Boston Conference, but I was told that the funds were not available.]
Best
Andrew