From: "Andrew Phelps" <starfish@northcoast.com>

To: <s-acc@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: [s-acc] human rights advocacy

Date: Sat 02/26/11 03:41 PM

This is a follow-up on the "human rights advocacy" which I believe we should assert in making the coalition agreement with PsySR for a New Social Roles project. Our listserv description speaks to

Some obvious concerns obtain, and others may also arise.

1.   There are PsySR members who are psychologist/clinicians with lived experience as client/survivors. That is an advocacy of merit, but it challenges the "sensitively" criterion. We will be happy to support the development of a "first wave" advocacy for these people, but that project is a separate project and should not be at center for the NSR dialogue process. There are a number of people on the S-ACC list with this background, and we are pleased to have them here. They are trusted to abide by the "sensitively" criterion on an individual basis - they do, generally speaking - and they make valuable contributions.

2.   There is a rhetoric of human rights advocacy ("our voicing") where our habits of being need to be engaged respectfully. In Wisconsin today, the labor movement is being told they "can't bargain." That promotes the "irrational behavior" of demonstrations and the opposition legislators leaving the state. PsySR has taken up that human rights cause with a strong positive advocacy. We must assert that our advocacy also deserves respect, and that we will so insist. Perspectives like attitude management to control our "madness" and adversarial legalism which gives virtue to negative practices of abuse are not on the table for the "reconciliation" aspect of this NSR project. We have to be able to stand on our advocacy that we "network on the basis of mutual respect" - and explain thus here, directly and with kindness.

   In addition, there is the matter of individuals involved with the Work Group who are personally entangled with these disrespectful dynamisms (myself included). We need to assert that we will respect - and network with - such individual struggles for social justice, even though they can't become the focus of our advocacy. In other words, like the psychologist/clinicians above who have a struggle of merit that needs support, so do the client/survivors have "separate project" needs which are diversionary to the thrust of S-ACC but which fully merit our notice and our engagement at an appropriate distance.

3.   We are engaged in an advocacy for truth in the area of "madness." That transcends "first wave" concerns of our movement for challenging the Big Pharma dominated treatment fashion of psychiatry and for accommodating the "abuse polity" that the New Freedom Commission advocacy stereotypically represents. I've put that in terms of the need (matching in reverse order) for "dharma work" and for the CGIS critical experience work. While we don't need to spell that out here, still we do need an upgrade to the (overly succinct) phrase that the NSR project should "meet the social accountability standard of the Work Group."

Acknowledgement by the program coordinators of our signing statement should suffice - there's no need for "version 20."

Overall, this turn of events looks positive and hopeful to me. Here's hoping we can get the NSR project underway very soon now!