La Tarcoteca

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sábado, 19 de noviembre de 2016

"Mad Pride" - Movement That Celebrated Mental Illness

Remembering Mad Pride, The Movement That Celebrated Mental Illness | VICE | United Kingdom
MillyAbraham

A quarter people in the UK say they have suffered from a mental health problem, yet most of them are isolated from one another. Unlike other groups and demographics, there is little in the way of a mental health movement.
Imagine if there was though. A huge festival in a park – a parade, concerts, poetry readings: hundreds of clinically depressed, anxious and schizophrenic people out on the streets or squashed into bars, to protest for sure, but also just to be with one another, and take pride in mental illness.
Well between 1999 and 2012, that existed, it was called "Mad Pride", a movement that tells us a lot about how mental health campaigning came to be what it is today.
Mad Pride was founded by four men with first hand experience of using mental health services; Mark Roberts, Simon Barnett, Robert Dellar, and Pete Shaughnessy. Simon had gone to a gay pride event and thought that there should be something similar for people with mental health issues. He had been involved in an organisation called Survivors Speak Out – a blueprint for what today is called the "user movement", where mental health patients come together to network and defend their rights – but all four men believed that there needed to be a group for mental health patients that resembled something more of a liberation army.
"It seemed like the right time to fight back," explains Robert Dellar over the phone. Robert worked for the charity Mind when he got involved with Mad Pride in 1999, but had also suffered from mental health problems himself, treated on and off for depression and anxiety.

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