Talking Sense   |   Glad to be Mad   |   Messages of Support

There was all the usual debate at the Mind conference in Blackpool last November, but just one talking point. That was when a delegate stood up in a plenary session and told the 900 assembled delegates: 'I am proud to be mad. I am a mad dyke!' Proud to be mad! Had she lost her reason? Well, possibly, in the sense that the speaker has a psychiatric diagnosis; but she also happens to be a successful psychologist. For someone in her position to stand up and make that statement means that Mad Pride - the equivalent of Gay Pride for people who have suffered mental ill-health - has truly arrived. There have been Mad Pride gigs, featuring acts ranging from the veteran-punk Alternative TV to the highly regarded C&W band The Arlenes; there have been Mad Pride marches and Mad Pride demos; there is a Mad Pride website, a forthcoming Mad Pride anthology, and there are even plans for a Mad Pride Week later this year. 'The philosophy,' explains Simon Barnett, a 38-year-old former Metropolitan police officer and Mad Pride activist, 'is that the end of the 20th century has been dominated by civil rights movements; we've had the American civil rights movement in the Sixties, the women's movement, the gay rights movement. Perhaps we're the next ones to win our rights and some sort of freedom.' Mental health is a huge field, with a bewildering array of professional organisations, service providers, lobbying, policy and campaign groups. Many of them attempt to represent or incorporate the views of 'mental health services users', as the jargon has it (or 'survivors', if you prefer the more radical alternative), but very few are run by users for users. The exceptions are groups like ECT Anonymous, which campaigns on a particular issue - in this case, against the use of Electro-Convulsive Therapy, the highly controversial treatment for depression. Mad Pride is different because, above all, it wants to change the way in which society views people with mental health problems Knife-wielding loners who jump into lions' dens, 'danger patients' set loose on society like 'bombs waiting to explode', 'lepers' who cannot live safely and sanely among the rest of us, these are the headlines that are driving Mad Pride activists mad. So, using a classic civil rights tactic to combat these misleading stereotypes, Mad Pride takes the label with a negative value ('mad') and reappropriates it. 'Glad to be Mad' is its slogan.
Using A classic civil rights tactic, Mad Pride takes the label with a negative value (`mad') and reappropriates it.  `Glad to be Mad' is its slogan.
Mad Pride is the sister organisation - 'the entertainment wing,' says Barnett - of the more political Reclaim Bedlam movement, Reclaim Bedlam began in l 997 when the Royal Bethlem and Maudsley Hospitals decided to celebrate their 750th anniversary. The original 'Bedlam' asylum was founded in l 247 on the site of Liverpool Street Station. It later occupied the building which currently houses the Imperial War Museum, before moving to sites in Camberwell and Beckenham. 'I was involved in the Maudsley at the time,' recalls Pete Shaughnessy, a leading survivor activist. 'They came and talked to us, as an afterthought, and said we'll have a "Users' Day" on the third day. I thought that was really token, that we were tacked on at the end of this really naff event. And then they said we're having a Thanksgiving Service at St Paul's, and I think that's probably when I snapped. We called that a Commemoration, for the people who have died and the sadness they've lived in.' Severe mental illness is relatively uncommon: about one in l00 people, for instance, suffers from schizophrenia. But for the occurrence of more common mental health problems such as depression or anxiety, the aggregate figures vary from one in six (Department of Health) to one in four (Mental Health Foundation). Shaughnessy's personal story is typical in that it shows how mental ill-health can affect anyone.
He used to work as a bus driver on the number 36 bus out of Peckham Garage. Following a vicious assault by two passengers in l992, when he went to the aid of his conductor, he was forced to take time off work and became depressed. When he went back to work early on the advice of his GP, Shaughnessy was criticised by his trade union - which then, just a few months later, advised him to take a wage cut and work longer hours because of privatisation. 'I went bananas,' he says. He staged a brief solo hunger strike outside the garage, and then decided to quit and go travelling. But the stress had taken its toll, and in Ireland Shaughnessy found himself admitted to hospital with the first of what have become periodic episodes of psychosis. Now 37, he takes several drugs to treat his manic depression and occasionally admits himself to hospital. He lives on disability benefit, writing articles and doing voluntary work when he feels well. He is also an extremely articulate survivor advocate. 'I think the stigma attached to mental health is as powerful as racism or as powerful as sexism,' he argues. 'It's just as powerful but it doesn't get talked about.' He points to how few celebrities are upfront about mental ill-health. Paul Merton, who has been an in- patient at the Maudsley, and Denise Welch, who plays Natalie Barnes in Coronation Street and has talked openly about her postnatal depression, are two notable exceptions. Like Barnett, Shaughnessy has been closely involved in Reclaim Bedlam's activities. The first events were counter-demonstrations to Bedlam's anniversary celebrations: a rally and march from the Imperial War Museum to the Maudsley in Camberwell; and a picket of the service at St Paul's, which involved a minute's silence on the steps outside. But Reclaim Bedlam has gone beyond disputing whether Britain's oldest psychiatric institution actually has a history of humane care worth celebrating. What activists are exercised about now is the Government's proposed new Mental Health Act, of which the consultative 'Green Paper' stage ends in late March. The advent of asylum closures and community care has resulted in many mental health services moving into the community and there is a widespread consensus that a new statute is required to take account of these changes. But the emphasis of the new legislation is neither on care nor non-discrimination, but on 'risk management' and 'public safety'. In other words, the Government is responding primarily to a media-inspired, populist agenda which says it's community care that has placed all those axe-wielding loonies on our streets.
'All the language is in terms of risk and safety,' says Joanna Moncrieff, a psychiatrist at the Charing Cross Hospital and a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network. 'It really should be called a Public Safety and Disorder Bill. I feel this is extremely hypocritical.' Not surprisingly, London has more than its fair share of madness. Psychiatric disorder closely tracks social deprivation: the 1998 King's Fund survey, London's Mental Health, noted that the capital's poorer boroughs - Hackney, Islington, Lambeth, Newham, Southwark and Tower Hamlets - have some of the worst rates of poverty, unemployment and homelessness in the country. Combined with the effect of large numbers of refugees (who generally have higher rates of mental distress), a younger, more transient population (the same), a greater proportion of people living alone (ditto) and even London's numerous railway stations (rates of mental ill-health rise in the vicinity of a rail terminus) - it all adds up to a high demand for mental health services. The public perception is certainly that there are more seriously deranged people out there, threatening mayhem and mischief. The rare tragic cases, such as the l992 killing of Jonathan Zito by Christopher Clunis, a schizophrenic, have provided graphic 'evidence' for this anxiety. 'What we're concerned about is the backlash against people with mental health problems,' explains Mind's spokesperson Sue Baker, 'that has come as a result of an awful lot of negative media coverage about community care and people with mental health s problems - and which has fuelled the myth that they are more violent than others, when that's simply not true.' The truth is, paradoxically, the opposite of public perception.   An article in the British Journal of Psychiatry last year demonstrated t conclusively, using the Home Office's own statistics, that the proportion of homicides committed by people with a mental disorder  (at most, ten per cent of all homicides in any case) has declined  year on year, not only since the advent of community care, but ever since the late Fifties when asylum populations were at their peak. The schizophrenic, in particular, has become a kind of modern bogeyman from whom we need to be protected. 'We all felt that to put public safety first was an unfortunate way round,' says Genevra Richardson, Professor of Law at Queen Nary c and Westfield College, who chaired the Expert Committee which reviewed the 1983 Mental Health Act prior to the current Green Paper. 'The answer really was to establish proper accessible mental health services.' `Our underlying principle was that of non-discrimination on the grounds of mental health,' she goes on. 'And that has just gone out of the window - it's nowhere in the Government's response; it's nowhere in the Green Paper.' The biggest bone of contention in the new legislation is the proposal for Compulsory Treatment Orders (CTOs), by which people with mental health problems who are not considered to be a sufficient threat either to themselves or anyone else to be admitted to hospital, may nevertheless be compelled to take their medication. 'This is quite a worrying development,' says Mark Roberts, a former musician and market researcher who suffered several bouts of severe depression in the Eighties. Now in his late forties, he works for Greater London Action on Disability on a mental health users' project. 'With the closure of the asylums, there aren't the places for people to go on a voluntary basis, so the Government thinks people ought to be treated at home and forced to take medication, and that's the heart of the Compulsory Treatment Order.' The former minister for mental health, Paul Boateng, insisted that there would be no question of injections being administered 'over the kitchen sink', but it remains unclear what arrangements the Government has in mind for making people take their medicine. Mind has published a joint statement with I 8 other organisations, from the Community Psychiatric Nurses Association to the Law Society, objecting to CTOs. But the director of SANE (Schizophrenia - A National Emergency), Marjorie Wallace, has taken a public stand as an apologist for the proposals. This made her the target in March last year for a Reclaim Bedlam demo. Around 200 people gathered to protest noisily outside SANE's offices, while a 'patient' was given an injection over a kitchen table with a six-foot-long simulation of a syringe. 'I suppose what attracts me to some of the Mad Pride initiatives,' says Rachel Perkins, 'and I'm not the going-on-the-streets-demonstrating sort of per-son - is that I certainly believe we need to challenge the stereotypes people have.' An engaging, energetic woman in her early forties, with a blonde ponytail and large glasses, Dr Perkins works as a clinical director at the Springfield Hospital in Balham. She is also a manic depressive. 'What concerns me is that the whole agenda around mental health is driven by issues of violence, vulnerability, containment, support - really presenting an incredibly negative picture of the possibilities of life with a mental health problem. My concern is to change that agenda, and look at the contribution that people with mental health problems can and do make to our community.' But before Mad Pride Week in July, where might we see Reclaim Bedlam's antics next? One proposal is for a mass lobby of Parliament on 29th March, the last day for consultation under the Green Paper.  'It's a bit boring,' concedes Pete Shaughnessy, 'but maybe a good " idea.' But there is one rather mad idea as well: 'We thought we might give Winston Churchill [the statue in Parliament Square] a compulsory injection - he was a manic depressive, you know -  just to show people that if it can happen to Winston, it can happen to you.' Matt Seaton - Evening Standard Magazine - Friday 17th March - 2000