Care Workers And Disabled Activists: Better Together

There is a really interesting new international initiative coming out of Canada but with a strong presence in the UK that seeks to bring care-workers and "service users" together as equal partners in opposing austerity...

I've forgotten the name off the top of my head but I'll have a look next week and get back to you.

Thanks for starting this thread, Diddy.

Out of curiosity, are you familiar with Black Triangle? They're a group of disabled activists with a presence in the North West.

I can see why this could be beneficial, but especially in the case of mental health, I think it's more worth while to work with other service users because it's hard to trust psychiatrists.

This is just an anecdote, but I think it says something about care worker and service user cooperation.

So last week I had a vist from my mental health care worker. During that visit she said some fairly unpleasant, run of the mill racist, stuff about travellers. Now, any friend or almost anyone else I would have called them out on that quick as fuck. But in this case I tried to change the subject as fast as possible. And that's because she has huge amounts of power over me. I need her to give me references to voluntary organisations, benefits offices and so on just so I can participate in society/live.

And that, to me, is the problematic in the service user-service worker colaberation project. In theory, it really ought to work. But I'm constantly scared when talking to mental health workers that saying the wrong thing will make them fuck me over. For example, I've told mental health workers I don't really care about strikes because I didn't know what they though and wanted to make sure they didn't screw me over for having the 'wrong' opinion.

Yes, mental health workers share the interests of service users in many, many ways, but also, they have a huge amount of arbitrary, fucked up power over us. And at this point in time I am not willing to co-operate with anyone who has that much power over me that they can use on a whim.

That may be my mistrust and cowardice talking, but, fuck it, I've been threatened with sectioning, I fucking need to to be able to pass a CRB check for most of the jobs I want to apply for and I can't be having with the possibility half the people in the room can ruin my life with one form. So I won't be organising with mental health workers. I'll turn up to their pickets (already have), but I'll not be in a decision making place with them. They have too much power over me for that to be at all meaningfull.

That sounds like interesting stuff you've got going on DD. Do keep us informed.

RedEd, that was a really interesting post. Thanks for sharing it with us.

It's not that I don't trust psychiatrists as people, I just mean that in the experience of many service users it's difficult to be open with them, as RedEd's post demonstrated. I didn't mean they can't be trusted in the sense they'll do something terrible just that a certain level of trust might be needed for service users to organise and that the power dynamic in psychiatry isn't really conducive to that. That's my experience of mental health services at least but I think there's also good reasons why this is the case.

The problem as I see it, is that when your using mental health services you're officially the insane one and the person dealing with you is officially the sane one (at least in the sense that, irrespective of their own mental health problems, their job is to be the sane one in your interactions). So although things go fine as long as you agree with them or you defer to their officially healthy mind, as soon as there is a clear difference in opinion, yours is automatically less valid. Obviously doctors in general will think they know better than you about your illness even if you've just got a cold, but at least when you go to you GP with a cold it's just the fact that they've studied these things that makes their opinion worth more, and not additionally the fact that they think you having a cold directly impacts your ability to understand your cold, to decide what medicine to take for it, or to establish whether or not it's gone, not to mention the validity of your views on everything else from current events to what you're doing with your life.

I used to be involved in a group called the radical mental health group. It was just for mental health service users (or would-be service users who avoided using services). Interests varied from wanting to take collective action against psychiatry, to developing alternatives to mental health services like co-counselling, to just ranting to each other about what kinds of shit we were having to put up with. We also had a reading group for Foucault's History of Madness which kind of came out of the group. Although I can see that when fighting austerity measures it might be a bit different, I think most of us really wouldn't have felt comfortable in a group where psychiatrists were welcome as psychiatrists. Psychiatrists who are also service users, no problem. But not ones who are there in their official capacity as sane person. If we were going to try and work together against austerity then I'd rather it was as separate groups which co-ordinated activity.