Mental illness

Actually, Chris, I think your hypothesis is total bollocks. Just my opinion.

Peace & love

Hi thaw

You're probably right, I am learning a lot about neuropharmacology though.

The more I think about it, the more bollocks it seems. I'll leave it.

Love

Chris

Chris, You are offering some pretty complex and challenging ideas. Myself, I'm suspicious of most neurological and genitic theories. Yes, they do play a part but then so does the weather, food and pollution. I am much more inclined to look at people as social animals. Much more interested in how human conditions are entries into already moving streams of consciousness, i.e., depression has used the same metaphors for centuries.

I'm a follower of Mikhail Bakhtin in both psychiatry and Anarchism. My book, "Language for those who have Nothing" (Kluwer 2000), argued that psychiatry is too big an institution to take-on at face value. I found that my questions were in the same "voice" as the answers. Thus, I attempted to approach psychiatry from acts of cunning and mischievous disguise. It was research that shook me up for years! I just stopped believing in it as a science. I still work with people with mental health problems. I just do it differently now.

It's good to see unorthodox ideas posted.

Peter Good (of The Cunningham Amendment)

It also kind of suggests that only stupid people are in charge of the world - an underestimation I think.

I just wondered if anybody on this site was interested in the ideas of Mosher Soteria? I attended a Soteria Network conference in Birmingham at the weekend, and have now become a part of the Network.

Their next meeting will be held in Burnley, Lancashire, on 26th October at 1.30pm, however the venue has not been sorted yet. Anyone with any interest in the subject is welcome to come along.

http://www.moshersoteria.com/

sorry pushka but i went on the amazon sight to look at one of the books and underneath it says

Customers interested in Soteria: Through Madness To Deliverance may also be interested in

Punk Socks

Your online source for old school striped punk socks

www.skatersocks.com

what??

Hi Lucy82

(Hey, did you just edit the post this next bit is replying to?)

I'm thinking it’s more of a tendency rather than an absolute rule. Maybe it's more pronounced in males, like, say, Asperger’s or something?

Perhaps the self psychotherapy you get by having such excellent politics, Lucy82, makes you immune to the effect.

Grumpy old man syndrome, midlife crises, narrow mindedness, inexplicable depression, belligerence and loneliness, selling out, a crushing sense of duty. I’m just exploring the connections between them for the fun of finding out about the species.

Peace and Love

Chris

LOL

I did, Lazyriser. sorry about that

writing posts and then editing them to mean something else in the heartbeat it takes for someone to respond is a kind of psychogeographical exercise, a playful, inventive strategy for exploring predictable paths and jolting those who reply into a new awareness of the forum landscape (to shamelessly paraphrase wikipedia).

or maybe i just got bored with my own words and decided to have some new ones

It is always worth remembering there are lot of people who work in mental health who are totally moral people despite the negative repercussions of a state owned health system. All coercive sate systems whether it is the army, the police or anything else have good people in them. They also have the opposite and the opposite is made inevitable and more likely to occur because of the hierarchy.
In an anarchist system there would need to be people who deal with mental health, crime and there would definitely be forms of voluntary defence. The difference between the system we have now and a potential libertarian socialist one is that coercion would cease or at least be very rare. All of our institutions would be voluntary and equalised.

I qualified as a psychiaric nurse back in the late 7o's. I still work in mental health today. I 've always been, well since the early 70's a socialist, and since the late seventies an anarchist. At times it has been very hard working in a generally authoritarian regeime. It has always been my self-appointed task to take the corner of the 'service-user' and to encourage co-workers to do likewise, and to get involved with the user-movement. There is, like Ted says, a lot of good people working in the system. Anyway, going back to the original question about libertarian medics etc - I would always recommend to anyone in the system to read Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist - on race, culture and imperialism. Another medic is psychiatrist, sexologist and gerontologist Dr Alex Comfort.

I think a cental issue has been overlooked here that deserves comment. The Sozialistische Patientenkollektiv (Heidelberg, Germany) was a seminal organisation of nutters. Talk about one bite of the cherry and cracking the stone and their teeth. Just to give you a touch of them a good publication: Make a weapon out of illness introduction by Jean Paul Sartre. When I had more brain cells and the SPK was still running about a decade ago I was going to write a dissertation on what they were up to. Never came to fruition. Perhaps for the best as conspiricists have since pointed out to me that they were more than likely an American military experiment in thought control. Some links for the interested.

Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre to SPK - Turn Illness into a Weapon
Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv
Talk about theory and praxis

The idea of a revolutionary vanguard (whether of those who are most opressed in society - the mentally ill - or others) should obviously strike the readers of libcom as false.