Mad Pride
It was a few years ago. I was sitting having a Thai dinner with some fellow consumers. We had wrapped up our day at a mental health-themed conference in Auckland.
Conversation ebbed and flowed. We talked about the conference, about consumer-led research and the work in our own lives.
Eventually we came round to the topic of Mad Pride.
I asked my colleagues if they felt they could be proud of their diagnosed mental health conditions. They thought for a while. The agreed answer was no. I guess the conditions we had experienced were too pathologised, too stigmatised to suggest we might have anything like pride in relation to them.
But that is exactly what Mad Pride is.
Mad Pride is something of a movement. Like other “Pride” movements, it aims to limit stigmatisation of a characteristic or condition, in this case, mental illness. Mad Pride is a challenge to feel proud at being able to say “I am a consumer. I am a survivor. I am a person with needs and hopes and desires like anyone else. I am special.”
In part, Mad Pride has emerged from the consumer and survivor movement for people with mental health issues. In the eyes of advocates, we who identify as having mental health issues can be proud we survived restraint, seclusion and depersonalisation in the psychiatric system. We can be proud to have survived clinics or wards. We can be proud we have survived the darkest times in our lives, when self-harm seemed the only way out. We can be proud we survived, and still survive, with very difficult feelings and thoughts and experiences. We can be proud we have experienced certain colours on the rainbow of human experience that not everyone has seen.
Mad Pride is a call to be proud of being “mad”. The goal of Mad Pride must be to must be to limit the stigmatisation of mental ill-health by turning stigma on its head. Instead of shame, we can feel proud. We can take back words like “mad”, “schizo” and “psycho”.
I must admit, personally, Mad Pride leaves me a little torn. I do not share great antipathy towards the mental health system, and surviving it was not that great a challenge for me. I am proud, however, to have survived multiple mental health issues and to have come out relatively strong and alive. I am proud to be able to sympathise with other people who are suffering. And I am proud of what I have been able to achieve despite my occasionally unstable mental state.
If you would like more information about Mad Pride an excellent Wikipedia entry can be found here. I welcome your feedback on this issue; do you feel proud of the challenges you face and have faced?
Dr. Richard Schweizer, Policy Officer at One Door Mental Health richard.schweizer@onedoor.org.au.
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Dr Richard Schweizer