“A Statement from the Psychiatrized”

*This “Statement from the Psychiatrized” was written and read by Yves-Luc Conreur of the Belgian G.I.A. (Group of Information on Asylums) in 1977 at the large conference on psychiatry held in Trieste, Italy, the most advanced laboratory of the Democratic Psychiatry movement. This short statement has become something I’ve returned to over and over, because it manages to make one of the most coherent statements on madness and labor I’ve ever encountered and it does so in a single page. Much of it is still provocative and fresh, like the dual rejection of the false choice between mysticism and the theme of “madness as liberation” on the one hand and being passive objects of enlightened beneficence on the other. I intend to publish a longer article by Anne Lovell that details what happened at that conference soon. But a few quotes will give you an idea of what it was about: ‘Over four thousand people poured onto the grounds of the San Giovanni psychiatric hospital in Trieste, Italy, in September for the third conference of the International Network: Alternatives to Psychiatry. They came from as far away as Tunisia, Mexico and Canada, to exchange experiences in the struggle against psychiatric oppression. The participants included four basic groups of people: mental health workers (psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, social workers, volunteers, interns); patients and ex-patients; persons indirectly involved with psychiatry and/or total institutions (elected officials, lawyers, architects, journalists, social researchers, etc.); and those who could be characterized generally as “movement” people.’

Here is how she described the contribution of Conreur and the G.I.A., which I’ve reproduced below: ‘Some workshops were planned at the last minute by participants themselves. A meeting on Repression was the outcome of the first day’s protests. The patients/ex-patients (“Psychiatrized”) meeting, which paralleled the conference, was organized by a Belgian group which put signs up in the mental health centers of Trieste, inviting all patients. Yves-Luc Conreur, a Belgian man who has been locked up four times, challenged the Network to: “Tell us what your conception of the world, of life, is. Only knowing your answer can we tell if you can help us or we can help you. Only knowing your alternative can we avoid being tricked, because the truth is not a liberating program. There will always be an alternative to the alternative.” Many of the ex-patients explicitly rejected madness-as-liberation, mysticism, magical and quasi-religious practices for a political involvement: “Suffering should not be seen as a painful fact, a tragedy, but as the direct expression of a political struggle...We don’t want concentration camps to exist under a banner of freedom.”’ It was translated from French by Mark Seem and was originally published in the Winter 1977 issue of The Radical Therapist (volume 6, number 2). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down any photos from the conference, so the featured image is Ornette Coleman playing to patients in Trieste in 1974, which he said was the “freest performance” of his life after a patient spontaneously came up on stage and jammed along with a harmonica for over 40 minutes. I intend to write something about this performance at some point. -Sasha

“A Statement from the Psychiatrized”

We cannot share common ground with people who openly declare that the psychiatrized are too uncultured or apolitical to liberate themselves, that they must be liberated from above by big or small bourgeois philanthropists. This conception of liberation results in a tragic failure, because it necessarily degenerates into a vulgar strategy on the part of our “supposed liberators” of taking control, rather than leading to a subversion of the relationships of control and domination.

For us, it is not a question of reappropriating a world that has foundered in the self-negation of rationality, a world whose that is forced to lengthen the list of what it deems reasonable in order to survive. What we must grasp is that where a complete transformation of society is at issue, it is essential that the masses themselves, and in the case of psychiatry the mass of psychiatrized, already realize what is involved in this struggle and why they must intervene with their bodies and their lives.

We, a group of psychiatrized, do not claim to exercise a monopoly over “what is to be done.” We owe our importance and our force to the fact that we have victoriously opened a path that was unimaginable until now, thereby freeing us from a desperate situation. We do not intend to act in the place of anyone, but to demonstrate concretely to certain people that the real field of possibilities is greater than it might have seemed. We reject magical forms of conduct, we reject artificial and voluntary misery, mysticism, suicide and madness as forms of liberation. 

We reject the demand by certain psychiatrized people to be exploited like everyone else. It is not a matter of having more rights in hospitals but of destroying the asylum and the logic of the asylum which has spread throughout our society. Hence we must struggle. Whoever does not struggle dies, and whoever does not die is buried alive, in prisons, in rehabilitation centers, in kindergartens and overpopulated schools, in psychiatric hostels and hospitals.

But in order to struggle, in order to give birth to the force necessary to struggle, we must participate personally in the political struggle that leads to the transformation of reality; for that is the only way of discovering the mechanisms of oppression. And once we have understood that the repression is growing in all domains, prisons, class forms of justice, the rhythms of factory life, buying on credit, suburban life, the ghettos of immigrant workers, etc, we can no longer fortify our position behind the fetish of legality. It must be realized that legality is a fetish, because one can legally plug in listening devices, open mail, interrogate neighbors, investigate the lives of anyone, watch her/him, put her/him legally into a hospital to control and destroy her/his mental universe. 

We must quit thinking of ways to prevent day-to-day fascism. The problem is not to prevent it but to conquer it. The situation cannot be appraised according to the criteria of sociologists. A large part of what takes place in our respective countries needs to be analyzed no longer. We must destroy the fatal structures of radical consciousness because this consciousness makes us consent to our own repression. If we are talking about alternatives, about alternatives to psychiatry, only immediate practices and experiences should be on the agenda. Here in Trieste, some psychiatrized will talk about their struggles. Within the midst of our own contradictions and sufferings we must also listen to and come to know the ethic and philosophy of all those who voluntarily come forth to help us because their reasons for wanting to do so are another risk we must face. Our truth is not to be found in the projects of our benefactors but in our own constantly renewed struggles. There will always be an alternative to the alternative. The conviction that strengthens us is that this struggle is not a drama, that our suffering constitutes a political itinerary, since it might well be a step toward remaining faithful to actions taken with the oppressed classes, thereby rendering them more profound. 

We hope, finally, that there are no more slave camps beneath the banner of liberty, no more massacres that could be justified by a love of humanity and a desire to cure it!