Crazy Pride Day: No More Violence, No More Stigma
A movement led by users and ex-users of the mental health system. Because we are a bunch of crazy people, but we are also much more.
Crazy Pride is a mass movement of users (or ex-users) of mental health services, as well as their allies. Its beginnings date back to 1993, in Toronto, Canada; and this 2018, for the first time, is celebrated and vindicated here too.
I could tell you much more about Crazy Pride, about the mobilizations, the events and the slogans, but I prefer to talk to you about why I think it has been so necessary for this protest to reach our territories.
And it is that, if many people call “unnecessary” protest days such as LGTBI Pride, Working Women’s Day or the recent November 12 (the state march against racism) over and over again, despite the statistics so bloody that plague these historically oppressed groups, what will the average citizen think of the need to vindicate ourselves as “crazy” without ties?
Yes, “crazy” without ties. Because there are many of us who affirm that terms such as “mentally ill” do not represent us, insofar as they do not refer to our psychological and emotional experiences in the first person, but to what professionals diagnose us from a perspective too often influenced by pharmaceuticals and impersonal manuals.
And yes, yes, no strings attached above all. Let us call ourselves “crazy”, “mentally ill”, “psychiatrized”, “neurodivergent”, or merely people who suffer from within or simply experience reality in multiple other ways. .. the range of terms could be endless, but what to me more I care here is not “what we are”, but “why we are”. And we are, this May 20 and the rest of the year, because we are part of a group that organizes, mobilizes and, ultimately, rebels because they violate us and discriminate against us ; from institutions, as a rule even from those made up of professionals in theory dedicated to our care, and from society in general.
Because, unfortunately and for what should be the shame of all people, when I speak of ties I am not using any metaphor.
Here, and around the world, we continue to be tied to the “crazy” (mental health patients) under the euphemism of mechanical restraint. This practice is humiliating, repressive, and has little to do with health; It has much more to do with the lack of sufficient resources, with deficient advice from professionals and, ultimately, with the absence of a peer-to-peer view on the part of those who order it and even, sometimes, those who apply it.
This practice is prohibited in countries such as Iceland, there are alternatives to this type of “treatment” in mental health such as the Finnish open dialogue model, and in our State patients “mechanically contained” continue to “die”. That is, immobilized and isolated by our own caregivers.
For this reason, because we want to be free and never tied down, because we demand dignified and respectful treatments with our physical, psychological and emotional integrity (as well as made possible within a framework of informed consent) that move away from over-medication and paternalism; because our demands are not made only to professionals, but to the entire population as a whole, because we are part of a society that at best is afraid of us and at worst, justifies the abuse and mistreatment perpetuated against our bodies and minds.
For all this, on Crazy Pride Day we take to the streets if we can to celebrate ourselves alive and resistant (which in our case, as in so many, are almost synonymous). And we hope that you will take to the streets, if you can, to celebrate us alive, resistant and companions as worthy, valuable and respectable as the most “sane” of all. Especially bearing in mind that whoever has a “mental health problem” tomorrow, whether or not they are diagnosed with what they call a disorder, may be the one who today stands in solidarity with us from their position of “mentally healthy person.” Suffering, as well as the different responses to it, more or less harmful to some and to others, touches us all.
So we went out, to protest and reaffirm ourselves as much more than “crazy”, but always proud of it. Always proud of being different and dissidents from the norm that sometimes hurts almost as much and even more than our own “follies”.
And if you can’t fight on May 20, we fight for you.
If I cannot go out on May 20, to continue fighting like the rest of the year, I know that you will do it for me.
