CRITICAL MENTAL HEALTH FORUM (Formerly Critical Mental Health Group)
Thursday 31st May 2001 6.30pm-8.30pm.
Minutes
Present: Dave Harper (chair), Sybil Ah-mane, Sarah Fielding, Chas de Swiet, Bipasha Ahmed, Robin Hanau, Ruth Adams, Goran Petrovic, Carla Willig, Ange Drinnan, Louisa Mackrell, Esther McCalden, Christine Nugent, Paul Godin, Jeff Thomas, Peter Campbell, Jonathan Bindman, Donnard White, Adrian Clapham, Jason Gul, Mike Slade, Diana Rose, Mike Crawford, Anne Cooke, Rachel Perkins.
Apologies: Sarah Rasch, Rufus May, Hermione Thornhill, Sara Stanton, Chris Freudenberg, Jules Hayman, Yan Weaver.
1. Recent events
- Several people in the group had attended the Critical Psychiatry Conference in Sheffield. A variety of comments were feedback to the group. Diana also mentioned that she had attended the SANE Conference
2. Upcoming events
- Dave mentioned that there would be two protests held on 9th July. The Critical Psychiaty Network would be picketing the Annual conference of Royal College of Psychiatrists, which is also running in parallel with the European regional meeting of the World Psychiatric Association, outside the Queen Elizabeth 2nd Conference Centre. MadPride would be organising a protest outside the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries. Both would be protesting against psychiatric drugs. If any one has information on drugs in order to produce a leaflet for both these protests, please let Dave Harper know.
- Psychology Politics Resistance (PPR) will be holding a Bastille Day one-day conference (July 14th) in Manchester. There was some discussion about the possibilities of the group being involved.
3. Statement on compulsory treatment
- A draft statement has been put together by Rufus for press release following small group discussions from the last meeting. Mike Crawford has offered to re-draft the statement. Any more suggestions should be passed on to Mike. The next draft will be discussed again at the next meeting.
4. Group Name
- There was some discussion about what the group name should be, following discussion at the last meeting. There was some concern that using ‘Critical’ in the name might be too negative. However most people felt that actually it was useful and appropriate to keep ‘Critical’ in the name although in any statements it might be worth including a sentence or two about what the name meant. After some debate over a variety of alternative names and words that could be included, the general agreement was that that the group should be called "Critical Mental Health Forum" -- forum since it implied a range of views since group might suggest we all agreed on everything.
5.Mental health and the media
- Diana Rose spoke to the group about the way in which the media constructs mental health issues. She talked about how she had studied transcripts of TV programmes on mental health and the techniques used to misrepresent people with mental health problems. For example, she discussed how often the media portrays there to be a strong link between madness and violence and talked about how this affects people’s beliefs and makes them afraid of violence. She talked in some detail about how Television often uses specific cinematic techniques to portray particular images of service users/survivors (e.g. filming "victims’ in shadow, whilst filming psychiatrists in strong light). She discussed a very funny idea where all the usual roles would be reversed: with mental health 'experts' shot in extreme close-up and, in one case, without make-up! The problems are not only with documentaries and factual news programmes but also with, for example, soaps. Often characters who are seen as "going mad" are seen as different from 'us', and so "othered". Such characterisations can be harmful. There was then some discussion about what can be done about this problem. Diana suggested that a start would be to offer training to journalists and convince filmmakers to change their techniques. It was mentioned that Mental Health Media already have a role in this capacity. The group then split up into smaller groups to discuss these issues further.
- Feedback from group discussion:
Some ideas put forward included maybe producing a video showing people's experiences of mental health to be given to mental health teams, in particular making them interactive and as a focus of discussion. It was noted that there were many resources already out there: Mental Health Media had a video looking at how madness was represented for example. It was also suggested that as a group, we could put ourselves forward to the media after discussion about how often it is always the same groups (e.g. Community Care) who are always consulted by the media. It was suggested that we need more actual survivors speaking to the media than groups speaking for survivors. It was also suggested that as a group, we could pool our media contacts via e-mail or the website.
6 Next Meeting
- The next meeting will be at 6.30pm on Wednesday 11th July in the Lower Club Lounge at the Central YMCA (Great Russell Street, London). Note that this is back to a Wednesday. On the agenda will be: feedback from the demos held on July 9th, further discussion of the statement on compulsory treatment.
- Following meetings: Wednesday 29th August; Wednesday 26th September