This is the event I’m talking about.
Read this by Han Dee.
Lately I’ve been stressed and full of shame, fearful that I’m guilty of political betrayal. Emails sent too quickly, without enough thought. At worst this reminds me of the firm belief I had in March 2022 that I needed to kill myself because I had at that point been guilty of betrayal. Denise Riley begins the best poem in her collection Say Something Back, ‘Lines starting with La Rouchefoucauld’, ‘It is more shameful to distrust your friends / than be deceived by them’.
The brevity of ‘Or without.’ The experience of being sectioned means I’ve lost a lot of trust. The trust of people who believed it was in my best interests to withhold my phone and later replace it with a burner. Perhaps they were right. I placed this burner, white hospital ID sticker on the back, name and NHS number, a spiral added to it drawn by me in biro, on the red fabric with sex worker history affixed near the ceiling and draping into the centre of a room around which the assembled people from Trieste, the Mental Health and Social Justice Network (MHSJN) and elsewhere (‘survivors’, friends and family members of people damaged by the mental health system in the UK, NHS workers including psychiatrists, people traumatised by their work on acute wards here – E was rendered mute and cried explaining this in a workshop, trainee psychotherapists, interested artists, etc.) sat on chairs. Other objects on the red fabric: a copy of Sense and Sensibility, James Baldwin’s Another Country, keys, medication blister packs, writing about a psychiatrist who threatened the patient ‘you’ll be back’ because they were refusing medication and how the psychiatrist herself subsequently suffered a breakdown, a photo of a cell in Broadmoor accompanied by some words, a red umbrella, vape packaging, a spiky ball…
The first person I met was R and we got talking right away. R wasn’t sure how long he’d manage to stay, had heard about the MHSJN event at a recent MedAct gathering. Long years of depression, many days of staying indoors. He stayed the whole day. Told me about a suicide attempt at the age of 21 while at university studying a pharmacy degree. Took his exams in September as he’d been intubated in intensive care and missed the remainder of the final term following his attempt. Regretted not bringing for the red fabric a stuffed toy hedgehog offered by his mother while intubated: it had calmed his stress through its tactility and familiarity, perhaps saved his life. Both of us diagnosed with bipolar. Exchanged details of hospital admissions, physical complications, hypomania, the desire to find a place of consistency, the lack of continuity in the kind of ‘care’ we’d accessed through the NHS. Talked about medication. Talked about the US and the tendency to overmedicate. A lot more. A crutch laid on the table behind. Kidney problems making lithium a poorly suited treatment. We both wrote ‘continuity’ on the pieces of brown cardboard offered to us by someone running an art workshop in the afternoon. Neither of us joined this workshop, preferring to attend the one on the open door policy and no restraint as it operates in Trieste.
Some comparisons between the way things work in Trieste and in the UK:
– Risk model and an emphasis on the clinical (UK)
– Attention model and an emphasis on the psychosocial and on helping the person change their life (Trieste)
Throughout the day I was thinking about Iran. One person who had been due to attend was absent because the attacks made participation impossible. Someone joined the final plenary and not the preceding presentations and workshops because of the emergency protest in central. The event was catered generously by Hiba Express, a local Palestinian kitchen. I messaged S who sent back a voice note about having watched Dr Strangelove just the other day. Didn’t know what else to say for now. I messaged L who said at least it’s sunny, that they’d been at the protest in central too and that there’d be another one in the week. E said that Netanyahu’s plane had landed in Athens and that nobody but Greeks seemed to be aware of this. Firework-like images on the FT news app. Han announcing solidarity with Palestine. Seeing H during the day and in the no restraint workshop. Comparing notes about how organising is going and about my attendance at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office blockade last summer, where we’d been kettled and I’d been afraid and subsequently wondered if I wasn’t best placed in these kinds of situations.
Things that came up at Birkbeck on 14 June. The Stop SIM campaign, Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition (I tried to find out if Mad Pride is taking place this year, it seems not to have been announced), Red Therapy. How ‘we keep each other safe’ but do we? The four times greater likelihood of Black people to be sectioned in the UK and the much higher frequency and severity of police involvement. The legacy of people of colour and especially Black Caribbean people with regards the rebuilding of the NHS. That these campaigns and issues were raised should be attributed to Micha Frazer Carroll who spoke via video link from Sweden. I think of the way Derica Shields brings some of these issues home, with steadfast force, in A Heavy Nonpresence, perhaps the most important body of work to emerge in years with regards UK state violence and the willed invisibilising of Black people. Cassandra followed Micha with a pre-recorded video message about the way people work in mental health in the UK, as if performing a play but each person with a different version of the script. The problem of patients/service users telling the same story over and over because so many interactions are with a different person each time. How some appointments are only ten minutes long. At the end of the day I met a psychiatrist who mentioned working in Hackney. I asked if she was familiar with Vivienne Cohen House and yes, ‘unfortunately’ she had worked there. I told her about the Google review I’d left and how a receptionist scolded me that this was a bad thing to have done and made it more likely that their existing funding would be withdrawn. The psychiatrist was sorry that I had an upcoming appointment, in two days time from the time of writing this ‘report’. I think momentarily of Can Xue’s ‘Train Dreams’ and how there are many clocks, often telling the same time. How a man who sleeps with a woman who keeps many clocks at her bedside struggles to relax around the omnipresent pressure they exert.
***
Europe’s largest rose garden is in Trieste. A collective project of gardening. Han mentioned Ruth Wilson-Gilmore’s idea of abolition geography as the attempt to combine people and land, wondering at this being somehow borne out in Trieste and in the rose garden in particular. The significance of 1971 in the history of Trieste and the admission of Han’s uncle to Broadmoor for 30 years as of the same date.
Pantxo spoke about the context of fascism in Italy. How Franco Basaglia placed the clinical question in parentheses because the problem of rights was more pressing. Basaglia was expelled in the early sixties from university because of his critique of psychiatry. About the need to destroy the reproduction of roles, of the psych and the patient, through the introduction of other objects and energies.
The huge rise in mental health detentions in the UK since the 80s. Mad liberation movements.
A film I want to see: Fit to be Untied, 1975, about the challenge to the mental asylum system in Parma in the sixties.
The need to connect the struggle for health to the same struggle in the workplace, in the home and the hospital.
Self-organisation. Self-realisation.
Basaglia, Laing and Tosquelles had many disagreements but they united on the principle of the dignity of people being at stake.
Trieste established the ecology as it exists today (not without many flaws and ongoing struggles and the presence of some assholes and right-wing people, not without police still issuing compulsory orders for treatment sometimes, killing people in this process in other parts of Italy) thanks to a leftist occupation of the system from within and from without. Thanks to an attempt to break up the institution of madness.
In 1973, a lifesize papier-mâché horse was painted sky blue and broken out of the asylum in Trieste for a procession. Art as a relational process (minus Tirvanija, Bourriaud, Sehgal, none of whom were mentioned or in any way missed). The horse as part of a spectacle and means of communication.
The renunciation of authority.
From 1972-73 Basaglia bought cars for the workers to help them move to and from different neighbourhoods. The mobility of workers and the need to be where the people are.
The Chernobyl explosion of 1986 and Triete’s position on the edge of the Western Bloc, in close proximity to Ukraine. They made a machine to block the cloud.
Sustenance. The invention of new ways of doing. Responsibility that needs to be affirmed every day.
I asked a question of a delegate about how migrants in Trieste interact with the mental health system. Mental health workers don’t report to immigration authorities. Fuck Prevent in the NHS. Fuck Palantir and Wes Streeting. Come to this day, Abolishing Prevent on 29 June maybe.
In the gathering back together at the end of the day I found the NHS worker who had already spoken at some length about feelings of complicity with the system as it exists to be taking up quite a bit of space. Perpetuation of harm. History as a keyholder and locker of doors. Every speaker was met with applause. I struggled to bring my hands together in time as I was making notes as a father spoke about a son sectioned seven or eight times. Forced on nasty medications. Denial of harm. Fed up of joining care groups. The desire to keep the son away from care workers who say he lacks insight with regards to his medication. The podcasting and radio workshop he’d attended suggested there was a place for people to speak freely without judgement. Escuchame – the name of Radio Fragola’s programme. There’d be a community event the next day 15 June with Asylum magazine, the father said. He spoke of the desire to set up a house. I forgot to speak with this person about the Philadelphia Association’s community houses which I understand they are presently struggling to fill. A woman who described her pandemic breakdown described The Tuesday Club and how people often don’t really want to talk about mental health. There’s so much else.
Quality of life does not get spoken about often enough in the UK, if at all, a practitioner of sorts said from the further end of the room. There is space in Trieste for a human to human relationship whereas here there are always risk assessments first, burnout, case loads, class and racism. So many things get in the way of the possibility of a relationship. In Trieste there had been a laboratory that allowed for the suspension of class relations. Art (in communities/with some kind of therapeutic aim) in the UK is often funded by charities and there’s a lot of gatekeeping and people not talking to one another, as well as the burden of constant grant applications. M spoke of the idiocy of the DSM and how the bio psychosocial model had some time ago turned into the bio bio bio model. These were not M’s words but someone else’s from a now quite old article. I thought of the usefulness of ‘bipolar’ for the conversation I’d had in the early part of the day. How I’ve been listening to the very American ‘Inside Bipolar’ podcast and how it's been useful, even if I have many reservations and the way the psych Nicole refers to her patients’ ‘wives’ as noticing everything is lol. Someone with experience in Brazil pointed out how the logic of the British Empire persists – in the idea that some people (especially those historically subjected to colonial forms of exploitation – loop back to Micha’s reference to the rebuilding of the NHS by Black Caribbean people in particular) might be ‘taking’ from NHS services. I think of the logic of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ that NELMA and other groups set out to challenge’.
***
It’s funny what you repress. In the no restraint workshop we began with each person in attendance saying something about themselves and why they’d chosen to attend. I mentioned my completion earlier that week of the Philadelphia Association’s introductory course and how it had been hard as an inpatient aged 15 to not be allowed outside during part of the five months of my admission. The same in the month of March 2022. I forgot to even think that I’d also been held down on my bed and injected at 15. There were others who crossed the line of former patient now thinking to train. I learned that a specialist service operates in Brixton, run by a charity, uniquely for people of colour.
Meanwhile I have in mind my lack of attempted contact with S since February. The worry about the ‘revolving door’.
One of the many parts of the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt I visited on Friday 13th in the afternoon carried a message attributed to Patrick White, remembering Peter Andrew Ryan 19.10.51–12.4.94: ‘THE WAY WE FILL OUR OBLIGATIONS TO THE SICK IS A MARK OF OUR CAPACITY TO LOVE’. Capacity again, that word I often hate for its application to people, recalled by Riley’s idea that ‘things in themselves do hold – a pot, a jug, a jar’.
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