|
To stop discrimination against people with mental health problems we need to look two ways.
The Like Minds, Like Mine plan looks forward, by creating a vision for a world free of discrimination and some strategies for getting there. But we also need to look backwards to where discrimination starts. People often say it starts with fear, ignorance, misunderstanding, pity or malice. But these are just some of the clothes discrimination wears. Take off all the clothes and we are left with one thing; the devaluing of madness and the entwined assumptions that mad people are full of nonsense and incompetence.
All discrimination stems from the devaluing of madness. The wider community often responds by excluding mad people and madness from its cultural social, economic and political activities. Friends and families sometimes respond by excluding mad people from intimacy, companionship, social networks and family responsibilities. And mental health services too often use the rituals of diagnosis, mind-numbing treatments and compulsion to devalue the people they are supposed to serve.
To move forward our Like Minds, Like Mine Project needs to challenge the root of discrimination by putting value back into madness. Without denying the pain of madness we need to amplify the voices of people who value madness in different ways. This includes seeing madness as a crisis of being, a reasonable response to trauma, a spiritual awakening, a transformation of identity or a protest against oppression.
Like Minds, Like Mine is growing in its ability to challenge the devaluing of madness by:
• Stating that it needs to be led by people with mental health problems
• Distancing itself from the more bland approaches to reducing discrimination
• Adopting a platform of human rights and the social model of disability and increasing its focus on the discrimination in the mental health system.
These are encouraging developments, but if we are ever going to create a world free of discrimination, they need to happen in tandem with a determination to put value back into madness.
| 
