We need more psych survivor protest videos

Whats the definition of "severe" when they use it anyway ?

Serious mental illnesses include major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and borderline personality disorder. - NAMI

Cledwyn Bulbs wrote:There's not really much point. No-one listens to mental patients anyway, unless that is they have embraced their identity as a "mentally ill" person. Generally, even mental patients don't listen to mental patients. There are psych survivor videos on youtube, but no-one watches them, and next to no-one cares, so making videos protesting against psychiatric abuse is pretty pointless, apart from leaving a record for posterity.

Theres not really much point???!! I strongly disagree. There is a great reason to tape/post more psych survivor videos. I agree the general theme is most ppl don't listen to 'mental patients' but if we do *nothing* about that, then how will anything change? There *have* been (admittledly very few) some changes made thanx to psych survivor movements, gays are not classified as mi anymore, Robert whitaker just recently spoke at a NAMI conference, its being talked about more and more (yes I know its still not enough but we have to unite and talk about this issue for ppl to actually open their minds and see whats going on).

I have just spend the last 3 hours watching 'psych survivor videos'. There is a page on

http://www.madinamerica.com/category/open-paradigm/

its called 'open paradigm, its on the madinamerica sight and its a n ew project, ive watched nearly all the videos there (theres about 15-20) and they've all really helped me in my healing (from psych abuse).

Mental patients will only get listened to, apart from for the earlier reason, if they identify in their expressions and opinions with the conformist majority. Otherwise, you are a dead duck, because society will never evolve to the point where the true outsider (and many psych survivors aren't true outsiders, but merely conformists who have temporarily wandered from the path of their herd, and desperately want readmission) is treated fairly, because of man's constitutional intolerance of difference, which manifests itself in so many forms and is supported by so many specious arguments that it can be difficult to discern, especially without the advantage of historical distance. Society will just give you the silent treatment, as it does anyone who violates the normative expectations about how one should look, be, think, feel and express oneself in society, condemning you to rot in the liminal state between life and death, a semi-somnambulant being. Otherwise you will just be sport for the sadistic amusement of the many headed monster that is the herd.

Such people like myself are basically social non-entities, consigned to the community of the socially dead as punishment for the cardinal social sin of heresy, our only hope of absolution for our sins lying in conformity to the ethic of dominant society, modelling ourselves on its pillars, prostrating ourselves at the alters of its scared cows and objects of veneration, and mindlessly observing the conventional pieties of the age.