Torture and psychiatric assault

Slides by Tina Minkowitz Part of Presentation on The Relationship Between Spiritual and Political Resistance to Psychiatric

Assault

PsychOut: A Conference for Organizing Resistance Against Psychiatry: Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, May 7, 2010

Why think of it as torture?

• Victimization/Not staying in victim identity• State repression• Spiritual death and rebirth• Encounter with evil• Witnessing

How to work with painful memory

• Moral dilemmas – shutting down/openness• Honoring the archetypes• Who suffers?• Drugs/ECT shutting us down – part of the

trauma• Public/private spaces – shelter and sharing

Public Advocacy

• Transforming individual pain into collective resistance

• Abstraction and theory• Making the violations visible: window into our

experience• Role of outside affirmation/ ambivalence/

transformation from partial to impartial

Experience of forced drugging

• Self-not-self blurred or new (not-self in self, appearance of self as not-self)

• Psychic apathy/anosognosia/ECT – shame of absence

• Re-making connections in/of self• Patience and waiting/ what to do in the

meantime• Creativity lost and found

Torture and madness

• Does psychiatric torture take away our madness? Change its course? Impose its own structure on it? Become part of the history?

• Do drugs and ECT change the self? What is it to change self against one’s will?

Tikkun olam/ Reparations

• Healing the self: healing the world• Repair• …to a secluded place• …hearts and minds• …the damage and destruction• …knit or sew back together• …harmony? Justice• Self-reparations/ we create/co-create

Working with torture advocacy

• Wanting justice in particular• Immediate to stop the violation• Reparations as compensation and giving back

– giving us our due• Detailed sympathetic reporting of facts/

persuasive argument• Using the tools now created

Spirituality and advocacy

• Are they in contradiction?• Forgiveness?• Parallel paths traveled at once?• Intertwining?• Torture as depth that shakes and changes the self

– opening doorways: how is that not an argument for S/M?

• Love and betrayal• What if you can’t heal?

Finding hope

• Does advocacy give us hope?• Light a pathway – will we get to the end?• Silence and mystery/ uncertainty• Humility and honor• Persuasion, human rights, non-discrimination,

alternatives• Willingness to accept consequences• Engagement with people & their pain & ours

To end torture…

• Somehow needs acceptance• Spiritual truth that harm is harm and it harms• Thawing and melting – love hurts but is not all

abuse• Encounters and repair/ self-nurturing• Forgiving self failures of nerve, of love, of

truth etc.• Accepting love

Does it matter?

• Saying psychiatric assault is torture cannot be taken back

• We are already on the path• Each of us makes the world anew for

everyone• What do we do with this?

As always, contact info:

• tminkowitz@earthlink.net• www.chrusp.org• www.wnusp.net• www.internationaldisabilityalliance.org• www.un.org/disabilities• www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/disability