‘Is the ability to hold a fluid, very similar to volume,’ according to Wikipedia.
There is always a danger in the judgment of capacity when those who are discussing it come from a perspective that the pot is cracked, before they know the first thing about the capability of the pot to hold water. So many who stick their spoonful into the capacity debate have no idea of what it is to have their capacity to state their point of view taken from them.

Those who are in positions of power, be they families, carers, voluntary stakeholders, professionals, debate in the general. So very often in their love, they deny the rights of individual out of their convictions and/or fear of consequence of the very capacity they purport to support to wider society.
Love coming from fear or doubt so very easily turns into goodwill. Goodwill in the hands of a convinced, caring person so very often turns to domineering. The moral high ground can be a bog. We need to have the debate regarding capacity but only if those whose capacity is under discussion are leading that debate, be that debate regarding the disabled, the mad community, or euthanasia.

The Catholic Church in the past moral debates in this country, was like an anchor dragging society backwards because we gave the church the kind of respect it never deserved. Voluntary bodies are in danger of trying to fill the void of unearned respect in so many moral debates today. Like the church they resent any challenge to their goodness. So very often those whose capacity is being judged or discussed are rolled out as victims/examples. 

If you begin the debate on capacity from a perspective that capacity is lacking, then the limit of the person’s ability to decide is already judged and the individual’s potential to expand in a non judgmental society is gone.
If you begin the debate from a perspective that capacity is an expanding idea to be encouraged, then that voyage is unending as the individual whose capacity is under judgment is the captain/navigator and not a compliant passenger.

Too many open forums take place after the direction of that forum has been decided by the stakeholders who are employed to hold that forum. An agenda decided behind closed doors is hardly an open forum, especially if the destination is already agreed. The Irish College of Psychiatry is holding an open forum on mental health law/legal capacity but they are interviewing/selecting those they wish to partake!
We have seen such a change in how we as a society regard those who are intellectually challenged. It has gone way beyond PC language. This evolution of respect for members of society has enriched all of society. Society now looks to the ability of the intellectually challenged, sees the potential before we see the ‘disability’.

I sat in the Taoiseach’s office last week by invitation of Minister Kathleen Lynch. I listened to an impressive bloke from Kilkenny speak of his joy in his inclusion in society but on the need to hold events not as fundraisers but as a celebration by the whole of society (eg Mad Pride family fun days).

I sat in the UN in 2006 at the talks on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Disabled and I heard a young lady from north Africa with Down’s Syndrome address us in three languages, a bloke from Australia challenge our intellect in the most eloquent fashion.

Those agencies such as Amnesty who are in this capacity debate regarding the mad begin from the perspective that the mad lack legal capacity; but from that beginning the only route is backwards.
Is being normally mad a disability at all? The NDA (National Disability Authority) and others need to make a decision on this. Emotional ‘disability’ in its spectrum may be a curse or a gift. If madness is a disability, then we cannot lock people up based on a disability, it is a breach of international human rights law. I hear no voice of outrage from the NDA regarding Carrig Mór.

If madness is not a disability - and I doubt very much that the mad community are well served by being included in the list of disabilities - then the common law must protect the mad community.

Either way, disabled or not, we as a society can no longer stand over our belief in the capacity of a doctor to legally lock away and force medicate another member of society, based solely on judgment of behaviour.

If I was to write this as fiction, it would be unbelievable. Sometimes I think the insane are medicating the mad!
I was asked by John Hunt’s nervous mother Marion to go to an appointment she had with John’s psychiatrist in Carraig Mór Hospital last week. Again she did not get to see her son.
Carraig Mór is being exposed as a prison, emerging out of the dark pretence of being a hospital, into reality’s light as a place where the living are buried out of the public view. Carraig Mór is a grim place.
When we arrived at Carraig Mór last week, instead of the usual security staff opening the door, a male nurse met us at the outside set of the double doors and informed us I was not allowed in. Just Marion Hunt! 
This masquerades as a public hospital. I asked why? He said: “Doctor’s orders.” My wheelchair was in the first set of doors at this stage so it made it a little awkward for him to shut the door. I said: “I am cold.”
Marian Hunt had been told, for legal reasons she had to attend alone. She rang me and asked me to be her advocate again. I agreed. We both knew I was not going to be allowed to be present when John’s case was discussed.
But Marion requested I be with her to put a point of view. We had talked and we agreed that rather than take an adversarial stance, that she offered to co-operate with John being transferred to the Central Mental Hospital in Dublin. All agree he has no hope in Carraig Mór.
But back to the pantomime in the hall. The nurse now explained: “I am only doing what I am told to do.”
“Is the psychiatrist in the hospital?” I ask. ”Yes.“ “Can you request he personally explain why he won’t meet us?” The nurse: “He won’t.”
The head nurse arrived. “The doctor will only see Marion alone.” We ask again that the doctor talk to Marian and I for a few minutes. The response is no. Reinforcements arrive. One concerned she might get her name in the papers, but insisting on protecting the psychiatrist.
Why are nurses and civil servants passing on information from the doctor who is sitting upstairs like God? Two of the nurses nudged each other, embarrassed and left.

All this is going on at the entrance stacked with furniture, people visiting, guys cleaning. There are empty rooms all along the corridor.
Anyway, it was agreed Marion would go alone to see the psychiatrist and the psychiatrist would see me afterwards. My son David and I sit in the hall. I am not sure if any laws were broken that morning but I do believe morality was dented.
I asked to see John. I was then informed that I would no longer to allowed to visit John Hunt unless I wrote in a request, and received written permission from the psychiatrist. Maureen O’Sullivan TD has agreed to write to the Health and Justice departments to enquire as to the legality of this.
I rang the complaints officer of the HSE. After the meeting, the whole morning fell completely into the role of farce. The psychiatrist walked down the hall with, it appeared to me, an embarrassed nurse, and David and I were finally asked into a room out of the hall.

The psychiatrist then said what he had said to me at meetings before. “I am meeting with you to tell you I will not talk to you.” I told him again I thought that was childish and we really wanted to help. “I won’t talk to you,” he said and left.
So while the psychiatrist asks David and I into a room to vacate the hall, Marion Hunt is ushered down the hall by other staff and out the door! Alice in Wonderland shite!

Fair questions regarding law/rights and treatment/outcomes, in my experience, are not welcome in the world of forensic/forced psychiatry. Other advocates were mentioned, Marion Hunt did not choose them; she chose Mad Pride. Due to the fact they will not talk to us, the staff have no idea what we might say.
Marion Hunt had no real clarity as to what she was told that morning. She knew that her son; a creative, emotional, now toothless 29 year old, incontinent and very ill son is being taken to court as some sort of legal requirement to get him out of Carraig Mór. John Hunt’s chosen solicitor has yet to receive any notice. I wonder will the Gardaí now investigate?

Shipped off, they hoped, quietly, to where those charged under the Criminal Law (Insanity Act) are detained. John Hunt got pissed in Bantry and had a row six years ago! Does this move necessitate he have a criminal record? Marion said, they said something regarding kidney stones but was not sure. Her GP is not allowed to see her son.

Could such a scene take place in the cancer suite in the Cork University Hospital? Staff, in public areas ordering a polite, supportive friend out of the hospital and banning them. Only in forced psychiatry. John Hunt, I have been told, is so drugged now it is pitiful to see him. What do we do?

God I hate my life
Never knowing from one
Day to another
Will I be able

For what the day
Might bring or take
Or that I will fake
Life to hide
The pain of my emptiness.

How can I fill
This empty spirit
That rings hollow
To every sound of love
Hands held out in  

Is a soul that’s empty
Dead or perhaps
Stagnant waiting
For what. Spirit
To be supplied
By.

Do we need an army? There is talk of closing the barracks in Clonmel, and in other locations. We have approximately 8,500 members of the Irish Army. Who or what are they defending? Our sovereignty! The only thing we have left worth defending in this country is fish and oil rights under the sea, so by all the Gods of logic, we must surely turn all the cannons and tanks into patrol boats and redesign the army uniforms into sailors outfits.

The army are peacekeepers in foreign lands now; sailors can defend. What do the army defend at home in Ireland? They are great lads in the frost and flood, but sure army or navy what difference, if the water is army green, or navy blue? Sand bags for the floods; navy, sea, sand, beach, water! Would you please pass the salt!
We still have some of the best fishing waters in Europe and possibly the worst equipped navy outside Switzerland. We are licensing oil exploration at sea. We will be building windmills at sea. We are laying power exchange cables under the sea. Wave energy.
We have the Gardaí on land who protect us very well on land. The Gardaí went to Mayo to beat the crap out of the protesters who objected to Shell. Not the army, they were in Africa. But we could send the navy to Africa, train the navy in peacekeeping; it is not very often that the peacekeeping forces of Ireland get involved in a pitched battle. They are a presence, as part of a greater presence supplied by the UN.
We were invaded, as savagely as our Celtic monks and monasteries were pillaged and raped back in the day. The IMF, EMF, MFI, ECB. Not a shot fired by the army or the FCA, in anger, in protest, in protection, or in defence of our sovereignty.

We are in a different era and we need fighters on computers now, in office blocks, not in barracks. We need accountants who can count.
But back to the Army. Are we seriously under threat of a land invasion from a foreign power, in the modern Ireland? Even if we were, realistically how long would our army mount a defence? The Irish Army has a proud tradition, there is nothing wrong with the army.

I am simply asking would we be better off protecting our sovereign right at sea, than on land? We have some of the best harbours in the world; Cork, Galway, Dublin, Killybegs. It would be good to see the Spanish, French, German, Russian, fleets being dragged into Irish ports, when they break Irish law, by a well-equipped Irish navy.
An Irish fishing fleet, being protected and encouraged, by a strong Irish navy. Be good to see thriving ports processing the catch from trawlers awash with the weight of the catch of the day, onto lines of lorries driving onto lines of moored cargo ships. 
It might just ignite this frozen economy. We are an island nation sitting next door to another island nation who conquered the world at sea. We are an island nation and our fishing fleet is all at sea.

We are throwing dead fish back, because some ass in Brussels says landing dead fish breaks quota; this based on the falling numbers of the species we are catching! How does firing them back into the water, dead, how does that help? It most certainly does nothing for the hard pressed fisherman flinging good marketable cod, hake, bass, or whatever to the best fed flocks of sea gulls in western European waters.
We should train the gulls to have a fly by, and a droppings raid on the Brussels bureaucrats. If they were buried up to their necks in gull shite, it might make them think twice the next time they throw bucket loads of bureaucratic bullshite on the heads of our fishermen. We are told that the harvest of the sea could create thousands of jobs on land, so surely we must protect the sea?

If we had a strong Irish navy or indeed an Irish Coast Guard services, fast boats dedicated and directed to protect not only the sovereignty of our island Irish nation, our resources at sea, the living of our fishermen, and the fish processing plants on land, how bad could that be?
Set up to chase smugglers: cigs, knock offs, and drugs. If we had a navy on peace duty in the desert why would that be so incongruous? Some say we have the only navy where the sailors go home for lunch. A navy that might influence a restructuring of the treaty deal that threw away our fishing industry on the altar of farming. If the CAP fits.

But the question is valid: would Ireland as a small island nation be better served by a strong navy? If we are to have an armed services, the question is not about how much we spend on the armed forces, but rather where we spend it, and getting best value for what we spend? How does the army serve our farmers on land, would it be better to transform the 8,500 men and women in the armed forces from soldiers to sailors? Ask the navy to save our seas and the natural treasure buried there. The SOS is gone out, this nation is in very stormy waters, some are drowning, who will respond? Army green or navy blue? Just a thought.

PS and nothing to do with the above, the Concern 13th annual Carols by Candlelight concert takes place in UCC on Friday 2 December at 6pm with yours truly hosting. Tickets €50 include concert, dinner, wine, beer. Available in the Concern shop, North Main St. 021-4223923. Good cause - good night!

What a wonderful word
allowing for the
dignity of difference
would cure all ills
give the right of way
to the others to go
down their road
while you walk contentedly
alongside.

A message with compromise
is a two way street
where traffic flows
freely together but
separate without a
cul de sac not traffic
jammed tight like a mind
shut tight.

My god but he’s odd.
who?
yer man.
what man?
you know, yer man.
Who, that man?
yeah.
but he was a fine man?
he was until he went odd.
what happened?
broke down, a couple of years ago.
what happened?
who knows, you can’t ask.
what, what happened?
Yeah, can’t say, well what broke yeah.
I suppose, but then again why not?
well you ask him so.
I will like fuck, I don’t even know him.
well there yeah go, eragh feck him.
yeah the odd bastard.
have another pint.
all right so.
the odd fucker, looks lonely though!

The eyes of God
must be blind!

Those who have never
been there will never
understand why those
of us who have survived
the journey into madness
would like to boast
abot our survival
of that journey that
takes us to the depths
of the pit where from
the bottom we spring
forth to announce our
worth in sane world
of normality where
is considered an abnormality.

You give to the church
to give to the poor who
take expenses from the top
who then take over the
minds of the poor
and make them conform.

Is it not just amazing when the wind of depression begins to howl, that the first thing it does is blow the cold breeze of doubt. The chill begins in your soul, you begin to shiver, doubt your worth. The warm glow, the joy of life cools; the rate of chill determined by your own frame of mind.
Do you open the door to let the wind in? Or does it simply become so strong, that a gust will blow the door to your soul wide and the chill kills the joy?
Joy of life is a solitary thing that is so often dependant on community. Those who have joy by gift attract others into their light, like flies to a Somerset Maugham lamp in the Deep South. The joyous flies perform in the light of community dance, reflect the glory of that joy and feed from it, but never drain the centre of the energy source; the peaceful personal joy in the individual soul.
But when those whose joy have been chilled and are turning to ice, approach that light, they plunge right in; get burned.
Wounds need treatment; gentle understanding and care.

The secret of peace of the soul is having it, without ever having to think about its existence. Those who walk life’s path unconscious of the peace of mind that life has granted them, are those who have true wealth.
Those who feel the chill of self doubt have to work at peace constantly; reassurance is a poor substitute for contentment. Beginning is always the struggle, and for some, unfortunately, the oxymoron is that the horrendous struggle to begin is overwhelming.
Nevertheless beginning is essential to finding peace. “The longest journey begins with a single step” - Moa. To begin the walk to peace is the hardest step of all for some and is so simple to others. When people ring and ask me how to take the first step I have a test. I pay them a compliment. I had two young women in my house yesterday at different times for totally different reasons. I had not met either before. Both beautiful. The first had the chill wind blowing and I said to her: “You are a very beautiful young woman.” She replied: “No, I am not!”
The second had the warm glow of joy and peace and I said to her: “You are a beautiful young woman”. She replied: “Thank you”. In the simplicity of it all, that test is so indicative of where your soul sits on the scale of life.
But the great truth is that the gift of peace is available; it is like fiscal wealth, some inherit it, some work harder than others to obtain it, some waste it. Some never find it. But it is there.

So again to begin, the next time you are paid a compliment please respond with a simple thank you. It took me years to stop the equivocation around that effort to respond in a positive manner to somebody telling me I was of worth. It embarrassed me to be told; I felt the heat of embarrassment but not the glow of joy.
My equivocation was, and is, an insult to the kindness being shown by the person passing on the compliment. The simple answer to a personal compliment sets the scene for the ongoing relationship. So we can control all of this, but for those of you who do not know how much of an effort it is to do this simple thing, please believe; it is so hard for others. 
Things are getting hard in this house. The Motor Neuron Disease is raging across the family. I am stuck in the bed now; it’s hard for us all. And depression, sadness is on the attack. I have to go on the defensive. You cannot win going backwards. Doubt is near to hand.
When you have self doubt, then you begin to doubt all. I have too much time to think now. I and it are getting hard and heavy. Harder to tolerate; the pain, the frustration as well as I previously could. Shorter temper and sharper edges, tiredness, are new tenants; they pay no rent but demand a high price in the coin of joy. They drain.

Everybody is trying so hard. Trying is the awful thing. There was no need to do so before; we just were content, smiled and held so naturally.
But doubt is a terrible thing. Parents demand respect from their children, but as with all things you have no right to demand anything, you earn respect.
That is where I lie right now. Horizontal, in a place of self doubt. As deeply as I know how much my family love and respect me, I am on the edge of the precipice of depression and that is the sharp edge of doubt. But I will not fall in.
I so want to do what I cannot do; casually engage. I so fucking hate not being able to get up and go, stop, sit and chew the cud. I have to orchestrate my life. I have to plan each move in detail.

Taking a vertical pee is possibly the greatest boon in any man’s life and to be unable to take a horizontal pee is as a prison.
I have to work at the minutiae of life, which we all take for granted. I will get on with it. The point is; it is about life and living life to the full. The level of expectation is my decision, I simply have to reassess, take the first step daily.
So for those who are feeling the chill wind of doubt blowing, put on the coat of community gather people about you, say thank you for the compliment and you will begin to feel the joy.

Me; do you remember bottle parties, bring your own drink? I am having one this week, wine, women, men and chat. Hopefully finishing in song, I feel the glow just at the thought. There really is only one um and that is fuck um! Yehaa!!

We all outraged at the victims stories of child chemical abuse.
Rightly so. There is a side to this that should also be debated but is not. How the victims were treated by society in general, and in particular the medical model of treatment with regard to mental health.
I have and had some friends who were victims all of them that I know were diagnosed with a mental illness a disease of the brain.
All my friends got angry at the unfairness of it all. Some of them became aggressive at that unfairness. Those that screamed out loud at this unfair treatment, were locked up not in gaol but in mental hospitals.
One friend self harmed in frustration, the best help on offer in the medical model is force. He was forced incarcerated; he was forced treated with medications and with ECT. He was locked into an isolation cell for 9 months.
He covered his body in scars in frustration.
When he was released from his “gaol” mental institution, As Part of his “parole” he was ordered to call to his local garda station once a week, strip naked and prove he had not further self harmed.
All of this was his own fault or so he told me his doctors and the gardai told him he refused all help.
When he spoke to me as he did many times over the years, he would say they never listened to him.
They denied his truth, he went the home of the new priest he shut the door.  His family got tired of his disease, they shut the door. His friends got tired of his disease they shut the door.
The medical model offered him pills for his disease they did not work. When the pills did not work there was nothing else on offer so they applied force for his disease that did not work
So he hung himself.
When in the name of God will we learn that emotion distress caused by life events is not a disease and cannot be treated as one?
And most certainly cannot be cured as a disease, sure you can control it with pills and some users of the system are grateful and indeed glad to be under that control. Others like my friend and I abhor it.
But the real sadness is there is nothing else.
So who is to ask the question on behalf of my dead a silenced friend what part did the medical model play in this scandal we are all so outraged about.

So many of the victims locked up so few of the perpetrators.

Report on the EU High-Level Conference “Together with Mental health and Wellbeing” Brussels, 13 June 2008

Let me begin by stating that this is in no way meant to be a comprehensive report as the amount of information available on the day was enormous and as the day was organised, I would need to be able to bi locate in order to attend each section of the programme. So what I am about to give here are the impressions that I took from the conference some thoughts in and around it and some opinion as to change. 

In the opening remarks, if I could say in the general terms of it, that the priorities seem to be to use public health policy to attempt to identify best practice and while there was a lot of conversation or a lot of discussion around genetics and research there was very little as to any aspects of the emotional or spiritual side of mental health. There was a focus on delivery and how the European pact could do this. 

We heard discussions as to discriminations in the work place, access to treatment, and medical research. In all of these presentations and throughout the day itself, in both the welcoming remarks, opening speeches, address by the guest of honour, the key note presentations, and the ministerial panels, we heard references to the part that politicians, academic research, the medical profession, the voluntary organisations and, unfortunately, as a sort of polite addition at the end of each presentation “and of course we must consult with the users and carers”. This appeared to me to be an afterthought, as a sort of sop to those of us who are the true experts in this field to keep us in our place at the bottom of the pile.

I do apologise if this offends some of you who may read this, but it was certainly how it appeared to me and after I made a number of interventions during the day emphasising the point it was confirmed to me that that was also the impression of many other members of the audience.

I raise this next point with great trepidation as I know it is going to be enormously controversial, but I do hope that those of you who read this will see that I make the point through concern and love and in the hope of gaining clarity around the whole issue of mental health as it pertains to so called “mental illness”. 

As I listened to HRH Princess Esmeralda of Belgium make her beautiful presentation on behalf of those who live with and care for those with autism. We listened to Alzheimer’s described as a mental sickness by Mr Martinez the Vice President of the European Parliament. I wondered that as a person who lives with the normality of madness every day of my life was I actually in the right place, and at the right conference. Speaker after speaker spoke of Alzheimer’s and Dementia, and I have to ask the question as these three physical illnesses mentioned above, are identifiable both in life and post mortem as brain diseases and I live with emotional distress, which I chose to call madness, and I can state that there is no medical or physical evidence of either manic depression, depression, schizophrenia or any other so called “mental illness” to be found in my brain either in life or post mortem. 

There are non specific signs and I can quote you if necessary, scientific evidence to prove that post mortem the long term effects of psychotropic drugs muddy the waters as to whether this is concrete evidence of so called “mental illness”. 

So therefore, in the interest of both lobby groups, those who are lobbing for improved conditions for autism and for our elderly population should all be included in the pact that is addressing mental health and the question that needs to be asked is it in its essence addressing mental health and well being or is it addressing madness emotional distress or so called “mental illness”. 

I certainly came away from the conference with no clarity on this issue.

It is appropriate to mention here that I was not invited to this conference by the organizers, in fact as a user expert I did not know it was on until my own MEP Kathy Sinnott fought for a place for me and three others. May I take this opportunity to publically thank her for her tireless efforts to raise the voice of the voiceless. 

It was absolutely empowering to listen to the former Prime Minister of Norway address the conference with his presentation entitled “A Personal Experience – from a Government Prospective”. His outlining of how proper support not only allowed him to continue to function within the Government as the Prime Minister but also how his courage in standing up and stating that he was living with depression wiped out the stigma that secrecy leads to. 

I found it quite distressing to later listen to Mr Paul Stoffels, Company Group Chairman, Global Research and Development, Pharmaceuticals Johnson & Johnson describe me as a person with a disease. He has neither the authority, nor the proof to do so without challenge.
In the year I was locked up in a mental institution, in the 10 years that I was taking pharmaceutical drugs for so called “mental illness”, when it was proposed to administer electric shock treatment to me, when I survived suicide, in all of that time I had never been given or asked to take as much as a blood test, an x ray or a scan to ascertain the so called chemical imbalance in my brain that would prove that I have this “so called disease”. There is no test to prove the theory that I have “so called mental illness”. Let me repeat that, there is no test!
 
Yet, companies like Johnson & Johnson perpetuate the disease theory to further their market share of the multi billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that surrounds mental health. I have no issue with the benefits of some drugs and their short term use, but common sense tells me that for science to evolve from theory, to quantifiable science, it needs to develop a test that proves the theory, we have no test, none exists and Mr Stoffels closing and triumphant remark that good health equals good business, as I said in my intervention, needs a reality check because in the case of the pharmaceutical industry bad health equals better business.

The afternoon session on depression and suicide, chaired by our Irish Minister for Equality, Disability, and Mental Health. Ireland, John Moloney TD. It was again distressing to listen to Kelly L Posner Phd, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Columbia, USA call on the forthcoming EU pact to take on board as a matter of urgency the need to MASS SCREEN our children so that we can have early diagnosis and early drug intervention. Is she proposing that we identify difference and uniqueness, those things that history has proven develop into creativity and art, and to cure us all into robotic sameness? 

To listen to her unchallenged statements stating that the increase in suicide was due to the fact that people were NOT taking their medications. Again, the other side of this argument needs to be quantified and the research proving the opposite to be true i.e. that the medications themselves are a major cause of suicide needs to find a voice and a place within this forthcoming pact. I did make an intervention on this matter but Professor Posner had approximately 15 minutes to make her presentation and my intervention was limited to one minute. I would appeal for balance to be taken into consideration. 

We heard statements telling us that we had a suicide every 9 minutes in Europe. We heard of the urgent and compelling need to address this whole issue of “so called mental illness”. There are more and more of us out there who are the true experts on how to survive and thrive and be proud of madness and understand the gifts that it gives to us. We are the community within your community that give you art, music, drama, poetry and you lock us out of society and bury us under ignorance, prejudice and stigma. 

I was chatting to the lads in the tents down the South Mall last week.
One lad rang, St John Ó Donnabháin asked me to go in, meet, look about, have a chat. “How will I know you St John,” says I. “I have a long red beard and long red hair,” says he. (He forgot to tell me of the bright, sparkling, so alive eyes and the huge smile that so welcomed me). “I have a grey ponytail and I’m in a wheelchair,” says I, “we will never find each other, you wear a yellow button hole and I will wear a red one”.

St John, of Occupy Cork, showed his only flaw early on when he told me he was a Kilkenny man! They were from all over Ireland, in the cold, in tents. Debating! Subject: How do we improve the way we live, earn, save, spend our national economy.
Not just our money, but our complete economy, our real human wealth. How we run the country. Not a small topic. But these are not small minded people; they act. They look slightly un-kempt, but one lad was sweeping the park, another was cooking hot soup, another was sitting eating it. A beautiful young woman wrapped in a blanket, could be clubbing, wasn’t. A tall lad picked up his guitar, gave it a lash!
They are the victims of greed, they were all smiling, and they are a generation who has been betrayed. My generation was the richest in the history of this state. We blew it. That is our right, it was our time. What we did not have the right to do, was to mortgage the future of this generation. We were on watch.
As we partied, the barbarians came in the open gates. In pin stripped suits they entered the pin, and electronically transferred not our money, but the money of this generation and the next; wrecked havoc. We were still on the piss when they left, the party went on. Those guarding the economy were at the best parties and when the robbery was discovered we gave them huge retirement packages and sent then off.

Down on the Mall in the Occupy Cork soup kitchen I heard intelligent people debating where to go now. To my absolute astonishment and to my great joy, I heard not one word of revenge. There was a dignity in those tents that stunned me. The only angry words were mine. There was joy; there was a sense of a regrowth of community. A sense that having a solution to this impossible economic crisis was not the point, but having the open debate on where we go from here, the point. In an open space, where all will get their say. For three days before I arrived it had lashed rain
They built a symbolic Mongolian yurt to sit in and talk. “How long will you stay?” I asked. “As long as it takes,” they answered without bravado, but with fierce quiet determination.

There was a gap in the space. I did not see one of us, my generation, sitting in the cold drinking potato soup. WE screwed this up, no point in denying it, by saying we did not know. We were being told and those who told us we were partying too hard, were told to commit suicide!
We lost a sense of real community in our pretence of real wealth. I was in Fitzgerald’s Park on Sunday. I met a young old friend, with her husband and her three babies. Susan said when the first was born, now five, the child got money for her christening presents, her third, ten weeks ago, got saving boxes.
Jill, my daughter, was there as were my four grandchildren. It was gratifying to hear these two mothers of young children speak with hope of a regrowth of community out of this mess. If my grandchildren grow up in a better Ireland, one not dependant on greed to motivate, it will be because of lads like St John who sat in the cold.
Will Simon Coveney, Kathleen Lynch, Micky Martin, John O’Brien break out the sleeping bags spend a week under canvass in solidarity?

Corporate greed = mental illness; I saw that sign on the Occupy Galway march. I am inclined to agree. Both are evil and lead to so many people being hurt. Both are invented ideologies,  created by greed. Both are based on a complicating of simple language. Madness is a part of humanity as old as life. So is greed.
‘Mental illness’ has taken madness to a new level of the corruption by a section of our society, the medical model; the victims: the community. Corporate greed has taken human greed to a new level of corruption by financial institutions; the victims: the community.

A possible solution to both, an expanding debate on human economy. Local being global. We are all in danger of being swamped by the markets.The markets are nothing more then educated gamblers who cheat. Have we sold democracy to the markets and are bond holders more powerful than our politicians? 
One thing is sure. The financial stress I collapsed under in the eighties/ nineties is rampant again. As black as this despair appears to you now, this too will pass. We can all come out of this, we always do. If we do, it will be in no small measure due to the courage of St John and the others huddled in a tent in the cold, simply but eloquently saying ENOUGH!

Does greed equal success and does success equal greed? I so hope not. I have met many successful rich people in my life who were never greedy. It is easy to agree that we should have a minimum standard of living for everybody, i.e. heath, education, housing, income whatever. But how do you decide on the maximum standard of living?

Dear Sir,
I appeared recently on the RTE.1. TV show the Big Bite. The subject for discussion on the day was Mental Health. I was on the panel as a former user of the Mental Health services. At the beginning of what was my first appearance on TV I was asked the first question. During my answer I described a snapshot of the living conditions of a lady in the long term care of a well-known Cork institution. St Patrick’s Hospital Sarsfield Court. A lady in the employ of the health board accompanied me on the day, and as it happens also by a camera crew from Rte’s Would You Believe programme. They could not film the lady, or any other human being, except myself, we were in fact not allowed into the hospital even though RTE guaranteed not to show any patient or staff. We were restricted to the grounds.

Despite an appeal to the minister, whose spokesman told us to apply to the project manager, who told us to apply to the commutations dept. Who finally relented to allow us to film on the grounds, under strict conditions, and under the watchful eye of an executive of that dept. who accompanied us during our time on the grounds. I understand the need to protect the right to privacy, but you would think that a guarantee from another public body to protect that privacy would suffice to gain us access to the interior of the hospital, we simply wanted one shot. As this is after all a public hospital. Her conditions were as follows.

I met her in the grounds in February; it was a bitterly cold day. She was dressed in a summer frock, had no socks, stockings of any kind, a pair of men’s shoes, her hair was dishevelled, she looked awful. She was frozen; her legs were blue with the cold, chaffed. When I asked her why she had no warm tights she replied that they had none in the hospital. I found her a cigarette, and she shuffled off to smoke it. 

We are here to discuss policy. We are starting a journey going in the wrong direction. Good policy is useless, unless it is backed up by good practice, and you cannot have good practice while the law allows the medical model to revert to force as a last resort in the treatment of so called “mental illness”. Emotional distress is not a disease of the brain, the chemical imbalance theory is just that a theory, it is not scientifically proven in any acceptable format.  During the course of my research I have spoken to scientists, neurologists, specialists in deep brain scan imaging and critical psychiatrists and all are agreed that the theory of chemical imbalance is in fact just that, nothing more than a theory. Then you should NOT be allowed to prescribe psychotropic drugs with known side effects up to and including suicide unless you can prove the theory by test. Medical science has to date no test whatsoever to ascertain a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Yet by looking and talking to me for 20 minutes a psychiatrist or a GP can tell me I have a disease in the most complicated organ in my body, my brain, can tell me the level of my chemical imbalance, can name the disease and label me, and his greatest achievement he can prescribe the level and type of medication to correct that imbalance.
What a genius!!
He never even took my pulse!!
Once he has the label then he can forget me John and treat the manic depressive. He has created the diagnostic box, and John can be ignored. I’m gone I have become the label.
Now if I resist the treatment and if I get angry (which is ok by the way) and if my anger turns to aggression in trying to protect myself from this breach of my human rights, then we in Ireland have given the right of law to the medical model to lock me up for 21 days without trial and they have the right to force treat me with any or all medications, up to and including ECT, during that 21 days.
And we are here to discuss in part stigma. Stigma derives mainly from fear and ignorance. I was afraid of people with ‘mental illness’ before I discovered the normality of madness when I had my own breakdown.  I was afraid of the steryotype manic depressive, knowing as I did the he was dangerous we had to create, and continue to, a special goal, with doctors and nurses as wardens to protect the public from him.
We recently had a report in Ireland ‘The Ryan Report’ into child sexual abuse in our institutions and to paraphrase its findings ‘if you give the right under the law to use force to one section of the community over another then abuse is bound to follow’

Everybody: forced incarcerated and forced treated is a subject of abuse, and because this abuse is being carried out by a caring profession as was our church then nobody wants to hear that such a respectable pillar of our community, the medical model: because this is not just doctors and nurses it is the civil servants who type up the orders the police who carry them out it is all of you who know of these practices and remain silent. The hospital porters the gardeners the cleaners all know and remain silent as most people in this hall are silent on this issue of the abuse of human rights in the use of force in the medical model of treatment of madness.

Funny, I lecture to psychiatric nurses on occasion and they ask frequently “do you realise the stigma we work under” funny that isn’t it that they too feel their profession to is stigmatised because of the undercurrent of belief within the wider community that these are not nice places to be, nobody wants to go to hospital but everybody is glad to avail of the services of a general hospital, so many of my friends in the mad community are afraid of the services available to them because of the deep seated fear created by the threat of force, psychiatric hospitals are generally perceived to be unpleasant places.  I once had a psychiatrist reply to an article I wrote in the paper where she accused me of Hollywood stereotyping, psychiatry created that stereotype not its patients.

I meet with psychiatrists and they fall into four categories those who defend the use of forced ECT.  Those who state they never use it but do not condemn it. Those that use forced ECT and declare they are very uncomfortable afterwards. Is that their conscience speaking to them and their training is such that they have learned not to listen to that inner voice?  And finally, critical psychiatry, who are beginning to find their voice. It takes great strength of character to raise your voice against your own very close knit profession. But there are some brave psychiatrists out there working in the health system who say that psychiatry has lost its way and needs to redefine its self.
So we can have hope that this will change I just hope it does not take too long for those being abused right now.
We are going in the wrong direction but the opportunity is there to repair the compass force has no real validity within a caring profession the weakness of the medical model is its very inability to operate without the use of that force. We must stop force now in order to make progress towards policy that will see John the human being and not the diagnostic box formally known as John.

Recovery is the new buzz word in Mental Health. Everybody wants to talk about recovery, and of course recovery is such a wonderful thing everyone should be talking about it. Different forms of treatment have become a contentious and never ending debate.
 
Nobody seems to talk about prevention and how to encourage prevention so let me throw a few thoughts at you, just to open up a debate. Is prevention of so called “mental illness” or as I prefer to call it madness, possible?  I am of the opinion and through my own personal history, know that it is. 
Had I been able as a teenager to walk into my mother and father and say to them I was experiencing very strange thoughts, that I was getting bouts of extraordinary sadness, that I was full of irrational anger and that I needed to talk to them as simply as I could state I’m getting a runny nose I think I’m getting the flu. If I could have gone to my friends and told them of the troubled thoughts that were in my head, discussed them and by sharing them got rid of them, I firmly believe that those destructive thoughts and feelings would not have lain dormant in me. 

In the way that the San Andreas Fault lies dormant under San Francisco and that like that fault opened up in 1906, when the stress became intolerable. So did all of the distress that I had buried, and had lain unspoken and unheard within me for the whole of my life opened up, when I became under severe stress in my mid forties.
I collapsed into that personal San Andreas fault that is the pit of despair that we call depression and even at 45, because of ignorance stigma and prejudice, when I began to cry as I did in my office, and had to turn my face in shame and hide from my colleagues because I passionately knew that if I shared my feelings with them they would not understand. Because we are shunned by the community at large for having the “weakness” of depression and at that time I was one of those who believed it was a weakness. 

Therefore we have to hide it, and the depression becomes deeper until we do as I did attempt to kill ourselves because there is nowhere else to go.
Let it be said, I am one of the lucky ones, I have a wife and children who love me who never stopped loving me and never stopped caring for me yet despite that fact I made their life intolerable and while this was not totally due to stigma it certainly had a great deal of responsibility.

The old lad with the gimp, limped his way to the Áras; galloping. Broke his knee, fighting for human rights, in the jungle of South America. He served his time to the state, to the citizens of Ireland over long years of public service. He has been justly rewarded.
Old age put on the scales; experience honour, decency, goodness, tipping the balance, common sense. And the people have spoken.
This election has been fascinating and filthy, on so many levels.
A vindication of so many who believe that age is no barrier to achievement. Well we are guaranteed rhyme and can expect intelligent reason, and if the arts provide anything, it’s a bit of craic.

The IRA man who never was; put the poorly sighted frontrunner in his sights and pulled the trigger. The frontrunner; he fell over the envelope he forgot to tell of, there was no skipping away from that. Fianna Fáil, who gave Seán no support, broke him in the end. People love the truth. If Sean had said: ‘I was a member of Fianna Fáil, a good one, I raised funds, I sold expensive tickets, I was never in a real decision making position, I left,’ it may have been different. But that left him with the problem of how he did business, questions not fully explained; not only hang about, they hang you. Mad Pride Ireland were requested to meet and brief Sean Gallagher, we did in the Briar Rose; he was an impressive listener. You don’t meet many of them.
The wee man from the north, the fighting peacemaker. These lads are official pros, was Martin in both? He said “no” and Vincent Brown started throwing books, like a teenager from Sandy Row throwing bricks. The questioning was truly savage, Miriam O’Callaghan throwing a hissy fit, there was murder in the air. Then Pat Kenny provided an ambush site, and the bomb exploded.

That envelope exploded and a great campaign imploded, there and then. The comment of the campaign from Norris; “I like Seán Gallagher, I really do but the reference of the envelope, I think unfortunate.” Well smack my gob. The dragon sent to his den.
And then the only Gay in the race started going on. He had pull. A plank of his campaign, suicide! Suicide - is it possibly the only method of dying that you can prevent with love, hope, and life? Not a word about any of those but reams on lack of resources. When asked who would be his first guest in the Áras he answered, Dan Neville President Irish Association of Suicidology. Who came up with that title and idea? The basic ingredient of good mental health is hope I heard no hope in Gay’s message.

He was supposed to bring hope to the mental health of a depressed nation. Sadness hung over Gay Mitchell the whole of his campaign. But where were the smiles, the joy of life, did Fine Gael pick the wrong apple when Cox was piped?
Norris. Is he the best president we will never have? The full truth is such an expensive gift when friends become affected by your need to declare. Loyalty has a huge price. But this was a race to the highest office in the land. Those whose judgment came down honourably on the side of friends but at the cost of the public good, then maybe those decent lads should not enter the race in the first place.
David is possibly one of the most loved men in Ireland, I hope he feels that love now, he will need it. But Jasus why did he not tell Vincie: “This is the name of my solicitors and these are the instructions I received from them, I am following my legal advice”. The unable to work in a Trinity theatre lecturing and being able to operate as a full time senator orating and heckling in the house, really kicked his crutch from under his oxter.
Dana waving the constitution like a bible belt born again Christian up to her waist in the full flood of indignant righteousness. Her Te Deum, an unending liturgy the advent of which the good people of Ireland were unrepentant in their rejection. In the blue ridge mountains of Kentucky family feuding is an obligation to membership.

Singing holy songs is okay, until copyright gets in the way. Again the truth drip fed only creates a hole, like acid. When the truth is spilled out it flows away, cleansing all in its path. Her campaign had a lot of hot air, but not enough to blow up a flat tyre! All kinds of everything, just not specific enough. A nice, pious woman. Presidential?
Mary the third is a conundrum. This woman did too much voluntary work, she sat on too many boards, gave too much of her time for the public good, seventeen unpaid voluntary outweighs three paid state on any good sceptic’s scales of membership of boards. Mary Davis came to Cork at her own expense to launch the first Mad Pride Ireland Family day. She is still a friend to Mad Pride and to me. When it came to organizing races she was the most experienced runner in the race.

Taking part, the most important thing, to have fought well. But did this decent woman deserve to come last? Her being last says a lot about how we as a society, regard social entrepreneurs against financial entrepreneurs. But again €150,000 is well paid volunteerism, maybe it will open the debate on the salaries of our CEO’s in the voluntary sector! Not before time.
Spare a thought here for those who stood, spent, and lost without complaint their own money when you sip your pint in satisfaction, at the cutting comment that has caused hilarity, while you hide in the anonymity of the crowd. These great people stood for us. We should honour them, all of them.
The media has proved again it has great influence. Did the media use its power with the honour decency and good judgment demanded by them of the candidates? But then, we the public, buy gossip!

Since I founded the Full Shilling with Kevin Foley a year ago now, I meet every week with other members of the mad community, we sit and we talk. The rules are very breaucratic, there are no rules. If you meet your friends tonight in the pub or over a coffee would you have an agenda? Would you have a facilitator? Would you tolerate it if you were told what you could not talk about before you went in? I don’t think so why should we? 

Funding is a major problem!! We need NONE, we don’t want any, it would be the ruination of us because with funding come rules and we don’t want any rules. We have the rules of normal society. So you buy your own coffee and we give Kevin 50c each as he sends a text to each of us weekly to remind us of next weeks meeting, that’s it. 

But by listening to the members of the Full Shilling, every one of us has something in common.  We all know beforehand when we are going to have an attack of depression or psychosis or whatever the hell you want to call it. The black dog, the black cloud, we all know when its coming on, and we are in general agreement that it would be wonderful, if instead of having to go through the route of medication and hospital, if we had access to a safe house, run by us that was not overwhelmed by bureaucracy, health and safety and RULES.
Where we could go and allow our anger and our anguish and despair to dissipate into listening ears.  Where we could be angry in safety, where we could be, a pain in the arse with dignity, where our difference would be unremarkable. As many of us have experienced, and it has to be said here that if taking medication works for you the blessings of God on you and continue to take it, but there are many of us out there who it has not worked for and who urgently need such a place of safety to retreat to.

I and so many others will now testify that we are no longer dizzy from the revolving door of re admittance upon re admittance into mental hospitals since we have found a place of safety and dignity to be who we are. So often that place of safety and dignity is in ourselves, we simply need space to find that place.
Is it too much of an ask that the services would look at the simplicity of a safe house to prevent people like myself and 25% of the population of this country potentially falling into despair. 

No matter where you look statistically the present system is failing. The prescribing of medications is going through the roof, the instants of suicide is going through the roof it is now greater than road deaths in this country. The diagnosis and labelling of people with “mental illness” is going through the roof.  Logically when something doesn’t work you should stop it and do something else.
 
You will be told by those that support this present system, that the main issue, if not the only issue, is one of lack of resources. Yet we have never spent more money on health, and let it be said on mental health, despite the fact that the share of the cake is falling in statistical terms. The amount of money spent has never been greater and yet the service is getting worse.

I would suggest to you that the problem lies with the status quo within the services themselves and their fear of change and the unwillingness to listen to us who are trying to tell them what we need and their insistence on us rather accepting what they insist on making available. 
I was brought to Brussels recently by Kathy Sinnot MEP with the Carers Association and the politicians and the bureaucrats were outlining the policy they were about to introduce, while the real experts were, with exasperation, passionately trying to tell them what it was that they needed. Yet the feeling that came across from the top table, was one of ingratitude by the carers for not accepting this gracious policy that was about to be imposed on them. 

You see why can’t the system knock at my door, come in, talk to my wife and myself. Ask us what do we need, and to be flexible enough to provide that need rather than insist on supplying what we don’t need and considering us to be awkward when we tell them that what they have to offer does us no good.
I met a couple recently who had a wheelchair allocated to them that they could not get in the doors of their house!!

We speak of outreach in the vision for change and multi disciplinary teams.  Let me request that the person among you who has had a house call from a consultant psychiatrist recently. Please write and let me know that doctors name.

This concerns you. I have a little story. I watched the movie on RTE 2 The Magdalene Sisters last night, with my wife, and we were horrified. How could we have lived through those times and not done anything!

I carry even more guilt. As a pupil of the North Mon I watched those “Girls” being marched into the city, in single file, in their brown uniforms. Even as a child I knew they were all “fallen women”. I was programmed by society to be blind to the cruelty of what I was looking at.
I am fifty five now, when I was thirty I was the President of the North Mon PPU. We held a Christmas party every year for the “Girls” in St Vincent’s who worked in the laundries. Our function was to dance with the “Girls”. Who ranged from 20 to 80? This was difficult, as they seemed to be nervous and not a little weird. (have to work on this)

When the dance finished we were taken for tea and cakes in the parlour, where we were served by the “Girls” and congratulated by the nuns for our Christianity. We went home with a glow and spoke of how weird those girls were and how great the nuns were to look after them.
We were as blind then as you are now. What happened to those “Girls” is happening right now to people who are in the care of this state. Those that are living with “Mental illness”. Those who are in long term care. Those that are sectioned under the mental health act.

I heard recently of a young lady who is locked up for a number of years now the reason given by her psychiatrist and accepted by the tribunal was that if she was released she might be promiscuous.
Those having forced electric shock treatment administered today, those that are being forced to take medication, held down by nurses while medication is being injected into them. Those who are in “jail” we call them lock up wards but they are jails, because they are different.

Those who make up 50% of the homeless in this country, who we know, are suffering with “mental illness”. Yet we walk pass with impunity to our conscience. If they had cancer sitting on the bridge we would howl with indignation at the neglect.
We are told that we establishing outreach in our new health services. When I see a Consultant Psychiatrist stretch out his hand to the boy or girl sitting on the bridge with their backs to the wind then I will believe we have significant outreach.

We know that as we speak a house in Charleville Co Cork is being picketed by neighbours to stop those with “Mental Illness” living in the community.
I tell you now that my friend, an asylum seeker, a concert flautist from Armenia is in jail, on medication for “Mental illness”. For which he has been treated for the pass three years in Cork. Where he has lived for the passed five years and we are going to throw him out. Waiting to be deported to substandard treatment. I do not have space here to go into these horrific conditions. Suffice to say that cage beds are a norm i.e. a cage is placed over the bed and the “patient” is left there.
But this is about you Joe public. Do not be in the position of trying to explain to your young adults, when you are watching a movie in 2030, as to how you could live in 2005 and do nothing.

Monkeys with your hands over your mouths, eyes, and ears. Raise your voice, open your eyes, and listen to the cries for help. Cries from patients and their helpless families. Remove the stigma. Allow us who live everyday with the “normality of madness” the dignity to be very “normally ill”.

Shaki Mahony - the fella had a touch of St Vita dance, hands shaking likes leaves in the autumn wind and the building game was great for nicknames. Do ye remember the guy from Saudi Arabia back in the 70s?  Sheikh Yamani, he took the price of oil to record heights, and this union rep was the Cork version.
He walked across the site and I turned in my overalls, to my more experienced mate. “He will be looking for the union dues, what do we do?” “The same as last week,” says John, “we will tell him, we will pay him next week”. So to read in this paper last week that the union had €800,000 in funds was stunning. To read that the funds have gone missing is not, according to legend, unprecedented.

My father’s father, and his father’s father were plasterers. All my brothers (no, not my union brothers, my real brothers) were plasterers. The family tried to educate me; failed. I had a go at plastering. I never served my time to the trade. Bluffed my way into the union; more later!
We, the McCarthy brothers, were all members of the union. I don’t know about the rest of my brothers but I never knew we had €800,000 in the bank. We lived up in Church Ave behind the Cathedral when I was a teenager. A job I had every week was to take my father’s dues to the rooms. I think it was either five or ten bob. It was an honourable obligation that he pay his dues. My father was a Labour/Larkin man to the bones of him. Hated Dev and mourned Collins. Unions were run by volunteers back then, newish organizations flexing their muscles.
He tells a great story of an AGM of the union back in the day, when the treasurer read his report and announced he had 18 pounds 14 shillings and 6 pence halfpenny in the funds. In a flash a member’s hand shot up. “I propose we drink the funds.”

Another member’s hand: “I second that”, a major debate and the funds are taken downstairs to Clancy’s and drank! I love to believe that it is true. 
To work in the building game back in the day before health and safety and ANCO (FÁS), who, my father claimed ruined the trades, was great craic in the summer and a nightmare in the winter.

The characters were something else. Larger than life, rough and rude men, mixed with the most Christian and kind men. For the most part the Christians worked for the established builders where they had a steady income and regular work. They worked for the rate, paid the union dues, a pension, they took the wage packet home, and their sons became engineers and quantity surveyors.
The rough and the ready worked in the main for subies, on the lump. You were paid according to the yards plastered or the rooms finished, the more plaster you spread the more money you made. In the main they drank. They drank huge amounts of alcohol.
The worst thing you could do with these men was to give them a sub. A few bob in advance. The stories these men could invent to get a sub, would put the literary class of Ireland to the pin of their collar to match. To bury the same grandmother three times, was not uncommon. The child sick, school uniforms could have been bought in Brown Thomas or Cash’s as it was then. Pawn the tools! But the extraordinary thing is that the lads who drank were the most superb tradespeople, their standard of work fantastic, but the minute they got a few bob, it was off to the pub, drink, craic, song. Totally irresponsible but, jasus, you would never be bored. The conditions when I went to work my summers with my brothers who were subbies (subcontractors, a new breed back then), were to say the least primitive. I have fond memories of discussions about what was in the lunch at ten o’clock tea.

Shilling a tonne corned beef, salad unheard of, monkey food, black bananas made the night before, cheese was Calvita, and the triangles in silver paper the sign of snobbery.
Ham! Only and rarely, of a Monday. A bone off the Sunday joint well gnawed before it hit the hut, if the site had a hut. Mostly you sat outside around an open fire, the water boiled in a billy can, you brought a pinch of tea, pinch of sugar, and a small screw cap bottle of milk. If your lunch was stolen it was blamed on a dog or a mason.
We were on a site with a hut once and every day at ten and one o’clock a few bricks were tossed in to drive the rats out. We had another site in Blackpool building a warehouse. The toilet was a plank across a slight bend in the river. The job possibly had 20 men, it was summer and the river dried up. An apprentice carpenter cut the plank halfway through from the bottom, the foreman sat on the half sawn plank. He had a soft landing! He exploded back up multi coloured, shouting like a bull and we hosed him down. He went back to work. Having written the horror of that scene down, I suppose you had to be young and be there!
Your family name indicated you were a plasterer; McCarthy, Kavanagh, Matin, Sisk. I was newly married man in 1974, on the road as a salesman away from home, not good. So I took a job on the Pfizers building site, my brother Liam was a subbie there. In ten years things had changed. A security guard on the gate,  asked for my union card, I was never a member, never served my time. Off with me to the rooms and asked for a card.
“Who are you?” I was asked. “My father was Old Irons (my father’s nickname).”“Go way ou dat, sure you must be a plasterer”. Seven years’ apprenticeship thrown out the window by my family history within the trade!
I served my time over the phone from then on talking to my brother Liam. But that’s another story. The nicknames were fascinating and varied and had meaning: Banana Bill, Henry the

Eight, Tom the devil, Ice cream Mickey, Fair dues Fair dues, Diesel oil, Tom the Yank, the Chicago Kid,  Small Tommy, Tom the Woman, Old Irons, (my father) Young Old Irons (his sons) and Rusty Irons (my brother Liam is foxy), the Rope Walker, Brophy, Chest of Medals, (he won a competition for plasterering), The Dazzler (rabbits), Dinny Dah, Skinsey.
How would all these past members react to the news of missing funds? I like to imagine that the figure would stun them, but to have missed the opportunity would drive a few of them mad!

You have to wonder why it is always in the reverse, when you hear a debate on Pat Kenny frontline or Joe Duffy on the state of general health services, that you will hear patients and their carers adversely affected by poor services in general health being allowed shout out loud at the minister without being restrained on their opinion.

It is never a debate on whether the general medical care on offer is the best we can get, we all agree the HSE is so up to date on procedures, and on medical science. The problem across the board in general medicine always seems to revert back to where and when these services are delivered but very rarely on how or indeed whether those who access them are adversely affected by those services.

With mental health the issue is very rarely centered on the where or when but almost exclusively on how. 

There was not a patient “cured” by conventional medicine paraded on the Pat Kenny frontline show, there was no need we know what they do is backed up by science and that it works. Administration and service delivery the problem.

Yet when you organise a debate on mental health we have to parade those who benefit from the service, in order to balance the debate, I watched PAT KENNY tonight and not a positive voice, a patient paraded, from those cured from cancer heart disease whatever: none needed to balance the debate, we all know oncology,(heart doc) a another have science to support their procedures. They don’t need to parade their successes before us to prove they are good doctors.

Yet when we who the mental health system fails; speak out, the media, academia, psychiatry, feel they have to balance the debate by the parading those they would state had benefited from the abuse we are trying to address.

Why is it that psychiatry of all the medical sciences, seems to have a passion to “exhibit” those it purports to have healed. What is they fear, psychiatry, what is wrong with what they do, that compels them to be so defensive when their “science” is seriously challenged.

Would the oncologist need to defend his science by parading patients: or could he do it with science, research turned to science, by the proof of a test.

You see this delete 59b debate did not originate as a debate on “medical procedure” it is a debate on human rights, but it rapidly evolving into law and a boarder discussion on some procedures.

We are at the point now when we are going into a review of the whole mental health act.

It is now time for you the public to start to ask the questions,

How do the pills work?

How do you test for diagnosis? (I am told, we have up to 600 “mental illness” now)

How do you prove ECT does what it says on the tin through science not anecdote?

How do you identify “mental illness” as a disease of the brain: by a scan, or even deep brain imaging?

If there is no medical test then how is a diagnosis reached?

Is all diagnosis then simply an opinion of the Doctor you meet?
These questions are not complicated, to me, they are very simple, surly, deserve answer in simply written form.

For instance how do you test for “mental illness” surely psychiatry can name the test or truthfully state it has none.

If I was to ask an oncologist “can you test me for a disease called cancer” he would answer “yes”

If I ask an cardiologist can you test me for heart disease he would simply answer “yes”

If I asked a psychiatrist “can you test for a disease called “mental illness” he would answer “well it is not as simple as that”!!!!

This is not complicated; either they can in a simple format of words like YES or NO answer what we ask. The reality is they cannot and then imply that we are too stupid to understand why they cannot. 

I have had the great privilege lately to be accepted into the Public Health Service.
I am not so happy that the need arose but I am overwhelmed by the standard of service that I have been given to date.
I have been a member of the VHI all my life, in the private health sector, and m grateful for the those times my health was protected by that private sector.

Now what I need is not available in that same private sector and I, like you, have been listening to the horrors of neglect they experience from the HSE and their employees.
I have Motor Neuron Disease as a reality in my life now. My muscles are fading away. My legs, my arms, my voice, going to go. Not a pleasant thought but so be it, it happens, so be it. We were scared, Liz and I, and were in the VHI, private, but we never got a call from those we pay, just to say how are ye.
So we are in the public service, my God the difference. Help is all over us, it is fantastic, wonderful. The phone has hardly stopped we now have a social worker, a phsio, an OT, a public health nurse, a consultant neurologist, access to all the physical aids you can imagine.

Dear Joe Duffy,

May I please relate the following to you? I was listening to your very moving show yesterday Monday 15/3/10, re the victims of Fr Brendan Smith and the fact that Cardinal Brady knew and hid behind cannon law, to explain his not taking action, to stop Smith.

Interesting that a lady said it was all so long ago, should we move on?

Mad Pride Ireland in the guise of myself and my wife Liz have been invited to the Aras for St Patricks day,  a great honour for the work we try to do, so we came up for a few days.

Hence we were by sheer coincidence listening to that very powerful catalogue of abuse, especially from the lady who was raped as a child, when we arrived at Glencree.

A poignant coincidence of time and place.

I have spent the last few weeks, at the request of his family trying to get a young man out of a psychiatric gaol in Cork.

He is 29 and now in his fourth year of incarceration. His mother signed him in: now under the 2001 Mental Health Act she is powerless to get him out, and she wants to.

His partner and mother of his child has no legal voice, she wants to take him out. As she said to me, he looks like he is dying in there.

When I went to see him I could smell him from six feet, he was dressed in rags, and his teeth are rotten stumps in his head from largactol he tells me. He wants to come out.

The nearest he has to law is a tribunal set up the Mental health commission, where over 90% of the evidence given by treating psychiatrists to date has been accepted by the tribunals!! (ref MHC).

People incarcerated under the Mental Health Act are in the main excluded from common law. To have a case of someone incarcerated by the Mental Health Act brought before the normal courts takes years, without financial resources, and if while you wait you strongly protest the injustice, this is further evidence of your “mental illness” so more forced drugs and forced ECT and it’s all very legal!

So to my call to your programme, I was trying put the case to your researcher yesterday, that there is abuse both psychical, sexual, moral and mental, going on in psychiatric hospitals(gaols) now in 2010, and 99% of those locked up have never committed a crime of any kind.

Society has no allowance for our different behaviour, and families get tired from the lack of help and the isolation caused by stigma, so we are locked away, and you can forget us, we are odd after all.

I told her I am just completing a documentary with RTE radio of a lady raped at 16 locked up at 17 now celebrating her 78 birthday, she never came out! 62 years for being raped. (The rapist by the way was never charged; too much shame for the girls family)

I have been asked to be part of a research team for a TV series that I hope will focus not on resources but no those abused, and she began to tell of your legal difficulties in airing this type of story, I asked if this was not the same type of defence Cardinal Brady used, he was restricted by the rules of Cannon Law!

And this happened:

“Ah give me a break I’m actually not going to listen to this”, she said as she hung up.

Did I just hear an echo of times past in the stories of those who now tell of being ignored?

As I keep saying; no wonder we nearly despair trying to air the voice of the voiceless but we will not stop.
Maybe next time.

I am including a piece from my new weekly column in the Cork independent, I hope you enjoy it.

PS.
http://www.delete59b.com is not about stopping the use of ECT nothing to do with ECT per say, (as your researcher implied when we spoke yesterday) it is very specific; it is to stop the use of forced ECT and that alone.  Force.

It is about power, and the abuse of it. If you wish to be informed then check out Dr Pat Bracken’s speech to a recent Oireachtas committee at Lienster Hous, Mr Paddy McGowan and I also addressed this committee.
http://www.delete59b.wordpress.com

I wish you well you are a very powerful man!

This post is about the economy; please read it to the end.
Hypocrisy, to quote Samuel Johnson, is “him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practice”. Johnson further states he who “may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself”.
It was our wedding anniversary last Friday. I was about to tell you which one but Liz just smacked me on the back of the neck. We were on our way for our annual treat to Parknasilla. Great deals at this time of year. Ye know I am in a wheelchair these days, so forward planning and detail are vital. We have to have a business outlook in everything we do. Some thought, consideration, feeling for each other. Now disabled toilets are hard to find. So I rang the Park Hotel Kenmare, to hear “yes, we do have a disabled toilet,” as you would expect. It is an expensive place but we were only having coffee, and, this is very important, we paid our own bill! Read on.
We have coffee and I request the disabled toilet. The Park Hotel Kenmare is owned by expert hoteliers, the Brennan brothers Francis and John. They have a show on TV telling people how to improve and run their hotels and an embarrassed staff member tells me they do not have a disabled toilet after all. But says he will take me upstairs to an unoccupied room in the lift. Needs must.

Do ye know Colm McCarthy, UCD economist? He is a bit of a TV star, Vincent Browne, 6pm news on RTÉ, newspapers, everywhere. Chairman of An Bord Snip Nua. This from the Phoenix: “There is nobody with a greater appetite for slash and burn agenda?” Again from the Phoenix: Colm McCarthy “on the Late Late scared the daylights out of middle Ireland with predictions of financial armageddon unless public expenditure was slashed”. He is so pragmatic on the fact we are all broke. Ireland has no money. Everybody must take a hit. There is no way to avoid the pain.
We also know, we need leadership by example. We have ministers walking into the Dáil now, going to Farmleigh by bus!

Here I am being pushed into the lift and rushing down the hall of a five star hotel in Kerry, when along comes the above mentioned Colm McCarthy.
I recognized him, but I’m a bit of an idiot. I thought this busy economic expert was on holidays and needed a break. So I asked him was he enjoying Kerry? He seemed preoccupied, said “beautiful autumn”, the lift opened and he dashed to a room on the right. I am pushed into another unoccupied bedroom with a standard toilet, not a grab rail in sight.
The embarrassed staff member left me to get on, and Liz and I left. Things got worse in Parknasilla; we got the wrong room, they took the bathroom door off in the wrong room, my wheelchair still did not get in. Anyway.
Back to the economy. We are on the way home on Saturday morning. I am reading the papers in the back, while my chauffeur Lizzy Mac who stubbornly refuses to wear a cap, is driving. I glance at the business section, page 33 of the other Independent, and there is yer man Colm McCarthy in a photo in the same casual brown suit he had on, when he got into the lift of un Nama-ed five star Kenmare Park Hotel the day before.

Striding behind him is yer man from the IMF, Ajai Chopra. He who demanded our sovereignty as the price of a few bob! Chopra told this nation in no uncertain terms: we, this country, had been living above our means. We had ‘leveraged’ Ireland into an untenable position.
I said to Liz: “Jasus yer man McCarthy is on holidays in Kenmare with yer man Chopra. They must be mates”.
I read on; they are working. Poor old Chopra; it says he lost his luggage. They were in Kerry for three days. The Dublin Economic Workshop, in Kenmare! In a five star hotel the state does not own. All sponsored by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce.

Opening topic: “Understanding the Irish Banking Crisis”.  Jasus lads, you need to spend all that money in a five star hotel in Kerry paid for by Dublin business to discuss that?
How many hotels does this state own in Dublin? Hardship being imposed on this economy but seemingly not on the economists imposing it!
According to the other Independent, the Park Hotel Kenmare was full of economists and stockbrokers; it implied Patrick Honohan, the Central Bank Governor, was there. They said Ireland faces a “lost decade” while these experts guide us through the “deleveraging” process ie paying back the debts of the banks, with our pensions.

That’s macro; micro policy implies, I think, that some people will lose their homes, will not send their children to college, will cry at the airports as they watch the bent backs of another lost generation disappear down the tunnel. What do I know, I am not an economist?
I picked up my iPhone and I rang the hotel. They quoted me €225 per single room per night, and €68 for evening meal. I think it right to assume McCarthy and Chopra did not share a room. I don’t know if they paid their own expenses, maybe they did! I hope they got a special.
But by what standard of judgment did these guys feel the need to bring a Dublin economic meeting to a five star hotel in Kenmare, did they all take public transport? The train does not stop in Kenmare. Maybe they got off in Killarney and then queued up for Bus Éireann?  Is that how the lad Chopra lost his luggage? Was it knocked off, robbed by another economist, or a stockbroker looking for inside information? Some people believe that the financial institutions advised by economists have been robbing this country for years now. Not me!

PS I saw Minister Simon Coveney FG and Michael McGrath FF being interviewed on The Week in Politics on Sunday night from the 5 star Park Hotel Kenmare!!
All in all I found a common thread in the weekend between finding it hard to go for a simple piss and in feeling I was simply having the piss taken out of me. In another column I might tell ye, of the fun Lizzy Mac and I had!

What could go wrong did go wrong all that day.
Nobody seemed to be at the end of a phone, email, nobody replied, I was tired and pissed off. I can’t walk so well, not a hundred feet, I am stuck on this couch, dependant on others goodwill. I so fucking hate that feeling. Dependency. Not really stuck, I can still drive bought a limo for small money a 4 litre Lexus, a magnificent machine.
It gets me around beautifully, glides it is fantastic, pass anything but a petrol station.
I have a walker spoilt by the HSE the public service fantastic.

I have Motor Neurone Disease, it will waste my muscles. Won’t be able to walk, talk, swallow, won’t be able to type!!

Setting up for Mad Pride, working on delete 59b, the legal right force ECT on a patient. I got a publishing deal to produce a book, called ‘The Normality of Madness’. I have two books of poetry on the go, and I write a newspaper column. I never refuse a call from anybody who wants to talk of their distress, be they family or fellow traveller. Isn’t life great!

But today all getting on my nerves, if you will excuse the pun!!

Coming on to evening, early summer, beautiful, sunny balmy day.

Liz was in the garden trying to distract herself for all of this. Fussing about, distracting her soul from reality, could not would not let her pain inflict itself on me. Smiled laughed, loved me so beautifully, with patience and grace.

I put the computer down and walked my yards to the kitchen, picked up a chair and sat on the patio.
It is important to note here that we are blessed we live in heaven, overlooking our entire beloved city of Cork from the lofty heights of Monttenotte.
To the left we see the harbour, Agahada, Rochestown, Douglas Estuary. The sea reflecting the clear bluae of sky threaded with whisps of sirru to the front Ballintemple, Douglas, Donnybrooke, up the green grassey slope heading over the hill(like myself) for Carrigaline and to the left across Turners Cross to The Airport.

No matter what the weather this view has one constant it remains beautiful.

Liz stopped weeding and hoeing, said “gin and tonic” what a great idea and we did we sat and sipped, and we talked.

Held hands brought peace to each other, took breaths, and looked at the view. Reviewed our situation looked at all our gifts, our kids our grandkids. Our life together the laughs, the fun, the blackguarding we did: all those things we got away with. 
Those gentle things that lovers do in the innocence and the bloom of youth.

We sipped gin and wine and we laughed, loved and did not cry.

We talked of my passing on, of her being alone, of how she was so better equipped spiritually to handle being alone then I. And we talked of the spirit, where we had been and where we were going.
I still have no belief in any after life, no need.
I am well loved here, could not ask for more.
Family, friends, sometimes total strangers its great.

I have madness as part of my life, I have found a place of peace for madness in my spirit, I now see it as a gift. The Normality of madness is a great boon to me now, it allows me to value the important things, allows me to absorb love.

The real killer of the discontent you have in your spirit when you fight the normality of madness, is the fact that you cannot absorb love. In fact you reject it, push it away. It is the real reality that causes such sadness, this inability to absord love, that makes you so self obsessed, takes your dignity your pride.

I would take my 2/5 years with this, Motor Neuron, soaking up love rather then 20 years in that desolate place that is depression rejecting love.

If you are a member of the normally mad community you are affected in the whole of your life, by how the law defines you as a “vunerable person” who needs the protection of a separate law outside of the common law.

Suspected criminals; big, small, or petty, blue or white collar, are protected with great vigour by human rights lawyers, to ensure that they have all rights granted to them under the common law protected.

The right to bail!
The right to judge and jury!
The right to trial in public!

Sean Fitzpatrick CEO of Anglo Irish was arrested to be questioned, he could not be held or questioned any longer then 12 hours and then he had to have “licence” signed by a Garda Superintendent. When the questioning finished he had to be released while a case is being built and to allow him to build him a defence.

Justice and a good thing to.

We should ALL have such protection ;( we in the mad community are denied these basic rights) it is what makes this country safe democratic place to live in.

The collapse of Anglo Irish bank has caused misery and pain to so many. Yet the chainman of that company has rights: and quiet rightly those rights have to be protected at all costs.

So many pensioners persuaded to invest in Anglo shares, It is now coming to light those share values were build on sand, the issue of lies and false accounting still to be proved, those values have simply collapsed. A great danger to society as a whole we are all going to have to pay the cost that cost not just financial but emotional so many affected “vulnerable” to the collapse of this financial giant.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST:

My friend Mary24 got drunk and disorderly, nothing serious she and a few of her friends when to the airport with no tickets - a prank - as they wanted to go to Spain. She made a nuisance of herself. Got arrested:

“what are you thinking down the station sleep it off rap on the knuckles sent home.”

You wish; that was 4 years ago she has never come out she is locked away in a psychiatric gaol since. Four years and ongoing now her family believe she is rapidly becoming institutionalized, for being drunk and disorderly.
Under the mental health act we can be locked up for a year at the time, for the whole of our lives, never see a judge or jury, all done behind closed doors( to protect our privacy) by the way.

The rest is pure opinion; in the opinion of her psychiatrist she is “mentally ill” so she is locked up and forced treated.

That last statement is all we know for a fact.

All very normal it happens in Ireland every day to members of the normally mad community we are locked based on opinion and you all accept it as justice.

In the opinion of so many economists, lawyers, politicians and every contributor to Joe Duffy Seanie Fitz is guilty, I have also heard it said that what he did is totally “MAD” and that he must have been “INSANE” to do what he did. But he has rights.

Where are they the men in the white coats? This is such an obvious example of irrational behaviour he is a danger to the whole community.
Why has he not been given a diagnosis’ those in the white coats have so many. And we would never see Sean again, but he has rights under the common law.
Maybe he will do what so many did before sign himself in. Hide, who knows?

Here is the catch 22 if we protest our treatment in these psychiatric gaols and if we get angry at having our human rights withdrawn under the common law, if we protest the treatment “the forced drugging” “the forced ECT”
Then that protest is seen as proof of the need to lock us up in the first place. As our behaviour is the single criteria that psychiatry has in order to come to a diagnosis

“She and I have a commonality under Irish and international law we are “VUNERABLE PEOPLE” we have both been put into a diagnostic box by psychiatry and you society have a duty to protect us from you and ourselves.”

Not as it happens protect us like our constitution insists:
Sean Fitzpatrick by releasing us to prepare a defence BUT BY locking us away out of sight out of mind for the rest of our lives.
Of course Sean Fitzpatrick who it is alleged nearly brought this whole country to its knees and generations of our youth will pick the tab of the collapse of Anglo, will have to have his day in open court before a judge and jury.
Not so myself and Mary both labelled, we you see are “VUNERABLE” so we are tried by tribunals behind closed doors,  in secret, no room for the public, no media box.
No room for a jury no room for a JUDGE.
Don’t be silly we are “VUNERABLE PEOPLE”
WE have no right to appeal

I was asked to write a little on the above.

Oh lord how I love my family, my first thought, yet writing that line has brought tears to the surface of my eyes, isn’t nature a wonderful gift, when you know, learn, and you allow yourself to be open to its lessons.

Tears are to cleanse the spirit, tears of love, sorrow, though such tears are salty; encourage the growth of peace in your spirit, when you lose a loved one:

If, a big if, you let them flow externally, from cheek to lip, while being held in friends and families caring arms. They cure grief.

Tears that we conceal; that flow internally, behind your eyes into your spirit, that we hide with false pride, tears we deny exist within us in the public domain, exhibiting our strength, will flood your heart, and drown your spirit.
That type of false strength, a huge weakness, in the natural cycle of grieving.

A little dignified self pity is so healthy at times of bereavement, so understandable to us all. Yet we see so many at funeral homes holding it all in.

Dignified, self pity, at a time of personal loss, human sadness; not to be confused with obsession of loss.

An essential part of the grieving process is knowing when to let go. To be content with your loss. Honour your loved ones spirit by being at peace with in your own. The greatest compliment to those who loose life is if those they love and leave behind, live life to the full.

Sadness at the loss of a loved one must be expressed.

In the Celtic tradition we very sensibly employed keeners to show the bereaved how to cry, initiate the process.  A wake, is a wake up for a family a sign of life around death. When friends gather bring gifts of sandwiches and booze, “put on de kettle” distract you from reality, a gathering of community to HOLD in a time of sadness.

You have to wonder are funeral parlours such a great idea, oh very convenient take care of the detail very efficient, but can you really replace the wake as a truly practical instrument in the grieving process. (my old friend Val O’Connor will forgive) but I believe that to be true.

We need an undertaker to supply the hearse, do the paper work, open and close the grave. Nothing more, now funerals are like weddings the “breakfast” essential! Where are we going with all this show.

I was at a funeral a few years ago, wake at the house, later as the coffin was being lowered a fellow stood out unannounced and said his recently departed friend would never forgive him if he did not, and he sang.

He brought tears to the family as they proudly cheered and clapped their husband and father down.

All so natural, all so healthy, the joy of that man’s life being expressed to his family at that very last moment they would see his mortal remains.

And the extraordinary thing was we all left that graveyard smiling as we did when we departed from that man in life.
A great and fitting tribute to his existence!
(it has to said when I mentioned wake to Liz she said “ Don’t let it worry you as you have no belief in the afterlife then I will decide”, yeha, fair play to her, she is right)

Natures designs are not accidental they have evolved through time they have purpose, intent, but convention can sometimes dictate to the detriment of the bereaved, block grieving

I am on a time clock in my life as we all are but I have been given an idea when mine will chime for the last time. So life not death has become a favourite topic in my house and how we can best fill that life.

Time constriction by death can lead to such an expansion of time use.

Time knows no real measure or weight on the scale of time well spent.

My father died very unexpectedly,1975, he was a lovely, lovely, so misunderstood gentle man, full of anger and contradiction, with no real loving space granted to him to express and expunge it within his spirit, so to find peace.

I loved him, still love his memory I can feel his touch, see his smile, his frown, I have so much to thank that soft sensitive man for. But I was 25 then just at the beginning of being men together, been a teen and a fool till then. I had started a family my daughter, Jill, 3 months.

I always hugged him kissed him on the top of his bald pate, much to the irritation of his old fashioned male ego. (I’m the baby I’m 60 he would be what, 104 had he lived).

But I knew he knew and we both loved it. No real regrets, he knew I loved him that is enough.

Still, I would love to have had time with him just as a man, given him the space, earned the place of his trust to just tell: if he needed to tell, been an adult friend to dad.

Unexpected death such a hard thing but also a gift. Dad never suffered. He left us gently, quietly, quickly. You will never, no matter how you try, say all you might have said! With unexpected death!

But we must be content in the knowledge that words pale against action in matters of love.

Now that my clock is slowing down we are in the opposite position in this house. We have time and we have a lot of pain, but love is an overwhelming balm when applied gently.

And I have an abundance of that loving balm from my family and my so many really great friends.

We talk of life now that we know of death. I am sad to tell you I have a few years yet so I hope to still write on into the night, as long as the boss in this paper requests and my fingers can type.

Those who lose a child, their resilience, their ability to live on, emerge re-engage, is something I cannot comprehend. It is an extraordinary exhibition of true strength, to live life again after that, most savage of all loss.

Death and pain are on this families radar now, somehow they, these two horses are galloping all around us, and yet we are still young Lizzy Mac and I.

These elements of nature are raging in our extended family and friends. Yet death and pain are powerless in the face of our love for each other.

We know pain and death exist, we cannot ignore them they are manifestly visible, physical, open to sight and sense.

Yet love, unexpressed consciously, but oh so at its best when expressed unconsciously, unconditionally, gently, gestures, smiles and a gentle loving touch.

A joy, for us all, love given and received.

To be in a position to receive such love, that is the real gift. To be in a place of self dignity so as to receive that love.
That is the real privilege of life.

And the true enemy of pain and death.

That love expunges fear, the main weapon of pain and death, replaces it with calm and determination to live all life. (not to be confused with resignation).
That love drives energy where it has no right to exist, drives energy where its fuel is most essential, deep into our spirit, and with that type of energised spirit we human beings are unconquerable!! 

Bereavement is a part of life, death is part of life, religion for some is the consolation, I have no need or want of that (absolutely recognise and acknowledge its power to bring peace if you have a calm and soulful belief in the afterlife), me I like to believe: I will live on in the loving thoughts of those that knew and loved me and when they go: my spirit will go with them.

That I believe should be enough for any human being, and I am well loved!

I so hope, your life is as full! 

I was asked to write a little on the above.

Oh lord how I love my family, my first thought, yet writing that line has brought tears to the surface of my eyes, isn’t nature a wonderful gift, when you know, learn, and you allow yourself to be open to its lessons.

Tears are to cleanse the spirit, tears of love, sorrow, though such tears are salty; encourage the growth of peace in your spirit, when you lose a loved one:

If, a big if, you let them flow externally, from cheek to lip, while being held in friends and families caring arms. They cure grief.

Tears that we conceal; that flow internally, behind your eyes into your spirit, that we hide with false pride, tears we deny exist within us in the public domain, exhibiting our strength, will flood your heart, and drown your spirit.
That type of false strength, a huge weakness, in the natural cycle of grieving.

A little dignified self pity is so healthy at times of bereavement, so understandable to us all. Yet we see so many at funeral homes holding it all in.

Dignified, self pity, at a time of personal loss, human sadness; not to be confused with obsession of loss.

An essential part of the grieving process is knowing when to let go. To be content with your loss. Honour your loved ones spirit by being at peace with in your own. The greatest compliment to those who loose life is if those they love and leave behind, live life to the full.

Sadness at the loss of a loved one must be expressed.

In the Celtic tradition we very sensibly employed keeners to show the bereaved how to cry, initiate the process.  A wake, is a wake up for a family a sign of life around death. When friends gather bring gifts of sandwiches and booze, “put on de kettle” distract you from reality, a gathering of community to HOLD in a time of sadness.

You have to wonder are funeral parlours such a great idea, oh very convenient take care of the detail very efficient, but can you really replace the wake as a truly practical instrument in the grieving process. (my old friend Val O’Connor will forgive) but I believe that to be true.

We need an undertaker to supply the hearse, do the paper work, open and close the grave. Nothing more, now funerals are like weddings the “breakfast” essential! Where are we going with all this show.

I was at a funeral a few years ago, wake at the house, later as the coffin was being lowered a fellow stood out unannounced and said his recently departed friend would never forgive him if he did not, and he sang.

He brought tears to the family as they proudly cheered and clapped their husband and father down.

All so natural, all so healthy, the joy of that man’s life being expressed to his family at that very last moment they would see his mortal remains.

And the extraordinary thing was we all left that graveyard smiling as we did when we departed from that man in life.
A great and fitting tribute to his existence!
(it has to said when I mentioned wake to Liz she said “ Don’t let it worry you as you have no belief in the afterlife then I will decide”, yeha, fair play to her, she is right)

Natures designs are not accidental they have evolved through time they have purpose, intent, but convention can sometimes dictate to the detriment of the bereaved, block grieving

I am on a time clock in my life as we all are but I have been given an idea when mine will chime for the last time. So life not death has become a favourite topic in my house and how we can best fill that life.

Time constriction by death can lead to such an expansion of time use.

Time knows no real measure or weight on the scale of time well spent.

My father died very unexpectedly,1975, he was a lovely, lovely, so misunderstood gentle man, full of anger and contradiction, with no real loving space granted to him to express and expunge it within his spirit, so to find peace.

I loved him, still love his memory I can feel his touch, see his smile, his frown, I have so much to thank that soft sensitive man for. But I was 25 then just at the beginning of being men together, been a teen and a fool till then. I had started a family my daughter, Jill, 3 months.

I always hugged him kissed him on the top of his bald pate, much to the irritation of his old fashioned male ego. (I’m the baby I’m 60 he would be what, 104 had he lived).

But I knew he knew and we both loved it. No real regrets, he knew I loved him that is enough.

Still, I would love to have had time with him just as a man, given him the space, earned the place of his trust to just tell: if he needed to tell, been an adult friend to dad.

Unexpected death such a hard thing but also a gift. Dad never suffered. He left us gently, quietly, quickly. You will never, no matter how you try, say all you might have said! With unexpected death!

But we must be content in the knowledge that words pale against action in matters of love.

Now that my clock is slowing down we are in the opposite position in this house. We have time and we have a lot of pain, but love is an overwhelming balm when applied gently.

And I have an abundance of that loving balm from my family and my so many really great friends.

We talk of life now that we know of death. I am sad to tell you I have a few years yet so I hope to still write on into the night, as long as the boss in this paper requests and my fingers can type.

Those who lose a child, their resilience, their ability to live on, emerge re-engage, is something I cannot comprehend. It is an extraordinary exhibition of true strength, to live life again after that, most savage of all loss.

Death and pain are on this families radar now, somehow they, these two horses are galloping all around us, and yet we are still young Lizzy Mac and I.

These elements of nature are raging in our extended family and friends. Yet death and pain are powerless in the face of our love for each other.

We know pain and death exist, we cannot ignore them they are manifestly visible, physical, open to sight and sense.

Yet love, unexpressed consciously, but oh so at its best when expressed unconsciously, unconditionally, gently, gestures, smiles and a gentle loving touch.

A joy, for us all, love given and received.

To be in a position to receive such love, that is the real gift. To be in a place of self dignity so as to receive that love.
That is the real privilege of life.

And the true enemy of pain and death.

That love expunges fear, the main weapon of pain and death, replaces it with calm and determination to live all life. (not to be confused with resignation).
That love drives energy where it has no right to exist, drives energy where its fuel is most essential, deep into our spirit, and with that type of energised spirit we human beings are unconquerable!! 

Bereavement is a part of life, death is part of life, religion for some is the consolation, I have no need or want of that (absolutely recognise and acknowledge its power to bring peace if you have a calm and soulful belief in the afterlife), me I like to believe: I will live on in the loving thoughts of those that knew and loved me and when they go: my spirit will go with them.

That I believe should be enough for any human being, and I am well loved!

I so hope, your life is as full! 

In the beginning there was the word, and the Word was with God.

This interview with Dr Patricia Casey, Professor of Psychiatry, UCD, and myself, John McCarthy, Mad Pride Ireland, in UCD’s The University Observer by Matt Gregg on 4 October could not be more current, and says it all. This is the first recorded comment regarding Mad Pride Ireland from Patricia Casey that I have ever come across.

Dr Casey: “Mad Pride are a problem because they don’t believe in psychiatric illness, they don’t believe in the role of psychiatrists and I think they actually contribute to stigmatising psychiatry,” she argues. “I mean one of the ways you get over stigma is not to pretend that something doesn’t exist, but to acknowledge that it is a reality. I think Mad Pride want to ignore the reality of psychiatric illness and that some people do need medication and that some people do sometimes kill themselves because they haven’t been adequately treated.”

Mad Pride’s comment in our Review of the Mental Health act 2001 (http://www.madprideireland.ie):
“Dr Casey is correct we do not “believe” in psychiatric illness or psychiatry. Neither should she, medical science is not about belief, religion is!  We do not ignore the reality of psychiatric illnesses, we simply ask for proof of them. We hope this review will do what Mad Pride cannot and insist on the proof being produced. Please note Dr Casey speaks of stigmatising psychiatry, not stigmatising the Mad Community. She is also correct in saying too many people are dying. Mad Pride simply asks how many people die from the prescribed medications; the growing evidence of this possibility is vast.”

Again from Dr Casey in the UCD Observer: “Mad Pride Ireland are un-engageable,” declares Dr Casey. “I have tried on several occasions and attempts to engage with them don’t really get very far because they have a very set view. I think the best thing is to ignore them.”

From Mad Pride’s submission to the review: “In this interview Dr Casey (UCD) we feel, is being disingenuous and truthful in one sentence. She has never tried to engage with Mad Pride but she has most certainly ignored us. Many who believe in the medical model also ignore us”.
What the mad community and society do not need is the arrogance of ‘we know best’ on either side of this debate, before we start the talks.
Mad Pride Ireland’s reply in the UCD Observer: “Mad Pride Ireland has never received any invitation or encouragement in private or in public from Dr Patricia Casey to engage in any way. We would welcome such an invitation. Mad Pride Ireland has always stated we can only progress through debate. This is not anti-psychiatry – this is about human rights and power”.
From the UCD Observer: “Dr Casey confirms that there is no ‘test’ in the conventional sense, and that diagnosis is instead reached by assessing the symptoms of patients”.

Considering that Dr Casey confirms there is in fact no “test” in the conventional sense (is this confirmation psychiatric diagnosis has no basis in psychical science?) the Mental Health Act places huge power in the hands of psychiatrists; over the human rights of the mad. Is the above a confirmation that all psychiatric diagnoses are a professional guess? I have no problem that guessing diagnosis is a fact!
I do have a problem with the fact that psychiatry claims it can prescribe a cure for odd behaviour based on observation alone and has been given the legal right to enforce that guess; especially when they are wrong.
Also from Dr Casey: “Politicians should be encouraged to listen. I would like during the elections, on the doorsteps, if politicians were asked about their commitments to mental health. The proportion of the health budget being spent on psychiatry has reduced from twenty-three per cent in 1968 down to six or seven per cent in 2010.

“That shouldn’t have happened because sale of the lands and old institutions should have allowed this to remain the same if there were no increases. So it means that the money from all this has been siphoned off by successive health boards, the HSE and governments for other things.”

Money will copperfasten unscientific ethos, it will not bring change!
From Mad Pride’s review submission: “In percentage terms, the spend on mental health has dropped during the Celtic Tiger. The overall health budget went through the roof so in real terms, we have never spent so much on mental health. Pouring more money into a failed system is simply a greater waste of scarce resources. Higher suicide rates, higher diagnostic rates, more people on medications for life, higher re-admission rates, the list of failure goes on. We will again be accused of negativity, but this is fact.”
You will be told by the medical model over and over that money will solve this.
It will not; a journey begun going in the wrong direction ends up in the wrong place. We must stop pouring money into the recorded failed ‘ethos’ of the medical model. We must turn this around and invest in the community, the medical model simply cannot demand belief as its right to lead this change. If an audit on the total spend on voluntary agencies in the mental health sector was undertaken, this nation would go into shock. Mad Pride Ireland functions very efficiently on a tiny budget, it can be done! We will gladly advise this review how we operate.
Mad Pride’s annual budget is less than the salary of most CEOs in the voluntary sector. Are we effective?

A Canadian court judgement this week found that Prozac ‘turned a teen into a murderer’. The judge based his opinion on the testimony of psychiatrist Peter R Breggin that the antidepressant caused a stimulant-like syndrome leading to manic-like behaviour, suicidality and violence (see http://www.breggin.com).

Mad Pride would ask Dr Casey to comment on this judgement from Canada. A 15 year old, who for no apparent reason, suddenly and uncharacteristically stabbed his friend to death.  His parents warned their doctor of radical change in their son since he was prescribed Prozac. His doctor doubled the dose.

Remember Shane Clancy in Bray last year? This from Dr David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff University, who spoke in UCC last week: “Pharmaceutical companies are legally obliged to agree that their drugs cause people to commit suicide.” Senior medical academics are not legally obliged. 
“And here is where they offer one of the greatest services they can to companies – they can and regularly do offer apologias for industry.  They have become industry’s way around the law and any moral code that may apply in this domain.  They state in public that not only did the drugs not cause a problem in the Clancy case but that they cannot cause a problem.”

In the end of days, Matthew 24:29-31: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.”

Sleep without it you cannot function.
If you are unable to sleep request help from your GP take a simple sleeping pill.

A rested body will replenish and calm a restless mind.

Stress will churn your mind into a maelstrom of discontent.

Distract your mind from the problem.

Avoid anti depressents as long as you possibly can they sedate never cure and they are in the main addictive,so if you have to take them, take them short term, and always always question the side effects carefully. Some can cause suicidation.

Personal hygene is absolute. You cannot find your dignity your self respect without personal hygene.

Shower every day it is essential.

Change from the skin out, every morning, clothes are cheap,

If you look good you will feel good. Logic.

Use the breath when stress becomes too much you will find a shortness of breath.

Breath in through the nose deeply and audiably out through the mouth. Four or five times. Find a place of peace and love in your mind be there, sit rest, hear the sounds of the place in your mind the wind in the leaves, The ocean waves lapping on the beach feel it, listen to it, It will calm you, slow you down.

Nature dictates when you feel fear the speed of your breath increases.
A person in a peaceful sleep breaths slow and even.
The breath can so often control our mood. Anger causes shortness of breath, breathe slow and even and it will bring calm.

Avoid people and places that cause you stress. Be they family, friends , lovers, bullies in the workplace.

Take action around the stress point identify it and stay away from it.

Talk to someone do not try to go it alone, share the pain but do not become a pain, by being self absorbed.

Do not take anti depressants or anti psychotics without second opinion from an independent source.

If you have to take meds then take then take them short term they are designed to sedate you control who you are they are very good at what they do. They do exactly what they DO NOT tell you on the tin. They and those who supply them have a history of lying about their side effects.

The level of corruption between the pharmaceutical companies and psychiatric research is now beging to surface.
Big pharma is paying all the fines, by comparison to income it is a pittance, psychiatrists are going to gaol for lying in research and people all over the world are dying as a result of this corruption.

I wonder; I would consider that incorrect. To me love is real wealth. To have love in your life and to be able to absorb it that is real wealth.
To live life without that gift of love given and received is to live in a place of the greatest poverty.

To have your health without love, is to live in a place of dire poverty and I would consider no matter how you percieve the state of your health, you are poor without love.

I am in the unenviable position of knowing the truth of the above.

I had depression in my life for years, a horrible place to exist. There are no words to express the desolation of that self imposed exile from those who love you, from friends, from society. To hide your dignity from yourself, to loose your self respect.

More and more Mad Pride Ireland are been given evidence by people who are a bit odd, of the part played in their being locked into psychiatric units by well meaning but misguided relatives.
There’s one simple scene I cannot get out of my head. It is, I believe, the perfect example of the trickle down effect of fear and propaganda into a normal Irish family.  I met with Joan Hamilton. We went for tea, at a conference, with a number of mothers from Schizophrenia Ireland, which is a carers group now rebranded as the user group Shine; it is no longer good sales tactics to be too open in the use of stigma.
It’s so much more influential to morph into a user group; change the brand, but never change the original medical model ethos. These very ordinary decent Irish mothers came across to our table and enquired… and I will write the rest as a little script… All names except mine and Joan’s are fictitious.

Mary: “Hello John and Joan we have heard ye on the radio, even seen ye on the television, can we join you?”

(Now John and Joan wanted to catch up)

John and Joan: “Please do.”
Mary: “Have you been to these events before John and Joan>”

John and Joan: “No, this is our first one.”

Mary and a chorus from the three or four, as we discovered, friends who were all mothers of “schizophrenics” and lifelong members of Schizophrenia Ireland said in an excited chorus:
“Oh we have been to them all; Australia, New Zealand, America, this year Killarney.”

Anne whispered: “We had to host one in Ireland but we much prefer travelling. California next! We can’t wait!”

Mary was asked by another mother, Jane, as she sipped her coffee: “How is your Tom; he is 29 now, isn’t he?”

Mary: “Arra, you know, all know of you know how it is. Well, he lives at home now, stays in his room, he does not go out much. In fact he does not go out at all. But I insist he takes his meds regular as clockwork.” (The other mothers nod knowingly at this wisdom)
Mary continued - there is a chorus of “that is what our doctors told us as well, ‘they’ must stay on the medication it is essential for ‘them’” - “Tom tried to come off the meds a few times. You know, he became impossible to live with, and we nearly went mad ourselves the state he got into. No, he knows the rules now; if he insists in not taking the meds, on time, then out he goes.”

“So, is he at home on his own tonight?” asked Anne.

Mary incredulous: “Ah no, not at all; I spoke to Tom’s doctor, Tom’s doctor is very good to me when I need a break; he signs the orders, and we section Tom in. Tom’s doctor is very understanding; Tom’s doctor is very good to me.”

Joan Hamilton tapped me on the ankle and whispered: “Get me out of here.”

These really were loving, caring Irish mothers, they were given no other option but to believe in mental illness, the diagnostic box, the medical model, there was and is nowhere else to go.

The weight of propaganda of the ‘medical model’ the PR of ‘the pill for every ill’ the ‘disease of the brain’ teaches us all that force and control by pills and lock up units sectioning the mad community was their only option and they adapted to what the system offered. And after all “it is in the patient’s best interest”.

The system, the medical model, educated these women. It convinces all of us that we are acting in the best interest of the patient and that the patient did not have the ‘capacity’ to make any decision for themselves. The Mad Community are some of the most intelligent members of society, just different.

The role of the relatives changed once their sons and daughters, brothers and sisters went into the system and were drugged up, the assertion of the system that ‘these people lack capacity’ now confirmed by the forced drugging that make the patient appear ‘slow’.
Some, and let me be clear here, some families, now embrace their own role of victimhood, glory in the “God ye have had an awful trial”.
Some have said to me “You have no idea of what we put up with”, “What would you do”, “We had to do something”, “There was no other way”.

It is that final statement that is the most poignant. As long as we make the normality of madness a crime, we will have conflicted relatives. Those relatives will continue to feel helpless and hopeless. But the good ones feel the terrible weight of guilt that this state forces on them. We are about to review the Mental Health Act 2001, our own Kathleen Lynch is in charge and she has the opportunity to make history. Will Minister Lynch grasp the opportunity?

Dear Minister Lynch: The medical model, diagnosis, psychiatry, force treatment, they all rely on unproven Chemical Imbalance Theory supposed to exist in the brains of the Mad Community:
There is nothing more dangerous, or in the case of the mad community, more cruel than a theory that is wrong!
If you do nothing else in this review, Minister, ask them to produce the test results that prove the existence of ‘mental illness’ and show those results in public to your constituents. ‘They’ will insist that we, the public, do not understand, it is complicated, we are not educated enough.
All of us deserve that simple thing from you. You are our public representative. Please ask them to produce the test.

It is not justice the Mad Community needs; it is not as complicated as that. At the heart of it, we simply ask for the right to exist.

So we, my wife, my daughter and my son, have talked not in any morbid way but as a frank discussion, and we all agreed that when and if a decision re my using euthanasia comes, that it would be my decision. I have friends who all agree under my circumstances and most important knowing me that euthanasia would be the right decision. We have agreed that in the broadest terms. I was informed by the kind aussie with some new information. As a doctor, he has no further function and really not entitled to any more input.

I have family, friends and if I wanted to talk to “experts” on this I would choose philosophers not doctors. This is about dignity of life. My doctors, great doctors have truthfully informed me they can do nothing for me, except make me a little more comfortable, that is honest.

I have specialists doctors, they are in Dublin I hardly know them, I mentioned euthanasia to one of them once and he got a little officious with me, saying don’t you worry we will look after you.

I replied as politely as I could, that, no, he would not.

That lousy job would fall to my wife and he might see me every three months.

I also asked why he would presume that my decision had anything to do with him he did not know the first thing about me as a human being.

We have the kindest team of people imaginable helping us from the HSE in Mayfield. I am in the public service for the first time in my life and I have to say it is fantastic. We had a meeting with the team and told them they were giving too much help and we needed space to live life. So now we ask for help when we need it, and they give us such loving help.

BUT it is inside our front door that WE live with the reality of this rapidly deteriorating condition, Lizzy Mac and I. If you read this column you will know I love my wife, have done for nearly forty years. Am I going to leave the horrible decision to Liz when I can’t move, breathe, can’t eat, can’t clean myself; I love her too much to do that.

There was a man in the audience last Friday in that horrible position he will face the possibility of fourteen years in gaol if he assists his wife to die out of love.

Am I to put Liz in that position I don’t think so.

I just hope I find the courage at the right time, and that, that time is a long way off.

I am having a ball right now and I have so much to do!!

But what in the name of all the gods has my informed moral decision got to do with a doctor, my doctor, your doctor, any doctor?

Academia really does need to wake up to its responsibilities in the area of mental health. 
Time for those who build their academic kudos on our and our families backs, our lives, our sadness, and by their lack of real challenge of the medical model, contribute to our despair, time to step up.

We have conference after conference, but no real action.
When are we going to see the education system in this country at third level give serious consideration opening the syllabus to the input of those of us who live with the normality of madness.
When are they who speak (lecture) for a living going to learn to listen.

We are wheeled in every now and again, give a lecture, a pat on the head and sent home.

And academia can write in its next report that it has listened to the user voice. OR it wheels in those who are comfortable with the present system will toe the party line are a safe pair of hands, I am running out of clichés here but you get the point.

At a conference recently in UCC Darrius Wheelan Dept of Law who just wrote a book on mental health law admitted to me “ maybe we should listen a little more to the user voice”. I hope he will take real action around that statement! He’s a decent man.

There are members of the mad community in this country well educated, plenty to PHD level who are more than capable of designing an inclusive/innovative based on user personal experience, educational programme to be part of the learning process of doctors, psychiatry, psychiatric nurses, social work, psychology, gardai, teachers: all of the above need to be introduced to the coal face of mental health. It has begun in DCU thanks to Prof Chris Stephenson who along with Paddy McGowan

To the practicalities of what they do and how the end product of what they produce affects the consumer, their customers, me and people like me and our families.

I had a man at my door today in despair, not for the first time for me, his adult child, in trouble on the street and he had nowhere to turn for help. Nowhere!
The crisis always the crisis before the system intervene well not intervene so much as force its services on the distressed patient.
No early intervention, no crisis house, no ideas out there for change.
So this young man was arrested under the mental health act by a garda I know and ended up in lock up.
His GP not a clue, HSE nothing they can do, we rang them all, the hospital, Samaritans refer you to the system that has no service.

The thing is we who have those ideas of how to do these things better, early intervention, talking therapies, crisis intervention houses where that young man yesterday could have gone to when he first felt the itch we all feel when that deep sadness that causes such distress is about to arrive.

But the predijuice of those who run the education system in UCC and other third level institutions across the country is stunning.
The refusal of academia to open its mind and its locked doors to the expertise of the user movement is stunning.
People like me who work at the coal face of mental health have a contributation to make to the learning process of how to treat us. People like me should be lecturing young doctors training to be psychiatrists.
People like my wife, should be teaching these young doctors lecture them in the realites of life when you live with somebody going through the normality of madness.
There are things you cannot learn from books, life experience, lessons you relate from personal experience.
Would make an interesting modual for psychiatry “The life experience” or “ A different way” (Sli elie), it is happening despite academia as an instition.
There are individuals few and far between, some do what they do from conviction others as a path to forward their career. 

From the point of view of being educators they really must being to explore is there a difference between the mind and the brain. Our physical well being can dictate the rejuvenation of the brian but love empowers the mind. It is t6hose around you that influence how your mind develops and it is your emotional responce to those circumstances that dictate how your spirit will evolve and mature.
I was at an ivor browne lecture recently when he spoke of Sli Eile in Charleville, an experiment in different way to reintrotuce people form long stay in psychiatric units back into the community.
And a psychiatrist spoke up from the back and I quote loosly “Are you really trying to tell us living on a farm will cure schizophrenia”.
That kind of closed minded thinking allows for zero progress.
UCC you need to wake up, it is a new era in thinking around living with good mental health.

So will Professor Ted Drinan of the dept of Psychiatry invite me up to address his class on a different way, a different option, a different opinion, if not me then somebody who thinks like me.

Allow his students to make up their own minds.

Our is his department a closed shop and a closed mind. I know their brains are active but I really do wonder about their minds.

In this article, published in The Irish Times, two psychiatrists argue the benefits of the DSM the diagnostic manual of psychiatry where;
“Over the past three decades, unhappiness has been redefined as depression, shyness has been reclassified as social anxiety disorder-even trivial complaints such as fussy eating are now being viewed through a psychiatric prism.”
Judgement of a disease; based on assessment of “behaviour”.

DR. Pat Bracken consultant psychiatrist states;

“The DSM reflects a growing trend to seek ‘experts’ for problems that once wouldn’t have been the domain of the expert..”

so as Pat Bracken like so many other critical psychiatrists, questions the DSM in the article it is defended by another consultant psychiatrist Niall Crumlish,

“Without the DSM we’d be losing a basic foundation for what we are doing. There is some validity to diagnosis” he states.

So back to Mr Larry Murphy the convicted rapist.

Larry the rapist was in gaol where he had the legal right to refuse treatment, he could “not” be forced to take medications based on his vicious “behaviour”.
Let me repeat he was legally allowed to refuse treatment.
Because you see Larry the rapist has rights. That is justice at work.

Larry Murphy was arrested under criminal law which gave him the right to a trial; and was convicted after evidence was offered to judge and jury.

The victims of rape if arrested under the Mental Health act 2001 have no such right to judge and jury; they are tried, convicted, sentenced, based solely on how two consultant psychiatrists access their “behaviour”. Then based soley on that psychiatric opinion they can be legally forced to take any or all medications or treatments psychiatry decides, up to and including forced ECT!

I have through my chosen work met so many victims of rape. Whose “behaviour” radically changed after the rape, they became angry and/or intensely sad, wouldn’t you?

I visit some of them right now they are locked away in psychiatric units by the state based on the “expert” opinion of psychiatry but as we see from the Times article “expert” psychiatry cannot agree within its own profession on the methodology of reaching a conclusion of diagnoses.

Yet the Mental Health Act 2001 allows these dissenting psychiatrists to take the victim of rape’s freedom based solely on their suspicion that they “MIGHT” be a danger, simply that; “MIGHT” be a danger, and they the victims disappear from society and are forced treated.

So as the law allows the rapist the right to refuse treatment, while the law grants the legal right to force treat the victim.

The rapist has legal rights! Why did psychiatry not diagnose Mr Larry Murphy with a disease of the brain and force treat him. They did not, despite his horrifically violent behaviour. Surely what he did is insane!

While a victim of rape who becomes emotionally distressed as a consequence of the violence savagely imposed on them, is so easily given a diagnosis.

Thousands of the victims of child abuse, and violent rape have ended up with a diagnosis of “mental illness” as per the very same DSM, the bible of psychiatry because of their altered “behaviour” caused by the likes of Larry Murphy, by being victims of violence.

And as mounting evidence shows per my article “Anatomy of an Epidemic” in this newspaper the altered “behaviour” may well be compounded by: or be a consequence of the very medications being prescribed by disputing psychiatrists.

If psychiatry understands how to establish the existence of “mental Illness” by observing “behaviour” according to the criteria of the DSM, how in the name of God do they miss so many violent rapists like Mr Larry Murphy and Fr. Brendan Smith.
 
Strange that!!

Medications can cause suicide.
Can you imagine that as a headline. A Professor of Psychiatry said that last Saturday in UCC. Said he knew of tablets that cause some people to commit suicide. Not one of the national suicide agencies were there. Where was Dan Neville FG TD? He researches suicide. Where was Professor Ted Dinan ? He teaches psychiatry in UCC.

I spoke from a platform last Saturday in UCC, at a conference organised by Health Action International Europe and Critical Voices Network Ireland. Title: ‘Mad Medicine: Do conflicts of interest drive you crazy?’
Professor David Healy, professor of Psychiatry at Cardiff, is originally from Dublin. He has an international reputation for being a thorn in the side of the combination of academic psychiatry and big pharma. He stated it was ‘psychiatric suicide’ for a psychiatrist to question the adverse effects of psychiatric drugs. Professional suicide because his professional colleagues isolate him for heresy!

We are looking for whistleblowers. We are framing legislation and we have a professor stating that he is being portrayed as some type of informer if he speaks out. Healy said all invitations from ‘inside’ the status quo had dried up.
Maybe we should not try to make heroes of the whistleblowers, but begin to name shame and disgrace those in the public domain, who deliberately cause whistleblowers to be afraid.

Look to the media to investigate the professional agencies like the College of Psychiatry to ask how do they support those members who challenge the accepted beliefs of their profession. Ask what support mechanisms they have in place to assist members who risk their careers to expose a whiff of corruption within their own profession. 

We should be asking that question of Professor Agnes Higgins, chair of the Irish Mental Health Nurses association -  a good friend- but the question deserves an official answer from she and Dr Harry Gijbels, another good friend in the same association. Directors of nursing have growing power, but they have yet to exercise them in the public. We need to hear from them; they could be the peoples’ champions yet.

UCC won an award last week as a five star university. It is well deserved, because of people like Lydia Sapouna, Orla O’Donovan, and Harry who are opening the doors to debate. Free speech and opinion, developing thought; kind of why they invented places of learning.

We must honour and protect people like David Healy. We must expose those who make free speech and opinion a shameful exercise.
David Healy has a position on ECT that I disagree with. That is his right. He has the right to be wrong! Ha.
He gave evidence last year in the Shane Clancy case. Remember that young man who was put on drugs by a doctor, became suddenly violent, killed another young man and himself? Professor Healy testified that the drugs prescribed caused that altered behavior. His parents say over and over Shane was a beautiful young student, Shane asked for medical help, he was given pills and he died.
Shane Clancy killed someone else’s son and then killed himself. Fact. Professor Healy put enough doubt in the jury’s mind at the inquest around the cause of that sudden act of violence that they could not find a verdict of suicide or homicide.

Professor Healy stated that Irish teaching professors of psychiatry interfered in that legal process. He said that Big Pharma are legally obliged to declare that certain drugs cause suicide but there is no legal obligation on teaching psychiatrists to say this. He said further that Big Pharma used academic psychiatrists to hide the truth. Shane Clancy’s parents have been fighting a lone battle since to find a listening ear.
All this is explosive information coming from well researched and professional sources.

Academics can be a pain in the arse. They were from across the world, speaking and attending that conference last Saturday. Those that organized the conference had no money to pay for professional PR. We exist in a deluded bubble of self congratulation, while big pharma and co have the biggest PR machine in the world. How do I know that? Academic after academic last Saturday stood on the podium and quantified not only how much big pharma spent on lying and making fools of us all.

But how they use PR companies to do it. They had researched how they do it. David Healy called the compliant psychiatrists ‘Cardinals’ and stated that the church in hiding the truth were as amateurs compared to Big Pharma. They stood one after another and they told us of manipulation by Big Pharma through PR. They told us how profitable, powerful and effective PR was for big pharma. Psychiatric nurses are huge targets for pharma PR, after all it is they who get the dirty job of administering the drugs.  Had the organisers last Saturday invited one speaker less from the US, they could possibly have made the day’s headlines. They had no budget for PR for the day. They spent a huge amount of time and research on studying how Big Pharma do it and they learned feck all.

We have to have academic research, it is absolutely vital, but jasus lads we have to let the public know the results. There is no point in academics telling academics and going for a pint.
The paper doing the rounds in academia pales against the paper making the front page in the paper.

There were speakers from Trinity, Sligo, the Lough,  Boston, York, Cardiff, the EU European Medcines Agency (the Irish Medicines Board invited, they could not be bothered) EU Parliament (Nessa Childers) Canada, Portugal, Netherlands, UCC and Church Avenue. No money left for PR. 
What was announced on Saturday was explosive information and it did not make headline news. You can talk all you like of the responsibility of the media to pick up on the news but we all have to feed the news to the media. The media have a professional responsibility to assess the information, but those who are trying to break the silence around abuse and silence also have a responsibility.

Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine Sept. 2010.
This is a magazine for psychiatrists.

An article in the above magazine states that in one Limerick psychiatric unit with a common ECT suite a team of psychiatrists has a variance in the use of ECT in the range of 8/1.
 
Surely the citizens of Limerick are entitled to know which psychiatrist is an E.C.T enthusiast in their area and who is not an ECT enthusiast.

The College repeatedly state that damage to memory from E.C.T. is now diminished because Bilateral E.C.T. use is in the past this was stated in the Oireachtas debate.

85% of those given ECT in Limerick in 2010 were given Bilateral E.C.T
The magazine report also states 1/3 of patients were damaged and one had a heart attack!!

All of this from a treatment the College itself states is a controversial treatment and they know NOT how it works.

You are in a lottery with ECT there is no way to predict outcomes and we have to fight the mental health commission, the departments of health, justice, NSUE and Amnesty to the make the use of it by force illegal.

Not the use of ECT mind you. If you want TO BUY A LOTTERY TICKET IN THE ECT GAME THAT IS YOUR RIGHT!!

But patients surely have a right to know if their psychiatrist is an E.C.T enthusiast before they accept treatment from them. Considering section 59b of the Mental Health of Ireland gives these enthusiasts the legal right to force E.C.T. on their patients simply by: they and a colleague signing a form. 
These massive variations undermine the idea that ECT is a ‘life-saving’ treatment.

What they do show is that consultants have widely different thresholds for prescribing this treatment.

It also begs the question why the college does not censure its members WHO CHOOSE NOT to use ECT at all.

If, as the college state ECT is life saving; ergo these refuses’ must be negligent towards their patients in refusing to use ECT as a treatment under any circumstances?

Deleting 59b; in no way bars access to ECT by choice.
Let me repeat that deleting 59b in no way bars access to ECT to anybody through free and informed choice.

The wording of 59b states if the patient is “unable or unwilling” the College in a grandiose manner as if it were some sort of major concession on its part has issued a statement it will concede on the word “unwilling” but wants to retain the word “unable”.

Of the 43 involuntary patients in 2008 who received 49 programmes (a total of 588 treatments nearly two a day of E.C.T)
31 were declared “unable” by their treating psychiatrists!!

That is de facto no change at all if two consultant psychiatrists state the patient is “unable” that will satisfy the requirements of the current law.

In no other branch of medicine is this acceptable, the Mental Health Act 2001 protects the psychiatrist from censure of; and excludes the patient from the protection of the common law; that is a disgrace.

But not surprising considering the part the College was allowed to play in constructing the Mental Health Act in 2001.
Bear in mind the Neary case and his variation in use of peripartum hysterectomies in Drogheda. The length of time it took his colleagues in the College of Obstetrics to admit that he was “excessive” in his use of this surgical procedure.

Years! And more patients were damaged!

Have we learned from obstetrics years of procrastination?

We need a speedy explanation for the College of Psychiatry on this.

In the Oireachtas the college muddied the waters, turning the issue on its head by focusing the debate on ECT as a treatment.

Distracting, the public’s, and media, attention from the point of the amendment. To stop the use of involuntary ECT, and that only. I am totally shocked/dismayed to learn that half of those subjected to involuntary E.C.T. are old aged pensioners.

We must protect their human rights.

I believe the public have a right to this information re the treatment of our fellow patients in private and public hospitals across Ireland.

This epidemic is so well described in Robert Whitakers new book titled above, Crown Publishers, New York, where he discusses like a “prosecuting attorney” the “flawed science, greed, and outright lies to reveal that the drugs hailed as the cure for mental disorders instead worsen them over the long term”

These are just quotes from academics and others, who wrote on the fly sheet.

This book did not come from the left wing of the mad movement. This book is written by a winner of several national science writers awards including George Polk Award for medical writing, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.

He also wrote Mad In America which traces back the evolution of asylums and modern day psychiatry, this is a natural follow on and a most welcome one from such an authentic source. Both these books are easy to read and I would suggest compulsory reading if you have any interest in how this ‘epidemic of mental illness’ evolved.

What he writes of America is true of Ireland, the more we hear of miracle drugs that will cure these so called psychiatric diseases of the brain, the greater the number of people we have who are registered as disabled by the people who are shouting from the rooftops that they have the magic bullet that cures/fixes us all.

Strange that!!

So we have a situation where the more they improve the cure the worse the ‘illness’ becomes.
So the vested interests big pharma and psychiatry; expound on the cure as they spread the disease.
Now I might be a gobshite from de northside who knows natin, but even I know there is something wrong here.
“Every so often a book comes along that exposes a vast deceit”

Whitaker refers to Steve Hyman provost of Harvard and a neuroscientist, his findings in a paper he wrote from decades of research which led to the following conclusion

“And what science has revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known “chemical imbalance.” However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one way or another, throws a wrench into the usual pathways of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally”.
Now in all fairness I have been telling you this for years but now the statement is coming from the heart of mainstream science, Harvard.

I have friends on chemo and they often say that the cure is worse than the disease, but not one of them has ever claimed that the Doctors treating them gave them the disease either deliberately or from educated ignorance.

The thing here is that we have to begin to question all of this, without fear of the consequences of asking these questions.

Look to your children who are being “diagnosed” with ADHD, please pause, question the science behind it, do not let your exasperation at the situation, your tiredness, sway you towards some quick fix.

Get second and third opinions from neutral parties and from those opposed to the pill for every ill brigade.
Question everybody and everything; it is a little like the child abuse when word first began to seep out it was met with resistance and condemnation.
When you hear the medical jargon that will wash over you like a flood question it, and then check the answers!
Before you decide to do anything that may affect your child’s whole future.
Question your psychiatric medications:
Why is it I will be told by certain opponents in this debate that what I have just advised is a dangerous thing to do.
How clever is it of those who thrive on this epidemic to put it out there not by marketing but as it was put to me by so many voluntary agencies; 

“do not question or discuss your medication with anyone else; it is dangerous for you and for them”

I can see so many of you nodding your heads right now. Clever, you have to give the marketing company, big pharma and psychiatry credit!
They sell a product but discourage any debate as to outcomes with the fear of the consequences of that very debate, not for them, the market, or profit, mind you, no, to obvious, but to ask questions is declared dangerous for the PATIENT, and the warning is transmitted by PARENTS and Patient associations.

And just to take the thought a little further to declare questioning of the product as a symptom of the very “illness your product is going to cure!
Am I being paranoid or is it simply marketing genius!

I get many phone calls from people who read my column in The Cork Independent looking for the magic pass to good mental health. I don’t have it. Nobody has the answers to all of this, mental health, what I do know is this: that it is like all of the most important issues in our lives the real answers are in the simple.
What academia/psychiatry/psychology has in the main as it always does is to complicate the simplicities out of all proportion to where the answers lie to boost their own egos and create a science and a huge business from that science

Sadness depression emotional distress, that changes who we are, how we feel, how we react to stress, how we live life, how we see others, but most importantly how we see ourselves.
I have a solution for all of the above as and how they concern me and how I as an individual dealt with them successfully.

But before I give you those solutions, let me say to those who treat us from a diagnostic box where individuality is lost, that is why you have failed. Why we now have an epidemic of epic proportions resulting from the “cure” of the medical model.
We are all different emotionally that is a simple incontrovertible fact. We are all different in our appearance and looks. We are individuals, simple: what psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry has done is to corral us all into a diagnostic box and mass treat the individual.

These magic bullets work for some and when you fire off as many rounds from the psychiatrists gun as is presently happening you are bound to hit someone.
Like they do in war, drop enough bombs to kill the enemy and ignore the collateral damage.
My column receives calls from those collaterally damaged. Those who at their whit’s end; with a system that not only fails them and then ignores them because they complain, thereby others who observe this punishment, do not complain at all.
But when the lack of support causes the complaint to deteriorate the system will give a satisfied smirk and state I told you so.

The advice: find self respect by doing the following.

When you wake up get up.
Shower or wash every day.
Clothes are cheap change from the skin out every day.
Look well smell nice and you will feel well, this is not rocket science.

For those of you who have never experienced madness you have no idea of how difficult it is to perform to that huge list I have outlined above. When I was there I would challenge would you ask me to walk if I was in a wheelchair!

Breath slowly and deeply in times of stress

Those who upset you most just by being in their company, avoid
them, be they your Mother your Father family or friends if when they are around: avoid them. And when you feel strong enough calmly tell that they upset you and why, and if they cannot accept your explanation them move on.

Back to the breath;

Find a quiet place in your head A place you had peace and joy. Sit breath slowly deeply the slow breath calms us.
Reach out to those you are comfortable with those you like do not get offended if they are busy the first time you ask, ring again, do not be a pain in the ass.

Hear the sounds of that favourite place, if it is a beach and at sunset hear the waves the breeze in the trees, feel the warm sand, if a wood hear the trees the wind feel and smell the grass, the pine.

Breath deeply, breath slowly, relax, relax.

Then get up and get out and challenge life knowing you are a great person, an individual who can tackle anything, “as long as you remain calm and respect who you are”
Unselfish self love the greatest weapon we have to challenge win any battle life throws at us.
We must as human beings engage with life if we are to enjoy life otherwise we float through life with out a ripple behind us to show we were ever here

It’s been some week. 
I am getting slagged by the mates. “You’re a celeb, Jasus. No matter what I turn on, dere you are boy.”
Won another media award, from a group called Headline. This newspaper thoroughly deserved that award.
Kathryn Thomas interviewed me on the John Murray show. She was great; we had fun with bad news, how bad? I came on after Pat O’Connell,  the voice of the English market. It was great to go on after such a positive Cork voice.
Gráinne Humphries did an interview with me on TV3, with Martin and Sybil; it was great, we were strongly challenged. With great honesty, the medical model was put up to us. Up to us to defend our position, we might have liked a bit more notice of ‘the tone’ to prepare, but that is the game. I think Gráinne and I did well; we spoke our truth with strength.
I so hope I get the opportunity from The Morning Show to have a return match. I have rang the producers with that request, and I will let ye know.
Two page spread on Saturday in the Daily Mail. We had lunch in the Dáil.
Now, I have a purpose with this boastful bullshite. Nobody with any interest in the area of mental health can be in any doubt about what was laid out in Behind the Walls. We are still legally abusing patients in hospitals under the abusive power granted to psychiatrists in the Mental Health Act 2001.

“Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress” 
Napoleon

Just a quick reference to that award, if I may. Three young women - really nice women - from three different agencies came to award it. Mental health politics is like an onion, you have to peel back the layers.
One worked for Headline, the second for See Change, and the third for Shine. All three, when asked, responded that John Saunders was their boss.
John Saunders is on the board of Reform the Mental Health commission. He is a very influential man who has publicly and privately denied me a voice in this debate. But he gives me a media award.

Can you see it at a meeting? ‘I have no idea what John McCarthy is saying about denying him a voice, we gave him an award for his column in the Cork Independent for God’s sake, there is no satisfying that man!’ Clever though, isn’t it? Credit where it’s due. It is all a game!
The game of politics is a strange one.
It was National Suicide Week. Every voluntary agency, Ministers, the President, stood on podiums across this country shouting the odds about lack of finance resources, stigma etc.
How could all these powerful people who rail against stigma from the podiums of five star hotels not mention John Hunt whose face, after five years in the care of this state, shocked this entire nation? But, one member of a leading agency said to me, that this is a very ‘nuanced’ debate.
The game is thus: When parties are in opposition they seek out the controversial voice to challenge the party in power. When they attain power they ignore the controversial voice who put them there and absorb the status quo with the influence to keep them in power. And the game starts all over again.

Ireland beating Australia on Saturday gave me a thought.
In the mental health debate we have scrums (conferences, meetings), but they are uncontested, polite. The ref / chairman shouts ‘crouch’,  and they engage, waltzing around the pitch, a little move to the right, a slight shuffle to the left. The opposition hooker whispers ‘forgive me now, but I must appear to be making an effort so I’m going to drop the shoulder and push a little, get ready to be upset now’, and the dance on the pitch goes on.

Both sides pay huge fees to play. The purpose here is not to See Change, achieve, but simply to prolong the game.
But then I thought of that wonderful, strong Irish scrum half. He’s possibly the most annoying scrum half in the history of the sport. Can you imagine a six foot eight flanker desperately clutching air where Stringer should be?
Stringer plucking the squirting ball out of the heaving scrum, a side step, sprint across the line.

Mad Pride Ireland is going to do what Stringer does. We will annoy the uncontested scrums, not because we want to, but because those who pick the teams will not give us a place on the squad no matter how well we play. When the ball, does, and it will,  squirt out , we will be there. Try, game on.

Hi Michael,

I wanted to write this sooner but I also needed to let it sit.
I could feel you Michael; the day they sent you off, I really could. I am neither a religious nor superstitious man, but you were there.
You were a powerful man in my life Michael a radical, a rebel an activist with the courage to stand outside, and take the shite, turn it to compost for us to grow from, and with great joy fire it all back in, with great truth and accuracy.

I loved our talks, I did not know you well enough on a personal level, I thought “I know what to do John” was an exclusive to me!!

We differed on so much in such a healthy way, but we both saw the truth of the finish, simple equal human rights, we fought over the road, the route, but not the destination.

You’re great strength Michael, you were willing to engage, listen “when I could get a word in”, and debate the issue, come up with a suggestion while not always perfect, always shifted the axis of my mind, you tweaked me Michael and I tweaked you, it was great.

You came to Cork 2007, the elections, put your time, and money behind my mouth, you spoke on a public platform with me, a “nutter” and a consultant psychiatrist shouting the odds as equals. That was a step Michael.

Know I will always remember you Michael your fervent enthusiasm, your joy, your fucking frustration with the fuckers,

“They are fuckers you know John, the whole fucking lot of them but I will drive a stake through every one of their ECT fucking hearts the fuckers, I promise I will”

The stake is poised Michael we nailed them in Lienster House they are already compromising, oh I know I hear you,

”watch the slippery fuckers John”

I will.

So like I say Mick I felt you on the day, they gave you a great send off, great speeches everybody told” lies” about you, you would have been proud and the singing wow.
So there you go I was going to say goodbye, why bother, you will always be around in my heart, so we will continue to shout the odds.

Talk soon Mick.

A letter written after the Irish General Election of 2007

To the editor

Dear Sir,

This is to thank you and your staff for all your help in the recent election. We stood in Cork North central in the main to highlight the abuse of forced ECT, and we won the election. Thanks to you and others in the media we have made this a national issue.
When it was first mooted that I stand for election I had two great fears one that no one would vote for me and two that I would be elected. Thanks be to God neither of those occurred.

The history of treatment in the field of mental health is a national disgrace and the ongoing repletion of this treatment is bordering on the criminal. The fact that you can be forced under the law to take Electric Shock Treatment, or be forced to take medication, or be locked up without trial is, as I say in this modern age, a national disgrace. You have no choice in this country. If you cannot take medication as I and so many others cannot, you have no real choice. We decided to take a stance in this election.
And we had great fun, we worked like slaves and found time to party, we were different in our approach and we achieved our objective with huge success, we brought mental health into the public debate.

But we met the 5000!
We applied for help from the major voluntary agencies involved in mental health only to be told we were too radical and that they could not be involved in politics or be seen to take sides in an election. They could not take the side of those who live with mental health problems in the greatest opportunity afforded to a citizen who lives in a democracy, elective politics!

But the fact is we met the 5000!

Here is a remarkable thing that emerged from this election campaign. We as a group formed out of the air. Sure I have been speaking out for years now on the abuse of ECT (electric shock treatment) but 50% of those who knocked at doors, I never met, and they just appeared.
More remarkable 50% of all of the team have been diagnosed with one form of mental illness or another. So you had people with so called schizophrenia, bi polar (manic) depression, depression, chronic fatigue, personality disorders, victims of forced ECT, victims of forced Medication, all knocking at your doors and we want to thank you for your kindness and generosity of spirit.
We had two rules in the campaign

You must enjoy yourself.
You can only do what you can do.

Out of those simple rules we worked as a team and we worked way above what others and indeed our own perceived capabilities, we gave each other strength, dignity and understanding, we held each other when we needed to be held, we quite simply loved each other without equivocation, and we laughed a lot.
We did what we did through SUPPORT not CONTROL.
We would also like to point out to you all, that when your difference is treated with respect and dignity then your difference becomes normality. We proved that a bunch of so called “nutters” can be normal. We walked among you as citizens of this state, we gave each other pride and we proved our point that without stigma we are capable of anything. We received 2% of the poll equal to the PD’s. We are proud.

But still we met the 5000!

To the 5000, one of the funniest comments I heard on the campaign was re, de five tousend boy, a candidate who ran in a previous election and received 200 votes, was asked afterwards did he learn anything from the election campaign and he answered
“I did boy, I learned dat dere are 5000 liars living in de northside”
We met every one of them, if everybody who told us they were giving us no.1 then I would have been elected five times over.
Like I said we had great fun, we proved a point and we would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for your kindness.
On behalf of a great team,

John McCarthy
(For the last time)
Independent Health Cork North Central.

Here’s a video from when John was interviews on RTE last week after the ‘Behind The Walls’ documentary

Is living life without ambition the only way to live life without regret?

I was at a funeral recently where a bingo book was brought to the altar as a significant symbol of a life lived.
I was at another where the eulogy was based on a restless existence spent on trying to swim against the tide of convention.
The first, a contented story of a family created reared on the minimum of resources in hardship and poverty.
The other, a life begun in privilege, with all that education and social status has to offer.

The “bingo book” accepting deprivation quietly and with dignity as “Gods cross to bear”, finding solace in the very poverty imposed by chance, circumstance.
The “eulogy” fighting against the causes of that same poverty the very privilege chance and circumstance, gifted.
The “eulogy” regretting the lack of achieving all of the stated aims, the lack of change, while at the same time satisfied, relishing in the very fact that life itself became the challenge; the fight, the campaign.

Bringing the issue out in the open, making that slight dent, better than spending your life in conforming to the status quo, ignoring it all.

The “bingo book” quietly content in a family reared in a place of peace and contentment achieved by creating a cocoon of blind indifference to the important issues of the day. That peace of mind, that lack of protest, that indifference of others suffering, very expensive, to those who are suffering because of created poverty.

The “eulogy” while financially rich totally discontented by the very same poverty that the “bingo book” found contentment in.
Are not the contradictions in life wonderful to explore?
Who had the more rewarding life, more fulfilling, you judge if any of us has the right to judge at all, but we surely have the right to speculate!

Are there conclusions to be drawn from any of this type of speculation? Whose existence both similar in length of time spent on this earth was better than the other?
In every other aspect of comparison totally different, which was the most rewarding, to whom, and in the totality of it all did it make any difference to anybody or to any one of us.
Both in some way impacted on me, both in minor ways, I think!

How do you really know what sitting, and talking, listening to others teaches us. Amid the laughter the banter the serious comment; you are subconsciously soaking up knowledge.

How you use that casual education, life education, is an individual thing, you can soak it up and openly benefit from it or you can bury it but you cannot ignore it, it will always be there at some level!
It will influence how you think, how you react to life situations.
What I learned from the “bingo book” was humour, acceptance, importance of family, vital knowledge.
What I learned from the “eulogy” was restlessness, questioning, anger (next best motivation to love) but also humour, compassion and caring.
   
So back to it: is living life without ambition the only way to live life without regret?
Or will the very ambition you may have, cause you the greatest regret: when and if you “never” achieve that ambition for change you spend your life striving for, as so few do.

And/or is life wasted when you live it in blind indifference to the possibilities of what challenging life, the opportunities that challenge might create in fulfilling your potential on this earth.

Tough call really, me I am walking my own road now, I love it, the freedom to express MY opinion without censure, downside is you live on the outside, the “eulogy” taught me a little about that, the “bingo book” taught me a little about being at peace with being shut out.
Where do you stand/walk in this short life?

‘It’s all in the past’ my ass! Maybe now the Irish public will do something. Maybe the politicians will do something; maybe Kathleen Lynch will do something. Time to go to work now.
Last Monday’s programme was powerful, distressing, upsetting, disgusting. But it is all meaningless, unless it is a call to action. Please do not say ‘it is all in the past’ ever again.

Pat Bracken, West Cork psychiatrist, finished on the perfect word: power. We must break the legal power granted to psychiatry. We must mind Dr Bracken now, they will go after him. A doctor friend said to me once, “John, politics is a dirty pool, and medical politics is the mud at the bottom of the pool.”
Psychiatrist Mick Corry, a great friend, spoke on the Late Late Show about Shane Clancy and his opinion that legal drugs caused his sudden act of violence. Mick had cancer and they came after him savagely.
He refused to use ECT, so they said he was not entitled to practice as a psychiatrist. I was on Joe Duffy with Mick, when the debate was stopped in mid-stream.

Somebody rang and said Mick was not a qualified psychiatrist, plug pulled, because he would not use ECT. Mick told me of his distress in being hounded as a whistleblower. He had cancer and other doctors put him under stress!
Martin Rogan stated the HSE must pursue complaints. As an advocate, not as a patient, I was attacked by a psychiatrist in Carrig Mór three years ago, and still no proper action from the HSE!
Dr Dermot Walsh spoke of reports, he had the power to shut the institutions down, and he did not! Patricia Gilhooley of the Mental Health Commission has the same power today but known abusive units are relicensed.
The male psychiatric nurse, Michael O’Keeffe, who stated that he hated to force inject patients, made it sound as though he had no choice. Yes he did. His colleagues today have the same choice; it is simple but courageous. Say no!

Have you any idea of the courage of those who spoke out last Monday night? Heroes like Gráinne Humphrys, Teddy Welsh, and Patsi Dolan.
If you know any of those superb women from Waterford, hug them now. Tell us, all of us, the mad community, how heroic we are. Tell us you see our strength not our ‘weakness’ as this abusive system of power has persuaded you to believe of us.
Those wonderful ladies Tammy and Catherine, Joan Hamilton and her family opened their arms to us in Charleville.
I would so love to have been sitting in Pike Farm, Charleville, last Monday night with my old buddy Helena King, a hero who did not make it. Pike Farm housing estate was the original location of Slí Eile, and that story must be told.

The ignorant aggression of those residents was extraordinary. The guards, the HSE - helpless. Helena came out of a lock-up ward every weekend for months to face down the pickets with me. We walked straight through them.
We sang ‘Faith of our Fathers’ to those Christians, those massgoing residents, to take the piss. They shouted, we faced them down singing. Their ignorance! Helena is dead. She decided to go. Her part in this fight for rights must never be forgotten. Vincent Browne recorded that time, he is very silent in the debate today. 

Bracken is right - they will scream that money is the problem - it is not. It is the ethos of belief and training that dictates force is the only way. Educated ignorance, close to propaganda.
We cannot allow this to descend into an anti-psychiatric rant. This is nothing to do with psychiatry, it is so much deeper than that. This about the human right of any member of the mad community to be an equal citizen!
Join in and sign up to http://www.madprideireland.ie and help us by signing our campaign to stop force in mental health.

I will speak at a UCC conference on Mad Medicine on Saturday, 24 September. I will speak about the business of mad medicine. The battle for market share in the human spirit. How the competition is going door to door, selling prescriptions to addictive drugs, while we talk. How we are deluding ourselves into thinking we are making progress, at our conferences, where we rant and congratulate ourselves, and they ignore us.

The fact is we are no real competition to the medical model. We are divided by ego, they united by cash flow. We have no real clear business strategy. They invest heavily to maintain their market share. They begin in education.
Grants, stipends, research; this corruption is to date their best return on investment. Next sales tool: fear! Investment in sensational lies, one stabbing worth a million acts of kindness. Return from fear spread through a media dependent on advertising to survive.

Through fear they established the right to force to cure. Great marketing, they are really professional. We need to study their methods. Know your enemy. We talk of truth emotionally, they are cool and pragmatic.  We take it all personally, when it really is just business. Armani v tweeds. Smooth corrupt doctors are team leaders.

They pitch at the tables of the bureaucratic elite across the world. They have back up teams of PR and marketing. They sip champagne, they recruit the complaint user groups, corrupt and fund them as house slaves, sip and sup happily with them. Great photo op, ‘we are consulting’. We, unfortunately, exist in a bubble of self congratulatory delusion.
We must find the perfect case, fund it and press legal suits on one targeted individual psychiatrist. Then, if we take their personal money, their homes in the courts? The next sales/ECT slip (prescription) they are about to sign, they will pause. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

The kids gave me a present of a television and a yoke. The yoke stores hundreds of movies and TV series. I’m watching The Wire; fantastic story line, I’ve come to end of the final series, of how bureaucracy gets itself tied up in knots of statistics and numbers in the City Hall, police, schools, justice.

How reports are so much more important than people, image so much more important than reality. How good people in the Baltimore police department become so disgruntled they simply clock in and out, collect their cheque and go home. Initiative stifled, something to be discouraged frowned upon.
The top level bureaucracies so caught up in how important they are that they forgotten how to smell a rose. Corruption in high places, dirty drug money, dirty developers, dirty engineers, dirty planners, dirty lawyers, so much money that the major problem is; where to hide it. Sound familiar?

The blind indifference of the many as long as that suffering is confined to a ghettoized few, the minority. Politicians elected not because they fix anything but because they are better at keeping the problem away from “my” front door then the other guy, but they never risk any action that may lose them a vote. The passionate voice of those who try to swim against the tide and make real change looked upon as trouble makers, people who stir up trouble, cause discontent with the truth, people who are a pain in the arse. Simply ignored; by the greedy few within the status quo. Sound familiar?
The Wire is based on the power of the back hander to the sleeveen, the bribe, not just money but promotion of those who toe the party line, about false declarations in the public domain and secret deals behind closed doors. It is about ineptitude: being promoted because of compliance, it is about the danger of asking the right question at the wrong time, about the danger of truth in a corrupt society to a person’s career. Sound familiar?

The Wire is about corrupt lawyers getting fat defending drug dealers and murderers, bending the law just as far as they can without breaking it and being paid fortunes, for denying the truth they know about their murderous drug dealing clients, within the law. Sound familiar?
The Wire is about the high life these parasites live together at parties, resorts, launching new developments paid for by crime and corruption, and being lauded for it in the public domain by the corrupt officials they bought off to build these “civic minded” developments. Sound familiar.

The Wire is about the ability of the status quo to bury the truth under an avalanche of paper work and delay the truth so that when the truth is told and questions are answered most people have forgotten what the question was in the first place. Sound familiar?

Finally it is about the enormous human misery that exists in so many people’s lives as a result of all of the above corruption and of how that misery is passed down through the generations.
About young men being shot in the streets, stabbings, children being neglected, women selling themselves as prostitutes to greedy corrupt men, those same men never charged.
About filth, dirt, life at its base lowest preventable level, sadness! Reality in the raw, that foul stench that flows like sewage from corruption and always leaves a trail of human misery wafting in its wake.  Sound familiar?

You should watch the wire or maybe you should watch the six one news this evening same thing really!!

“46.5% of 588 involuntary ECT treatments in 2008 were to people 65 years of age and older”
“The ratio of women to men is 2/1”
Why?

You are 73 times more likely to receive ECT in Galway then in Cork.
Why?

You are 60 times more likely to receive ECT in Waterford then in Cork.
Why?

36% of total (4884) treatments were given in 2 private hospitals in Dublin
2008 report of the Mental Health Commission.

The rate of use of ECT in one psychiatric unit in Limerick has a variance of 8/1 between the psychiatrists who work there!!
You are safer from ECT in the public service!
We have ECT enthusiasts in Ireland, you are appointed your psychiatrist in the public service in Ireland by where you live.
Patients surely have a right to know if their psychiatrist is an ECT enthusiast before they accept treatment from them.

Lat year I was invited to a conference in Tullamore by kind invitation of Mayor Molly Buckley speaking at a Fine Gael organised conference chaired by Kieran Mulrooney RTE with George Hook.
It was about suicide. We both spoke of our personal experiences in the area. Identical stories in the main. Stressed out over money, business, but both with underlying problems, which never allowed us to be at peace with ourselves. That gift discovered late in life.
John Moloney the Garda Superintendent spoke of road deaths and alcohol and the suicide prevention officer Josephine Rigney spoke of charts and slides and schemes to help people to help people in times of suicide.

Questions were asked from the floor. Why was the biggest one. How? next. The part played by drink.
Then there were other speakers said a few words from the floor. Dan Neville TD President Irish Association of Suicidology!!

To me the most interesting man of the night, not because of what he said or even how he said it, because he was a bit long winded, it was what he did not say that intrigued me. He was the coroner.
He outlined all the sadness of his court in the case of suicide. The terrible job our young guards have to do telling relatives, God I would hate that job.
He spoke of the amounts of drink and illegal drugs found in the bloodstream of those who died.

May I refer you back to the top lines on this article; those are figures we have had to fight for years to obtain from the Mental Health Commission re the use of ECT in this country and have it broken down between voluntary and involuntary. 588 treatments forced on people in 2008, 50% of them pensioners.
The College of psychiatry state this is a life saving treatment, only used in times of crisis i.e. when a patient is starving or in a coma.
I would request that we have made public the reasons 588 forced treatments of ECT were administered.

Back to the coroner he or indeed none of the other “experts” in any way questioned or mentioned the level of LEGAL prescribed drugs in the bloodstream of those who died by suicide.
Why do we not have a chart from the suicide prevention office showing that?
A lot of these prescribed legal drugs carry black box warnings now to state that we need to keep a suicide watch on our loved ones as these drugs may cause suicide.
Yet we have no figures to show what type and dosage of these LEGAL drugs our loved ones were taking at time of death.

Earlier this year Amnesty made a big fanfare re Mental health Law yet they refuse to stand behind the campaign to stop the use of forced ECT. It is a complete disgrace what Amnesty are doing.
This week the NSUE CEO will speak in Cork. NSUE refuse to back the call to stop the use of forced ECT. It is a complete disgrace what the NSUE are doing.
Not ECT by the way just forced ECT, http://www.delete59b.com

We found a cure for TB and less people died. We found a cure for polio and less people were damaged by the virus.
We found the cure for “mental illness” and the number of people dying from suicide is going through the roof, greater then road deaths now.

I don’t have the answers, but I do have two questions; why do we not have full information re the part played by doctors and prescribed drugs in the suicide of our friends and loved ones?

And why is there this undercurrent of unease and fear re our psychiatric services?, would it be that we have given that service the legal right to force a cure that is simply not working on people and they are dying because they fear the consequence of accessing the service. Right nor wrong we must surely find the answer.

Fear and force are hardly the road to love care and cure, we have yet to learn that in psychiatry.

NSUE and Amnesty have yet to learn it.

Please tell them they must stop force in psychiatric units.

I was in the dail listening to and partaking in a debate on Mental Health. I spoke about the people I have been writing about for the last couple of months, those who are currently being abused in our institutions. Of how Anne 1 is still in after 60 years how Anne 2 is in for 3 years because she might be promiscuous if she is released. Of how when I went to visit Jim 1 I could smell him from six feet. He was dressed in rags in his forth year locked up. Jim 2 who I helped bury in a mass grave. Representatives from every party was there to hear of these abuses of the human rights of our citizens and yet not one of them approached me there or since to ask either the names of these people or of the institutions wherin they are being held.

Be I right or wrong in my allegations I would have thought that my making them in Leinster House in front of an invited audience of cross party TD’s and Senators and other professionals in the business of mental health would have at least provoked an enquiry.
It was stated by a speaker that there are no votes in mental health, one TD made a bland statement about the fact that Td’s represent all their constituents equally and one brave Td, to his credit, stated that the truth is that the first statement was correct - there are no votes in mental health.
Try and take the budget set aside for cancer and spend it on mental health. Can you imagine the uproar. Yet when millions were taken from the mental health budget to buoy up the cancer budget not a whisper of protest.
So is the problem one of the mad communities? Is it of our own making?Are we silenced by our own fear of stigma? Our fear to speak out? Our fear of what the neighbours might think?

I did get a slight acknowledgement from a rep of the medical model who again introduced the old chestnut of fear as the reason to lock people up.  He spoke about how tough his job was in having to deal with psychotic people who break up their homes etc. I have a friend who works in A + E who comments on this kind of moaning from psychiatric nurses as follows “let them come and work one night in A + E and they will see what real violence in a hospital is about”.
I wsa on Joe Duffy recently talking of involuntary ECT and again the argument coming from those that see force as best practise, or as the only solution to acute mental health problems, based their argument on fear. What do we do with the patient who is starving himself and is in a coma? I wonder how many of the 43 citizens of Ireland who were forced to take ECT were in a coma? I spoke to a psychiatrist recently who again gave me this argument and I asked how many patients he had come across who were starving themselves into a coma and he replied one, when he was in Africa as a young man.

Why is that when you begin to question the current system of treatment in mental health those that are happy in its present format always revert to instilling fear of the patient into the minds of the general public as the best defence of how they practise medicine. Fear, it comes up over and over again, the extreme case, the emergency. I say it again we of the mad community are the least violent members of society yet those that treat us when challenged on how they treat us always revert to fear to justify what they know in their hearts is abuse.

There is a deep seated fear in Ireland of mental hospitals just as there was of clerical institutions such as the Mafdaline laundries. Why is that? Is it because just as we all knew of the abuse that lay at the heart of those institutions we also know of the abuse in Mental hospitals. Ask the husbands, wives, brothers and sisters of those being abused why they do not speak out and they will tell you it is because they fear what might happen to their relatives who are locked up if they do.
Sound familiar?

Nothing has changed.
The horror of it all; and it is still going on now right here in your city.
Where are you all? Where is your outrage, these are your brothers and sisters; being abused. Their lives being stolen.
Where is the mayor, where is the City Council, where is the Chamber of Commerce, where is Vincent de Paul, Rotary? 
Where is the bishop? Where is the County Council that supervises a mass grave in Curraghkippane where I helped bury Michael Smith, who went into upton at five and died in Sarsfield’s Court at 55? The council could not tell us where they buried his mother who died in St Anne’s in the 1960s. Her crime was to have a second child out of wedlock. Where were the staff at that funeral? His doctor could not be bothered to say goodbye to the man he ‘cared for’ over years)

Nothing has changed; the abuse goes on.
UCC, through people of the calibre of Harry Gijbles, Lydia Supona and Orla O’Donovan are opening up the debate. We must get behind and support the dissenting voice now because the status quo will respond in a cool calm voice of reason, and they will blame resources, money. They will state that the problem is money. It is not.It is ethos.

Where is the voice and ear of Professor of Psychiatry Ted Dinan? I have been to many of these debates on a new way to deal with emotional distress. I never saw or heard him at a CVN meeting. We have another coming up soon. I extend him an invite on behalf of Critical Voices Network: Ted, we would welcome you with open arms, you might even get out again - kidding!
I am still visiting patients in 2011 in Cork hospitals in their late 70s, locked up because they were raped (Josie, who was featured in an RTÉ Doc on One last year). I visit another woman in her mid 20s raised and abused by this state, this town, in foster homes and locked up against her will. Her psychiatrist states she is in danger of being promiscuous if released! This is in the year of our Lord 2011!
Nothing has changed; the abuse goes on.

In places like Carrig Mór (the old mad house, St Anne’s, where John Hunt is locked away still waiting to be moved to the Central Mental Hospital because

they cannot break his spirit in Carrig Mór) and the Mercy Hospital, the psychiatric ward is on the second floor. What genius designed a ward where physically fit people cannot exercise? In the CUH, in Sarsfield’s Court.
In all these places, right now, Cork citizens are being force-incarcerated, force-injected, force-fed, restrained and put into isolation cells; based on the educated, ignorant guess of some psychiatrist. And as a final act of desperation if they still show strong will, like Hanna Greely, forced Electro Convulsive Therapy.
Nothing has changed; the abuse goes on.

Cork’s minister Kathleen Lynch must surely be in no doubt now of the need to do a simple but significant thing. Delete 59b; both unable and unwilling to

stop the use of forced ECT completely. Dr Brendan Kelly made forced ECT sound so benign on the programme because they now knock you out before they steal your memory. All they did was add another profession to the list of abuse anaesthesia.

Did you see the nurses marching Hanna Greely off to be tortured last Monday night? Nurses today have the perfect phrase, you read it in notes “in the patient’s best interest” while forcing them to take damaging and addictive drugs.

Nures today record resistance; “the patient lacks insight”.
And if they force the patient into compliance the note reads “the patient is NOW showing insight”.

Directors of psychiatric nursing must take a stand, it is time. You saw what happens last night, when society abdicates its responsibility to a single profession; people are horribly abused. Psychiatry cannot do this any longer as Dr Pat Bracken states in Mad Pride Ireland’s campaign launched yesterday to stop force in mental health: “The medical profession cannot claim some sort of moral superiority and psychiatric knowledge has weak scientific credentials in terms of its predictive power.
Nothing has changed; the abuse goes on.

I saw on Aertel page 700 that you were referred to the NSUE if you were affected by issues raised in Behind the Walls. These are the same people who stood alongside the College of Psychiatry in favour of forced ECT in the Oireachtas debate.

Last year the National Service Users Executive - those the state established to speak on behalf of the Mad Community - held an award ceremony in Dublin Castle to acknowledge ‘good’ psych units (and there are some). But knowing what you all now know - and they always knew - how could they do that disgraceful thing?

I would call on those who received those awards last year to hand them back as a sign of solidarity of the victims of the past and present.
Mary Raftery and Shelia Ahern’s powerful documentary on RTÉ 1 last Monday night might just begin to blow the cap off a system of care dominated by psychiatry that has been abusing people for decades. This is and never has been anti-psychiatry, but we are dealing with a powerful profession that we have elevated to a legally powerful position; where they can lock people up.
We must be allowed to state that psychiatry, in common parlance, still does not have a clue and is still fecking about in people heads like that American psychiatrist Freeman and his eye-pick under the eyes to chop up our brains. (By the way, he won a Nobel Prize and was Chair of the American Psychiatrists Association).

Men and women, because they wear posh suits and speak gobbledy-gook should not be able to fool us. Oh, the bankers the lawyers, well psychiatrists are right there, it is time we know that. Lobotomies still go on; it is just that they use chemical lobotomy now, too sophisticated for a knife! They still do not have any idea of the result before the drugs are forced into you. They do not have a clue, and if I am wrong let them prove it.

Professor of Psychiatry in UCC, Professor Ted Dinan, I would like to make you an offer: Ted, me lad, will you test me in public and prove you can see the chemical imbalance that your profession says I have for the rest of my life?  Mental illness!

Mad Pride Ireland is very proud of the part we played in the production of this programme. We worked closely in assisting with the research team headed by Sheila Ahern and Mary Raftery. In fact a share of the filming was done in this house.

Watch next week’s episode

The column I wrote last week for the cork independent. ‘Life and Love’ has certainly grabbed some attention. I have received a massive amount of positive response to what I wrote. I am truly grateful and a little humbled by that response.
But there are risks in what I wrote. Not least the truth. I have a great wife and kids, but ye all know that.
Words were thrown in my direction last week, “inspirational, brilliant, strong, courageous”.
Jasus, these are words that would make any man proud. I got letters that would tear the heart out of you, saying I had helped.
But what about the truth?

We have scandals breaking out all over, about those on pedestals having those pedestals kicked out from under them. I don’t want to be up on any ‘pedestal’. Well, being shagged up now, I can’t afford any kind of a fall! (Forgive the joke!) I certainly have no place on any high moral ground.
In Cork parlance, I have been a langer for most of my life. I have screwed up or nearly screwed up most of the opportunities that fell in my path. I was a hardchaw for a bit, a young fella competing for distance, spitting out of the corner of the mouth, I was very good at it. Pisst! The spit would arch in flight.
Tried being a hippie, a cool dude, failed completely. College drop-out.
Discovered sales, I was great at it. I loved sales, still do. The most important part of any business. Cold calling is the real challenge. To find a lead, (on a day when the phone is not ringing) open the negotiations, and close the deal. Great feeling!
I bought a pub at the start of the recession, sold at the start of the boom.
Went broke, had a breakdown, started again. Liz put manners on me, and did it so gently.
All that praise last week got me thinking about all the stupid things I have done. A langer has no place pontificating.
If it came down to saints and sinners, I am most certainly on the left of the herd and running (forgive the joke again) as fast as I can with the sinners.

The craic must be in hell
I have often thought if there is an afterlife - and I have no belief whatsoever in one - the craic must be in hell. In the concept of heaven I grew up with, there are do-gooders sitting about on clouds playing harps, pontificating from the high moral ground. They’d bore the arse off me.
I have this abiding thought of all the sinners in hell listening to jazz and drinking gin.

That is where I want to be. The great idea of the Irish chancer, best portrayed by our playwrights, is the chancer with goodwill. He’s always been my hero, he manipulates for the public good, then goes for a few pints.
Back to the sinners. I am a sinner, but I think I have confessed my sins to those I have sinned against and I have been forgiven by those who I needed forgiveness from. I did this long before I wrote that article last week.
I have had fierce craic arsing around in this town drinking and singing and telling lies and stories.

The best people I have met in this life have been sinners, especially the ones who challenged the comfort zones of saints.
I have met priests and nuns, classic sinners, who never had time for the church, never conformed to the puritanical hierarchy of the institution. They joined to do the right thing and they did, quietly.
I have met honourable robbers who have a code. I drank with really decent developers, I mean that, no sarcasm.
I drank with deluded bankers, robbers in suits, liars who deceived themselves, while they pontificated ‘it was for the public good’, and declared themselves saints.
Some still defend their sainthood: Politicians still in power, some retired, who say ‘not our fault’.
So that column last week puts me in a certain kind of danger. I am in danger from the truth!

I had an old buddy who used to state: “never stick your head above the parapet for a cannon ball”.
The cannon balls I fear now are the truth. My head is well up there. We even made the “other” Independent - the one that comes out on a Sunday.
Radio stations from different counties wanted to air it. Newstalk.
All I have ever tried to do is open a space in the debate on mental health, for those silenced by the power of the status quo, to raise their silenced voice. Few answers, but lots of questions that seem to cause resentment!
So, as a langer, I spoke to my gang, those that matter, Liz, Jill and David and I pleaded with them, “hold ranks now please, for God’s sake, do not tell the truth or I am shagged”. They agreed. So this langer is safe for a bit longer. I have plausible deniability. I’m clean behind their shield! For now.

But Jasus! The real truth is such a terrible dangerous thing to a sinner, who, acting the langer, raises his head above the parapet! To all the sinners I have met, I say thank you for all the craic.
And to the saints, I say take it easy now but cop yourself on there, boy

The column I wrote last week for the cork independent. ‘Life and Love’ has certainly grabbed some attention. I have received a massive amount of positive response to what I wrote. I am truly grateful and a little humbled by that response.
But there are risks in what I wrote. Not least the truth. I have a great wife and kids, but ye all know that.
Words were thrown in my direction last week, “inspirational, brilliant, strong, courageous”.
Jasus, these are words that would make any man proud. I got letters that would tear the heart out of you, saying I had helped.
But what about the truth?

We have scandals breaking out all over, about those on pedestals having those pedestals kicked out from under them. I don’t want to be up on any ‘pedestal’. Well, being shagged up now, I can’t afford any kind of a fall! (Forgive the joke!) I certainly have no place on any high moral ground.
In Cork parlance, I have been a langer for most of my life. I have screwed up or nearly screwed up most of the opportunities that fell in my path. I was a hardchaw for a bit, a young fella competing for distance, spitting out of the corner of the mouth, I was very good at it. Pisst! The spit would arch in flight.
Tried being a hippie, a cool dude, failed completely. College drop-out.
Discovered sales, I was great at it. I loved sales, still do. The most important part of any business. Cold calling is the real challenge. To find a lead, (on a day when the phone is not ringing) open the negotiations, and close the deal. Great feeling!
I bought a pub at the start of the recession, sold at the start of the boom.
Went broke, had a breakdown, started again. Liz put manners on me, and did it so gently.
All that praise last week got me thinking about all the stupid things I have done. A langer has no place pontificating.
If it came down to saints and sinners, I am most certainly on the left of the herd and running (forgive the joke again) as fast as I can with the sinners.

The craic must be in hell
I have often thought if there is an afterlife - and I have no belief whatsoever in one - the craic must be in hell. In the concept of heaven I grew up with, there are do-gooders sitting about on clouds playing harps, pontificating from the high moral ground. They’d bore the arse off me.
I have this abiding thought of all the sinners in hell listening to jazz and drinking gin.

That is where I want to be. The great idea of the Irish chancer, best portrayed by our playwrights, is the chancer with goodwill. He’s always been my hero, he manipulates for the public good, then goes for a few pints.
Back to the sinners. I am a sinner, but I think I have confessed my sins to those I have sinned against and I have been forgiven by those who I needed forgiveness from. I did this long before I wrote that article last week.
I have had fierce craic arsing around in this town drinking and singing and telling lies and stories.

The best people I have met in this life have been sinners, especially the ones who challenged the comfort zones of saints.
I have met priests and nuns, classic sinners, who never had time for the church, never conformed to the puritanical hierarchy of the institution. They joined to do the right thing and they did, quietly.
I have met honourable robbers who have a code. I drank with really decent developers, I mean that, no sarcasm.
I drank with deluded bankers, robbers in suits, liars who deceived themselves, while they pontificated ‘it was for the public good’, and declared themselves saints.
Some still defend their sainthood: Politicians still in power, some retired, who say ‘not our fault’.
So that column last week puts me in a certain kind of danger. I am in danger from the truth!

I had an old buddy who used to state: “never stick your head above the parapet for a cannon ball”.
The cannon balls I fear now are the truth. My head is well up there. We even made the “other” Independent - the one that comes out on a Sunday.
Radio stations from different counties wanted to air it. Newstalk.
All I have ever tried to do is open a space in the debate on mental health, for those silenced by the power of the status quo, to raise their silenced voice. Few answers, but lots of questions that seem to cause resentment!
So, as a langer, I spoke to my gang, those that matter, Liz, Jill and David and I pleaded with them, “hold ranks now please, for God’s sake, do not tell the truth or I am shagged”. They agreed. So this langer is safe for a bit longer. I have plausible deniability. I’m clean behind their shield! For now.

But Jasus! The real truth is such a terrible dangerous thing to a sinner, who, acting the langer, raises his head above the parapet! To all the sinners I have met, I say thank you for all the craic.
And to the saints, I say take it easy now but cop yourself on there, boy

This post is an attempt to awaken the public consciousness as to the appalling conditions that exist in our long term care of people who live with mental illness. The lack of early intervention. Lack of attention to the families of those who live with the problem, these are the primary carers, they sit at the coalface and nobody pays them a blind bit of notice within the system. An attempt to focus the public’s mind on the whole area of mental health.

Why do nurses make beds?
As an ex inmate of a number mental institutions I have often wondered why nurses spend so much of their time as housekeepers.

Why do long term mental health patients in our institutions do the following;
Why do these patients shuffle and not walk?
Why do not have teeth?
Why do they drool when they eat?
Why do they eat freeze-cooked food? Do the staff?
Why do they ware clothes that do not fit or are torn?
Why do their clothes appear second hand?
Why is their hair not groomed?
Why do they look dirty?
Why do they smell?
Why do they sit on chairs all day staring at each other?
Why does nobody talk to them?
Why are they not entitled to human dignity?

Have you ever thought why? I have and if I transfer the above list to those who suffer from mental handicaps, as my nieghbours in Cope do, I do not believe any of the above would apply. Why?
Because it is not allowed by the system that governs those institutions.
Why do the health boards not take action do remedy these issues?
Why do caring people who staff mental hospitals allow this to continue?
Is it the system?
A system that is relentless in its efforts to perpetuate itself.
A system that is cruel in its breauracy, stifled by its own bureaucratic layers that cause a mountain of paper to be issued to procure a pen.
A system that cannot control its own finances.
I have never met a deliberately cruel person within the system. I have met people who are so demoralized by the system that they no longer care, or have been so subdued that they no longer see the injustice they help the system perpetuate. I have heard of a student nurse being told to do your work and keep your mouths shut do not rock the boat.
We must buck the system!
Why do nurses make beds?
Why do they not spend that time talking to their patients?
Why am I stigmatized because I am ill?
Why do nurses serve food to the patients?
Why are they not involved in inventive occupational therapy?
Why are nurse’s housekeepers?
Why are there not enough councilors?
Why are there not enough drop in centers?
Why is there no early intervention?
Why did they not sit at my bedside and talk to me, they were to busy making the bed, while I sat in corner ignored.
Why are there so many whys’?
We must buck the system!
As the system stands logic would dictate that nurses should spend 50%
of their training time in Cert, 25% of it in bureaucratic school learning to fill in forms and 25% in nursing school.
The patient’s reality would dictate this proportionality in training.
Why do nurses make beds?
I am concentrating on this aspect of mental health care because it is easy to highlight, there are so many others. The professionals right across the spectrum, uninspired, the staff, uninspired, the system stifling.
I truly believe we have a Minister who cares but I wish her luck in trying to disentangle the system that has built up walls of bureaucracy stronger and higher then any ancient fortress.
We must buck the system.
Mental hospitals are public places; you can walk in and visit, why not go and see for yourself. Take a drive to Sarsfield Court, look at those society has forgotten, wandering aimlessly about the grounds, they are the lucky ones they get out. I know a man who stands at the same window every day staring at the sill, ignored, compliant, in the control of the system. I have been visiting the hospital for a number of years now, he is always in the same position, an expert in camouflage, he has blended into the wall. He stands at a busy junction, between stairs, corridor and doorway, invisible. I mentioned him to a friend who has been visiting a relative for years. Who on the next visit cried because the man had been unseen and unnoticed over the years
Will you continue to forget this lonely, compliant, victim of the system? Will you allow the system create a new generation of lonely, compliant, victims, you can stop this.
Go and see, if you have a heart you will cry.
If you have a voice raise it.
Do not be compliant.
We must buck the system.
People are in pain waiting for you to raise your voice, Mental illness very often makes patients silent, you retreat into that pit of dispair, but it does not make you stupid.
Voiceless but not stupid!
Be our voice.

I’m dying, oh I don’t have a hangover or a flu, no nothing as mundane as that. I’m dying and that’s that.
Shit happens!
Motor neuron disease, the muscles waste away, left leg is pretty bad, floppy foot, and the right is starting, the hands, the voice, ability to swallow, not the most pleasant way to go.
End up in a wheelchair mumbling and drooling, being fed, changed and washed.

As they used to say when I had “depression”, “a breakdown”
“he have a problem with de nerves”
I simply lost control of my emotions, but I really do have a problem with the nerves right now.

Two to five years on average.

Here’s the thing, if I was offered 20/30 years with madness, depression, “as I had it”, or my 2 to 5 with this, I would take this anytime.

I have a remarkable thing happening in my life right now as my body is getting weaker my spirit is getting stronger! Go figure?

Explain that to me, how does that happen. I have a theory, I have learned from madness the value of my spirit. How to be content, how to absorb love, a great gift from madness.

Self dignity, with it you can do anything you really want to do.
Without it you can do nothing.

God how I hated the downside of madness, the self inflicted loneliness, while surrounded by love, the self rejection of love on offer, seeing the pain of rejection in your lovers eyes and not being able to respond to that pain.

God how I hated it, my hate was really for myself, the pain of madness impossible to express.
So I fell foul of the pill for every ill crowd, nearly killed me, attempted suicide when I was on my heaviest doses of a mix of ten different drugs a day, four different diagnoses, they really didn’t have a clue, psychiatry.

So I ran as far as I could away from psychiatry, I studied me; learned about me, with great help and love from my then councillor Brendan O’Callaghan.
I was invited to lunch recently by the Irish college of psychiatry, had dinner in London at the royal college, not as a patient being paraded as their example of cure, but to challenge them and some are listening, I will give them that.

The arrogant ones deaf!

But God what I have learned from the upside: madness is an emotional feeling just like joy, love, happiness, sadness, all the others, but I shut the door in its face as I was taught to do. Rejected all it had to give, and it, madness got mad at me. I fought it, it fought back and it won.

I learned so painfully and slowly, to let it in, be comfortable with it, and it has rewarded me for my kindness to it.
I write now, this column, poetry, short stories, working on a book, sport a ponytail, whatever.

There is something really dignified in the honesty of neurology, they have done every test under the sun, x-ray, scan , bloods, lumber puncture, you name it, they have done it and they tell me with great honesty they have no idea where it comes from and more importantly they have as yet no treatment.
Remember as yet no treatment, Neurology has a single a pill to retard it for a few months, that’s all but no fix.

Compare and contrast, I have never had a psychiatrist take my pulse, never preformed a medical test of any kind on me. Never!!

In fact let me make an offer, publically through this column to Dr Justin Brophy, President of the College of Psychiatry, a good man, test me Justin. Scientifically, supervised by a neutral medical scientist; for the casual and in my opinion incorrect various diagnosis of Uni Poplar, Bi Polar, (Manic Depression) Dysphoric Elation ( don’t ask me nobody seems to have heard of it except the guy who gave it to me) and finally Paranoia (I began to ask questions) I was given.
Test me Justin, in the public domain, prove your ability to label us for life.
I am in the perfect place I have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain and you can prove our professions credibility.
If I have a disease in my brain called “mental illness” prove it.
I will send this to him, Dept of Health, HSE. publish their response when and if I get it.

The king is wearing no clothes and I bought his suit!
Psychiatry needs to so radically reform itself reassess the whole ethos of the medical cure for a problem of the soul. We need to help them.

Compliance, control, they are the by-words for cure in psychiatry. I wandered around in a daze when “I was Cured “ by pills, told to settle for a life under sedation, it was the best they psychiatry, could do, God love them.

No time to go into it all here but have a look at Eugenics another exposed “taught medical bullshit Science based not on fact but theory” (like chemical imbalance theory) exposed as completely naked.

I can hear it already the classical defence FEAR. I am exposing vulnerable people to the possibility I might be right, asking them to use their own innate intelligence.

Talk of friends.

At least we have a beginning, psychiatry is admitting to overuse of “the pill for every ill” cure. Through http://www.delete59b.com we have a debate initiated. 
Do not get me started on forensic psychiatry, what an oxymoron.

And we have given the power of law to this theory to lock our citizens up under this naked science, some citizens for the whole of their lives on the guess of a, dare I say it, quack, a forensic psychiatrist, who is scientifically naked.

So I am dying and thanks to my brush with madness and what I learned from it, the real beauty of life, I will handle this dying as long as I have my dignity, my families love, that I now know; how to absorb.

Is compromise the death knell of the dissenting voice?

If so, then by inference, is compromise the sustenance of the status quo?

To be uncompromising as to the truth, albeit your truth, when that truth contradicts the perceived reality of what it is be to moral, legal, humane, it can lead to a very lonely place in your life.

When the weight of international, national, law decides that what you proclaim to be a breach of our human rights is ok, then to sustain the energy to shout loudly enough to be heard above the calm hysteria, that is the status quo, with all of its resources, strains your larynx to the full.

When your friends, with all the good nature they have, whisper to you, just give a little, we believe you, we agree with you, but it pains us to see your pain at rejection after rejection.

Those that have compromised will say, we need the funding, the service, we have to take the small steps, no point in standing outside, come into the tent, its warm. A little progress is better then none. But they have gone backwards they will always be guests in the tent, never co owners.

Are we, can we be, our own authors of change?

Then when you are about to flag, a little light, a kind word, a door opens a creak, access to he, who can, an ear that has power listens, nods and says,
“you have to find me the words that I can say while I do what you refuse to do compromise a little towards your position while holding the door open to both sides.
Politics is after all the art of compromise, I have to be an artist, you don’t. I believe you, I just can’t say it, as you want it said, wrong time, wrong place, wrong whatever but together we will get there”.

Is integrity another word for stubbornness?

Is that bar of steel running down your back a medical device for an unseen disability, or a gift from an unknown God, that holds you upright?

Hard to tell.

Do you know Rebecca Riley? No!

She is 4, no strike that; she was 4; she is dead.

Died from an overdose of psychiatric medications.
Rebecca was diagnosed ADHD/Bi Polar at TWO. This child had the terrible twos and they put her on anti psychotic medications. Not one but four anti psychotics.
“Off labelling”; it means the drugs being prescribed that are not suitable for the intended purpose. This practice is not illegal, yet. There is huge resistance to it being made illegal.

I was at a European commission conference on Mental Health in Brussels, at the plenary session, on the podium sat a number of European Commissioners’ the chair was a doctor, it was a conference on mental health, at the far right hand side of the top table sat the CEO of a pharmaceutical industry who was formally thanked for paying for the whole event.

The CEO spoke; he stated his business was health. I interrupted to remind him his business was illness; with health he was out of business. He spoke of mental illness, and chemical imbalance, I interrupted to remind him he had no science to back up that remark; simply marketing.

Rebecca Riley was 4 years old, she died from that marketing, from that false diagnose of ADHD/Bi Polar, she was a disruptive little girl, difficult to control, her mother just got tired, her doctor, produced a prescription pad, and she died. On the link below you will read a statement from a leading psychiatrist stating when parents come to him exhausted he has to do something: for the parents but to the children!!

Her teacher gave evidence of finding Rebecca sitting in the corridor listless, like a rag doll, could not stand, walk up stairs unaided.

“She wasn’t even there, she was blank”
Prescribed a mix of:

Seroquel: anti psychotic used in the treatment of schizophrenia not approved by the Federal Drugs Authority for the use on children. She was four and bold!

Depakote: used in the treat epilepsy (she did not have epilepsy). She was four and bold.

Clonidine: for ADHD. She was four and bold.

Zyprexa: an anti-psychotic not approved for children. She was four and bold.

She was on all of them. She was four.

Despite what her teachers say her mother said she saw no change in her behaviour. ( She and her husband face murder charges; not her doctors).

When asked recently did she think Rebecca was really bi-polar her mother replied “no just hyperactive”

Her teacher said

“She had no emotion”

she was not disruptive any longer, she was cured into compliance, and she died from the cure.

My grandson had the terrible two’s he is four now a beautiful boy.

One million children are on anti psychotics in the US diagnosed Bi polar. What does their future hold.

Back to that conference there was a side bar meeting chaired by our Minister John Moloney, attended by 100? “Experts” we were addressed by a beautiful young looking professor of psychiatry from New York, the pharmaceutical industry sponsors a lot of education in the US, who informed us “that as a matter of urgency” we must test every child in Europe for ADHD.

I interrupted to tell her I thought she was out of her mind.

As we left that conference Minister John Moloney approached me and asked me to visit his office for a chat, we have been talking since.

I am on a panel of advisors to the European Commission on Mental Health, I have sat at round table talks of NGO’s in Brussels.
An NGO is a non governmental agency; my clear understanding has always been they are voluntary agencies. There were 20 of us roughly; from all over Europe, overseen by the European Commission, the purpose is to come up with a new way to deal with mental health, and all that implies.

There is a guy sitting at the table; for two days never said a word, scribbled notes, on the second day I asked;

“Excuse me may I ask, who you are?”.

He told me
“I represent EFPIA, John”

“Oh” says I “What’s that”
 
“European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations” says he.

Says I;
“I thought this meeting was for NGO’s”

Says he;

“The pharmaceutical industry is a non government body “  and he smiled.

I looked at the rep of the EC he told us; the EFPIA were sponsoring all of us. You have to say it is very clever, what do the mafia say, keep your friends close and your enemies even closer!
At a follow up conference in Budapest during dinner, attended by politicians, bureaucrats, civil servants, voluntary groups, I sat with a PR company working for the European Commission promoting the event they were doing it “pro bono”; free, they were part of a charitable foundation. So we drank, sang, told stories, laughed a lot, and I asked a few questions.

The charitable foundation was founded and funded by a pharmaceutical company!

Rebecca Riley was four, four years old how do these people sleep?

This week’s newspaper, as usual, features a column by John McCarthy of Mad Pride Ireland. It’s called The Human Condition and if you don’t usually read it, go and do it now.
Unusually, John’s column is a first-hand account of physical, and not mental illness.
It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever read.

John is well known.
He’s well known for so many different things. He’s a chancer, a campaigner, a poet and general good-time gin drinker, an enemy of punctuation, but he is best-known as an amazingly unselfish support to people who have been touched by mental illness, or, as he calls it, ‘the normality of madness.’
John and I don’t agree on everything, but when he approached me about writing a column for us on mental illness, I said yes. We agreed to give it a shot. That was two years ago.

Now, John’s column is regularly the most-read item on our website. We get comments on it from people all over the world who identify with issues he and others are experiencing right here in Cork. The Free John Hunt campaign is known all over the world, mostly because of John’s work on it.
The Cork Independent has just won an award - Headline Regional Newspaper of the Year - for our reporting on mental health. Headline identified John’s column and our reporting of Mad Pride’s work as the reason we won.
John has written extensively about the crippling depression he has suffered for much of his life.

Now, though, he has a new challenge - motor neurone disease.
It’s supremely ironic that someone who has spent years fighting the stigma of mental pain should be struck down by one of the most debilitating physical illnesses there is. And, as he describes it this week, “it’s shite”. How could it be otherwise?
But priorities sharpen and come into focus when new limits are placed on what you can do and how you can do it.
Mad Pride Ireland is achieving traction. The organisation has major sponsors coming on board soon and its media profile - and bargaining power - is increasing.

John is harnessing all his strength, and is pouring it into his twin priority areas; what he has identified now as his life’s work; his family and friends, and his campaigning.
Separate, but the same.
The work John is doing - improving things for people who are fragile, who feel the world’s pain and cannot translate that in a ‘normal’ way - is not separate from his life. It can’t be.
He writes in this week’s column about the pain he feels at being unable to play with his grandchildren.

But with the time and resources he has, he is doing something infinitely more valuable for them. Step by step, campaign by campaign, hour by hour, he is making the world a happier, more understanding, more compassionate place for them.
Now that’s prioritising.

Heres a video of John reading from his latest article; Life and love which was published in the Cork Independent today where he writes the column ‘The Human Condition’.

I have been thinking about writing this for a bit.
When friends ask me how I am, “I’m grand” is the stock in trade answer, with a smile. Or “as good as it gets”. A few ask how do I retain the humour? A few suggested I write it down, warts and all. So here it is.
If I don’t complain or crib, then I will not feel so bad. It works; it works very well. Most of the time!
We in this house are going through hell right now.
I’m dying.
We know how hard it is for all of us, but we smile most of the time. We remain calm most of the time. I am stuck in the bed most of the time. Outings are rare and tiring. Taking a leak a nightmare! Putting on socks, underwear, pants, exhausting. Sitting up in a chair - exhausting. Not able to walk. Sponge baths! Losing the use of my hands. Basically, my life is gone to shite.

This motor neurone is relentless. The old name is so much more descriptive - creeping paralysis. That is what it is does, it creeps over your body, like a rapist. I cannot stop this disease destroying my body but I can prevent it destroying my mind and spirit.
You know there is an opportunity in everything, and in every situation. We as a family are closing ranks and showing our strength. Growing!
I would suggest, even, that this family is getting stronger. There is a lot of love in the air in the house, there is a lot of sadness.
When I need to, and I do, I cry scream and vent. Alone, when they are out, they know it.
I tell them, and they say it helps to know.

I have learnt to be very open about my feelings whether they’re good or bad. Some cannot handle that level of truth. My family can. And they do me the great honour of telling me “will you cop on?” when I run away with myself. 
So I just cry - not too often mind you - but I do it, and it helps. It does not help as much as a deep breath and a smile when my beautiful wife returns, gently opens the door and asks “You all right?”
I can smile and say “I’m grand, you?”
“Me?” she always lies, “I’m fine, cup of tea?” and we get on with this shite.
Liz, being Liz, walks the pressure off in her beautiful garden and vents in her space.
She rarely speaks of her pain, but the story is in her face at those brief moments when I see her and she can’t see me. If she catches me glancing, that beautiful smile magically reappears.
This paralysis is nearly as disabling for Liz. Her whole life has been shagged up, she is on a new, unexciting, heart-rending heart-breaking career, love is forcing this choice on the woman I love, she is a carer now. I so hate that, I so hate seeing my beautiful wife under this strain.
We all make an effort to smile through the strain, and we all see the strain through the smiles.

My family, the four of us, have sat at the kitchen table, looked into each other’s eyes and hearts and agreed to stay united through this.
Love at its best. They are doing for me what I have done for them. They are looking after me and I am making it as easy as possible for them to look after me.
My daughter and my son are in their mid-thirties. They’re great, and they have their own families to distract them, thank God. I know it helps them. They give me huge strength, giving too much of their time but I am greedy for it.
I have an extended family now, grandsons! One side with a nana and a granddad, one with a granddad.
It breaks my heart that I will not know them as men. I get pangs of jealousy, when I see the other two granddads, playing, walking with the boys.
I have great friends who visit, and we have talked this out. I think most of them call to drink my stock of gin! But I really hope the gin does not run out, I love the company.

Choice
So I have a choice: I can allow all this to overwhelm me or I can smile. I can only smile if I keep the mind busy. So I work in the bed for eight - ten hours a day. I write, make calls and stir the media and political pot to keep this fight for human rights of the mad community on the boil.
I love it. I love the progress we are making.
I cannot imagine having something like creeping paralysis in the old days when a cripple was a cripple, before computers, mobiles, skype, all of that contact with other human beings from the bed.
How and where did those in the past find the strength to live with this cruel way of dying?

Mad Pride is working hard to get its autumn national radio campaign in place to stop force by scrapping mental health laws.
What is going on in my spirit? I am simply experiencing the beautiful side of madness, I have a sense of peace, because I have found that essential unselfish way of loving myself.

The normality of madness! Being quietly confident!
Having spiritual disquiet; depression is the most crippling method of destroying a human being. Pain in the body can be handled so much easier than pain in the spirit.
I will take the last few years I have with creeping paralysis, but with my spirit growing, rather than 20 years with depression and my spirit dying.
I have been there, that place of self isolation.
That was truly awful.

Recession is an opportunity to either fall back into helplessness or a challenge to step up to the plate and move forward.
Can you become addicted to helplessness? As one who very nearly did, I would most certainly answer that in the affirmative. Being helpless can be a very comfortable place to be. Being helpless can allow you to disavow any responsibility for anything that impacts on your life in a negative fashion.
When I had a breakdown and fell into the pit of despair, being helpless became a hugely convenient rational for my inability to recover. When somebody came along with a positive suggestion as to how to improve my situation, I would lambaste them for their lack of understanding of the reality of my helplessness to do anything about my own situation.

Very conveniently, I would blame my addiction to helplessness on either their, inability or lack of will or unwillingness to engage with me so that I could explain to them how my breakdown, my depression, being in the pit of despair, whatever you want to call it, my madness did not allow me to have a positive bone in my body.

I became impossible to have a normal relationship with, as I was so self absorbed that there was no room in my life for any other problems, family, business, etc.
Can this also be reflected in communities ie. that the community collectively becomes addicted to helplessness and resistant to all positive or forward movement. In my experience many voluntary and community groups for connivance encourage this addiction to helplessness by conforming to the status quo rather then take the more difficult route of challenge in a positive wat that very status quo.
Very often we pander to rather then engage in constructive challenge, tell people what we think they want to hear rather then the stark truth.”

This addiction to helplessness just does not exist within the area of mental health and I also believe that it permeates across all stratas of disadvantaged societies. For instance, we have in this country right now young people who are growing up in homes that are third and fourth generation unemployed and are being taught the benefits of the addiction to helplessness. Being taught how to milk the system for everything its worth, being taught how to blame the system for everything that goes wrong in their lives and being taught how to exist within the misery of poverty in their spirit, in their homes and in their communities. Being taught how to disparage those who exist within their communities and try to improve their lives in that community. Words like suckers, idiots, fools, do-gooder’s, would be used to describe those who work for the benefit of the community instead of those that suck it dry.

The sad thing is that very often the position of those that are addicted to helplessness is not challenged because of politic expediency. There is a certain risk taken if you criticise this addiction to helplessness. You risk the accusation that you lack understanding, of being cruel, of being a capitalist, of lacking a social conscience and while I very consciously understand these risks and the grain of truth that maybe contained in them, I also firmly believe that if action isn’t taken around the addiction of helplessness then more and more of our society are going to fall foul of it.

Let me go back to where I began, when you lose your dignity due to emotional distress or madness, being helpless can be a very comforting compensation for that loss of dignity. Pleading “I can’t” living in the negative is in the reality of it in the middle of your misery the only comfort that you can cling to but in the deepest part of your mind, you know the falseness that underlies your comfort zone and that makes that zone contradictory both comfortable and uncomfortable and that mix of emotion allows you for no peace. 

I was the proprietor of public houses in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  While in that business period of my life, I saw remarkable changes take place in Irish society. Prior to the mid 70’s you would be embarrassed to be seen in an unemployment queue but because of irresponsible changes in our Social Welfare system we suddenly had a situation where you could earn more money out of work than you could in work and we created the black economy and the beginnings of the addiction to helplessness in a social sense.

The Celtic Tiger and a readjustment of our tax laws changed this for very many of our population but the real addicts, still addicts of helplessness, still exist. There are sections of this city of Cork where long term unemployment is endemic and we have ghettoised that fact. We have also allowed the infrastructure in these areas to fall way behind other areas of the city i.e. playgrounds, sports fields, schools, community centres, shopping are all of a substandard quality compared to other more progressive areas. All of the above are an endorsement of the addicts of helplessness to be addicted to it.
So the questions that are being asked are “what’s the point?” “why should we? Nobody gives a shit about us, why should we give a shit about them?” “Why would I clean up my own house when the city council will put somebody next door to me who doesn’t give a damn?” “We tried to improve the area once, within a week it was back to where it was because we got no proper support from our politicians or city fathers” “Look at the rubbish on the streets, nobody cares”  worst of all, “We are forgotten up here”.

When you can in truth apply those questions to yourself then why would you bother trying in the first place? Community schemes come and go, policies devised by academia come and go. Money, time and effort are expended and, in the main, the situation remains the same. There must be a lesson to be learned from this type of failure. There has to be an exit from this never ending groove of hopelessness and helplessness, there has to be a way to break the addiction. Is the method too, in real terms, to empower those that live there to come up with the solution that best suits there needs and not attempt to impose a solution on them that comes from the lofty heights of academia.
Rather, develop a listening ear and ability to be non judgmental and an ability not to impose your view but to accept the view of those who presently live with helplessness but have the wish to break that addiction.

So to quote Paulo Freire 1921/1997 “…its impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identity that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge.  Or what is worse, ridicule it…”

“…if we have any serious regard for what it means to be human, the teaching of contents cannot be separated from the moral formation of the learners…  that to know how to teach is to create possibility for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge. When I enter a classroom I should be someone who is open to new ideas, open to questions, and open to the curiosities of the students as well as their inhibitions…”

“…mass hunger and unemployment, side by side with opulence, are not the result of destiny, as certain reactionary circles would have us believe, claiming that people suffer because they can do nothing about the situation …”

Source: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage, 1998 Rowman and Littlefield, Maryland.

When I grew up the existence of community was encouraged by the equality of poverty
I was born in a two up two down terraced house with an outside toilet and a tap in the scullery with cold running water in a tiny laneway in the North side of Cork City in 1950. 
The house sat at the top of a red sandstone rockface at the bottom of which was situated Murphy’s Brewery and Denny’s bacon factory. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays you had the unholy smell from the brewery of the fermenting hops wafting up at you and on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays you had the background music of the squealing pigs as their throats were being cut and their blood being collected to make black pudding and sausages. 
It was a great place to be a young teenager.
We left it when I was three and came back when I was twelve. I had three or four years of the best time in my life in that place.

When I was a child there were nine of us living in the two bedrooms. My three sisters slept in one room, my three brothers on a mattress on the landing and I slept with my mother and father. By the time I came back at twelve, there were only five of us living in the house. But this is not about the house or my family per se, this is about the neighbourhood, the community, the joy of freedom to run, play, shout, get a slap in the ear from a neighbour or a gard but only when you deserved it, a time that if you went home and told your parents that you were beaten in school they would beat you again for upsetting the teacher. A time of freedom to be young, a time when our key was always in the door and, as an excuse for a security precaution it was tied on to a shoe string that was tied to a nail inside the letterbox so that the last person coming in at night took the key out of the lock and slipped it in the letter box. On reflection, not a great security precaution. A time when the neighbours didn’t knock but turned the key and shouted put on the kettle I’ve something to tell you. A time when if you needed a cup of sugar, you went without embarrassment to a neighbour and borrowed it. A time when neighbours fought like hell over trivia and came together in emergencies, matters of life and death with the most enormous love and support.

A time when birth was very often a near panic because there were no resources financial or otherwise to support the new life but clothes would arrive in in abundance always ready to be passed on to the next arrival when they were grown out of. A time when death was an emergency for financial as well as emotional reasons.

My father used to wash and shave the bodies of the dead men in our neighbourhood and helped to lay them out. A Wake was always in the home but the body would be laid out and the families would be collectively supported and encouraged to grieve openly and to cry. A gulf away from the modern funeral parlour where you are expected to hold your dignity and bury your emotions.

Community in the real sense of the word. Community existed then and the community ethos was encouraged by the equality of poverty. I asked my father once why was the key in the door. He said sure we have nothing to steal boy. Nobody had anything in the sense of material goods. No remark would be passed at the patch in the trousers at the sole of a new shoe reinforced with a piece of a rubber tyre. Gentle laughter only at the wearer’s inability to balance himself for the first 3 weeks of the wearing of the shoe. Where we as young boys formed gangs and fought wars that were dependent on the Saturday morning movie of the week. If it was a gangster movie then our hurleys and sticks became machine guns and pistols. A John Wayne movie six guns and bows and arrows and a war film rifles with bayonets fixed and Japanese soldiers shouting Banzi!

A time where the excuberance of youth was expressed by youths own inability to entertain itself. When imagination stretched reality without limits a simple hurly could be anything. A gun, a sword, a crutch anything! Wonder was the order of the day. A time when you burst out of your house shouting with the joy of it all and absolutely hated going back in through the necessity of eating or sleeping. Summers always seemed to be sunny, we never had rain we walked miles to find a valley or a wood or a quarry to run, chase, hide, shoot and slaughter each other day after day after day. 

There was a sadness to all of this, broken homes, violence in homes, sexual abuse in homes but for some who are hidden. While I lived in a disruptive house the joy of the neighbourhood and the community made it bearable at that particular time and that joy I believe came from the equality of poverty. I believe we all knew sub consciously and the community new sub consciously of each others troubles and supported each other without judgment in a truly significant way. The women would gather and gossip and remonstrate about their husbands and the men would lean on the bar counters and gossip and remonstrate about their women and behind the veil of lies everybody knew the truth because of the closeness of the community.

There is a certain comfort in the knowing of that truth that modern society has lost to its cost.

The equality of poverty meant that in a real sense there was nobody looking down on anybody else and yet we knew, that there were some in our group that were better off and some who were worse off but the margin of difference was so minute as to not be worth remark.

The true heroes of our community at that time were the mothers who sacrificed everything to educate the children, particularly their sons as education was seen as the only real exit from our poverty. So to remain in school until you were 15 was an achievement for my older siblings and to remain in school until 18 was equivalent of a degree in today’s society.

Two things happened in the mid 60’s to upset the balance that was created by the equality of poverty. One was the introduction of television into our homes and secondly, the introduction of the concept of hire purchase.  Suddenly, people could buy things they would never have dreamed could be in their possession previously. Washing machines, sofas, three piece suites, carpets, huge home improvements by previous standards and the key came out of the door because now there was something to protect and nobody could walk in any more because they could interrupt a favourite programme and the community began to lose its sense of itself. By some strange osmosis the games, the gang fights that up to then if you actually hit somebody or God forbid kick them while they were on the ground heretofore you would have been shunned, gradually became more vicious and violent. Our community became selfish and self centred instead of embracing it began to lose its identity and people began to leave, as we did.

The down side of the Celtic Tiger years is, I believe, a worshop of greed.  We have set a false standard for ourselves an artificial standard that demands huge sacrifice from our spiritual selves to the awful cost of our community. I saw one of the saddest things in my life recently when I saw a sign stating 24 hour crèche now available. Where have we come too? The demand for the fully furnished home the second car, the insistence on both parents working for the sake of a career to keep up the artificial standard there is no need for, the unwillingness to contemplate sacrifice as my mother and father did. The consumers societies insistence and fuelling peoples passion and greed have turned the equality of poverty into an epidemic of greed. How do we strive to find the balance? What is the balance? We now have children being medicated for Attention Deficit Disorder a strangely new and worrying “disease” of the modern era. Could this simply just be an intelligent response by our children to the attention deficit of the modern parent where children at 6 months are put into a crèche 5 days a week and we wonder why some react with so called dysfunctional behaviour that gets them the attention they are accused of being deficient in.

If they scream enough, if they shout enough, if they are disruptive enough they get attention whether that attention is loving or condemning is calm or angry it is nevertheless attention and we have called this intelligent response to, dare I say it, neglect of our infants and turned it into a disease. I fear for the future cost of this.

Is there a possibility that one of the benefits of the recession might be to reawaken the communities responsibility to itself to engage with itself, to unconditionally love itself and to grow from that love.

Surely not such a bad thought.

Now this is good. My buddy Carol in the Cornor House sent this to me. I had forgotten it is on Youtube “The Thud Experiment”, have a look.
Some of you might have heard of RD Laing a Scottish bloke, a psychiatrist who was critical of psychiatrists. So he was obviously totally mad. Liked a pint he was a controversial psychiatrist ye know off de wall like boy.
He thought Psychiatry was out of its mind. That psychiatrists are crazy in how they think and act, now this was Laing not me, you know me I have an open mind on this!!

You might have seen him on the Late Late back in the day with Gaybo, bit pissed on the night I’m told.

Remember, he was all the rage back in the day; existentialism, breaking the control of the state, believed psychiatry was a part of the state attempting to control society.
Anyway Laing is giving a lecture one night on how he believes Psychiatry is a flawed science. Don’t put the paper down now this is funny, well, yeah this is funny.

So bear with it for a bit longer this is a good story, really; so read on! Laing a psychiatrist claimed that psychiatry was a flawed science, the chemical imbalance theory crap.

When Laing was speaking, there was an American psychiatrist in the audience David Rosehnen who decided to put Laing’s theory to the test.

Rosehnen, and seven others from Harvard went across America and agreed to go to psychiatric hospitals and say they heard the word “THUD” in their heads.

Every other question they were asked, they had to answer with complete truth. Everything else was to be the simple truth. They were to act in every other way completely normally.

The only lie they agreed to tell was hearing “THUD” in their heads.

ALL eight were declared insane and locked up. IN eight different hospitals IN eight different states, BY eight different teams of psychiatry: I kid you not.

Remember now they went to eight corners of America, no connection between hospitals or Psychiatrists. And seven were diagnosed with schizophrenia one with bi polar disorder. THUD that’s all THUD!!

They were kept in for months, involuntary detained, could not get out, treated with bundles of medications, anti psychotics etc.

They acted in every way in a normal fashion, some of the patients recognised they were out of place in the psych unit, some patients asked “are ye reporters”.
They were taking notes you see the staff thought that “strange, paronia” the patients saw reporters.

ALL of the staff BELIEVED they had a “MENTAL ILLNESS” because they the volunteers lied only when told them they heard THUD in their heads that was enough to conclude diagnoses of a disease in the brain!

Rosenhan soon realised the only way they could secure their release was to agree with the Psychiatrists that they, the volunteers had “mental illness”. They acquiesced to psychiatric opinion that they had a chemical imbalance in the brain. They had to agree they were insane before the psychiatrists would let them out!!

And they were all released.

They told the doctors that they believed they had “schizophrenia” and the doctors said “well OK so NOW we can let you go home ”.

The fall out for psychiatry was huge, the media were all over it and psychiatry lost huge credibility back then.

So they reacted; they challenged Rosenhan to send more “fakes” to a particular hospital over a three month period. Rosenhan agreed.

At the end of the three months the psychiatric team at the hospital proudly declared they had spotted 43 fakes and had refused them admission.

Rosenhan from Harvard told them “I did not send ANYBODY”!!!

Good that isn’t it.

I have gotten at least six people out of lock up wards by simply telling them to be nice. I had one lad on hunger strike. He had got very angry at the lack of understanding in Irish society to his mood swings.
He did something he is not entitled to; he became aggressive.
He was locked up!
Went on hunger strike, in the psych unit, shouting in raging anger, at all around him. He rang me.

I said, “you are in a psych unit shouting like a lunatic, AND on hunger strike and you wonder why they won’t open the door, will you cop on boy”

so I advised him to calm down, go to the nurse, say sorry, ask for a fry up, find the psychiatrist tell him “THANKS” and that you are going to take his pills, and you are so grateful for all the help.

He did, he was out in a week.

The disease in his brain cured by mobile!

Good that isn’t it.
You have to wonder if the “fakes” in the U.S.A had lied some more and said they had repetitive THUD THUD would that be that paranoid schizophrenia!
Your guess is as good as any psychiatrist!

The damage they have done to this country is immense.
Idiots appointed by/as political hacks, or because they will kiss the ass of those who appoint them.
The last thing in the world you should put on a CV as a government advisor is the fact that you hold strong opinion.
Consensus; that is “The way forward” if you want a job on a government panel, as an advisor!
We now know the cost of consensus, financial ruin for the entire nation. Those who opposed the bonuses paid to bankers were told they should commit suicide as they were dragging down the positive feeling we all falsely glowed in.

The financial crisis we now face; we realise is the responsibility of those who agreed with the consensus position, when their moral compass was turned off to hold the job.

Advisors who fear the power of the status quo are the worst kind sleeveen.

We need a national government based on leadership not consensus. We need leaders who will fight for the right to be right, not to be popular.
We; Ireland have a great opportunity here but do we have the political leadership to put aside party politics, and fight for Ireland I am not convinced.
We spent and we are still spending a fortune on these idiots, advisors in quangos. Brendan Drumm spent 3 million on advisers he has 110000 staff! God knows what the HSE AND the Dept of Health spent on advice.

FAS, gods knows what they spent.

I knew of a guy, lived in Cork he was a volunteer on some prison service visiting programme or other. He visited Mountjoy his buddy in Dublin visited Cork prison it’s the expenses ye see they would make feck all if he the Cork lad went to visit Cork prison.
But someone in politics appointed them and the civil service paid them.

I was listening to Ed Walsh of Limerick University with Marian Finucane and he said someone must go to jail. He is right someone; from the banks, and some of those advisors; the economists, the financial regulators, the bankers, the accountancy firms; someone must go to jail.

Public justice demands this cleansing process.

Our great civil servants he said who have ability, we paid for their training, are either retiring or being head hunted.
He is right a good friend retired recently from the HSE to tired to carry on exhausted by the very system that employed him.

And the decent into mediocrity is the most frustrating thing those great courageous civil servants’ who stay will face.

“It’s not my job”

I hated that phrase when I worked in the seventies and eighties.
It drained the hope out of us as a nation.
We are back to it again.

“It’s not my responsibility” is now the new dehabilitating mantra.

We are close to public anger turning into public aggression.

We, that is Ireland demand justice to be seen to be done.

We, Ireland also demand common sense to prevail.

We are now proposing to pay another fortune to those advisors who advised into financial crisis to fix the crisis their advice caused.

Back to my issue Mental Health have a look at those who advise the minister re this issue. The same names pop up over and over again on board after board no wonder you have no meaningful change.

We ran into a financial crisis because those who lost their moral compass and told minister after minister what the minister wanted to hear rather than the truth!

We must end discrimination in mental health laws.

We as a nation are in pain, while we recover from that pain we cannot forget those locked into psychiatric units being forced treated.

We the Mad community are not inferior to the rest of you.

When you are reared and educated in a belief system that holds at its heart an injustice, then you are by inference blind to that injustice. When you believe that God is a Christian then the Jew and the Pagan are condemned to Limbo.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at the Mad community in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

You cannot stop discrimination by calls to make it harder to discriminate like Amnesty Ireland are! You stop discrimination by making discrimination ILLEGAL.
We must change the law to change the system.
What if we had:

A system that taught at it’s core as Martin Luther King sought, stated black is equal to white, a huge ask in its day to accept that right of equality after centuries of educated ignorance had taught black is inferior to white

A system that progressed beyond imagining when gay was legally proclaimed equal to straight.

That is the immensity of the leap we require now, to decriminalise human emotions that sit at the edge.
A system that asked why is this human being, reacting to life in the manner they are.

A system that required understanding of the broken spirit.

The only thing new in this world is the history you don’t know.
It is time to open a new chapter one of hope.

Have we created a sacred cow here?
It is not the done thing to criticise voluntary agencies.
Not a very healthy option for a politician to challenge how they spend their funds!
Do they do what they say on the tin?
Are the members happy with the staff?
Are the members at times in awe and/or in fear of the staff?
I often wonder how many conferences we have in this country on any given day. How much public money is being expended on these “junkets”, to harsh? well maybe

How many of our “voluntary agencies” are voluntary at all but run by full time highly paid professionals - some up to and over €100,000 - who so many state have no ability to listen to the voices of those they purport to represent.
Who unilaterally make decisions and then pass them on in the public domain as policy decided by the members. These members so often so overwhelmed by what life has thrown at them: to notice they are being ignored or so grateful for any help, afraid to complain.

Let’s go back to those conferences.

I get some invites to attend these conferences, I gatecrash others, and so often you sit in the audience and listen to the same people speaking on the podium that were in the audience last week listening to those in today’s audience speaking from the podium the week before.
All of course applauding each other enthusiastically and smiling benignly at how great everybody is.
No place for the reality of human suffering here, “to harsh” again? Maybe!

But absolutely no space for embarrassing or awkward questions, so inconvenient and so really rude, unprofessional in the extreme, there is a time and a place but of course no space for those who refuse to comply!!

Is it really a type of repetitive gravy train?

Is there a need to shout stop and begin to ask where the value for money is in all of this.

Is it time to get back to the root of where it all began, a community coming together to tackle a particular problem. A few people saying we can help and we don’t need funding to do those simple things like help each other with love.

So many of the voluntary agencies have lost the ability to see the core principle they undertook at the beginning through the dense fog they create around funding.
So many of the professionals we employ in these agencies are taught how to be just that professional, but have no personal experience of the difficulties they are addressing.

And in being professional are so often distant.

I hear so many people complain about the level of dismissal they experience from these professional “oh so busy professionals”.
We so often promote people within these voluntary agencies because they will give the “wrong” answers to the hard questions: simply because they know this is what those in power want to hear. Reply as required to stay inside the golden circle, funding, funding, funding, jobs for the boys!!

Hard truth can be an expensive commodity to any professional dependant on goodwill, and the status quo to remain employed.
Much like the financial regulators did with politicians during the tiger economy.

Surveys and research; that lead to the inevitable report. That is where the real action is. More especially if that report disguises the reality, but states a comforting message for those in power, be they politician or senior civil servant.
If you can produce a report or a survey then you have it made.
Of course the more important the person you can get to launch the report the greater the perceived value for money.

The Taoiseach wow! What a coup, the President even better then you work your way down to a Minister, a TD a Councillor a Mayor and so on. We all do it.

Somebody said to me once that there are 500 voluntary agencies in Ireland dealing with mental health alone. All in receipt of funding of some sort!

Monitoring and Evaluation, now we are really rocking, huge bucks here if you are in the circle, this IS international, much more impressive if you bring an OUTSIDE evaluator, and of course, if you monitor in the right way, (again we have comparison with the economist’s who evaluated the development companies, the banks and the tiger economy told us all it was all good: keep borrowing and spending remember them, they were all part of the golden economic circle, the buy, buy, buy, guys!) and so you evaluate according the needs of the inner golden voluntary circle, then you get the next gig. If you don’t, if you are not “nice” then you are unemployed in this so small enclosed world.

It is all so cosy in the golden circle of charities and voluntary agencies do not rock the boat and you stay in, state an unpalatable truth and you are out. Gone baby gone!

It was ever thus!

Then of course there is the “split”. When the founding volunteers find their original vision compromised by the professionals need to conform in order to get funding, they walk away and start a new organization.
That new organization will then employ another professional and we start all over again!!!
It would be of huge interest to trace all these organizations back to where they all began, and the economic consequences of the “split”.
The “split” is possibly the best weapon the status quo has to maintain its position.
Of course every professional voluntary agency has to undertake its own research and write its own report which in turn leads to the launch of the results. The larger the fund available to that voluntary agency; then the more flamboyant the launch.

My god if somebody did a little research into the cost of research in this country I believe the nation would go into a state of shock.
The printing industry would certainly be in a state of crisis, but on the other side the environment would greatly benefit from all those trees growing instead of being tossed aside at conferences where the reports are thrown around like autumn leaves.

This waste so necessary to allow the professional voluntary agencies state in another funding application how successful the launch of the report was by the amount of copies in circulation and “may we have another tranche of funding please” to compile another report to add to the ones nobody has read.

It is how so many professional representatives employed by voluntary agencies, get onto government advisory bodies, by saying the popular thing, in reports, at the expense of the truth and now that you are “in” the decision making process, you now decide who gets, the gig to speak, the funds to undertake research, monitor and evaluate, write the report, have the launch, so saying the “nice things nicely” is an essential part of the voluntary professional’s training. Being PC like! 

Once in the circle it is a bit like the old Cork hurling team harder to get off it then get on. And by God do those inside protect and insulate each other from criticism or questions from the dissenting voice.

We call them “Special Advisors” in the political world.

Finally you must factor in the economic cost to the taxpayer of all the civil and public servants who are a part of the golden circle and who we pay from the public purse to attend all these conferences and launches, and decide who to finance and who not on our behalf and who in the main ensure that the golden circle is unbroken!

It is how the system works but I really do think it is time to shout stop! Or at least review the ethos of complacency around the unquestioning belief, that like the church these people are beyond challenge because they are paid for working for charities.

Maybe I am just a tired old cynic, would somebody do some research on that, write a report and I will get the result at the launch we can monitor and evaluate later, after the conference in New Zealand, Australia, maybe, or they are going to leave their hearts in San Francisco?

The Cork Independent is one such paper and went a step further than most, they empowered a self proclaimed member of the mad community to write this column. Stigma is a powerful weapon in the wrong hands, stigma arises from public perception. The press survives on the public’s goodwill, the smaller the outlet the greater the risk in taking a chance.
When I met Deirdre the boss of the Independent I told her with complete honesty of my battle with the negative side of madness.
She still gave me the gig, that took guts and I am truly grateful and so should the readers of this paper be. Let her know she deserves it.
This paper has been a light in the window for many spirits in despair. Opening the debate as they have done by creating a space where unpalatable truth may be expressed.
It is still and always will be about equal debate.
It is the perfect example of the power of the few, if that few stands proud. I’m the old fart of this crew. The others all young and idealistic. Great people, we must support avenues into the public discourse as vital as this paper. The only guy I met near my age is the owner and he is not so bad either.

The abusive ‘mental illness’ system is a national issue, but our Junior Minister sits at the behest of the community that reads this paper.That is a source of great influence; this paper is of great influence. You have great influence. We must sustain the pressure now if we are to stop the abuse in our psychiatric units caused by force.
Nobody is satisfied with the current system. Those that engage with it as patients, their families, or those that work for this system of abuse.
The shout will go up now that this is all down to lack of resources; this has nothing to do with money.

This is an ethos. A belief system that tells us that doctors can look into the spirit of the human being and cure the pain being felt by that wounded spirit with a pill.

Out of that false ideology and psychiatrists’ frantic need to hold on to the right to prescribe. That prescribing allows them to be acknowledged as doctors, and as a consequence we have evolved into a system that at its heart depends on force to cure to exist. We saw last week the vast amounts of money this state is pouring into the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. We have been duped by marketing ‘a pill for the spirit’.
You cannot fix this with money we must face up to the reality that force does not work in mental health.

“You cannot force me to smile, you can force me to cry”
Mad Pride Ireland slogan

Too many of our citizens have been forced to cry by this abusive ‘mental illness’ system.

Mad Pride Ireland has secured funding to run a national campaign in the autumn to expose the abuse caused by trying to force someone to be happy. It cannot be done.

The capacity legislation is under review as far as I can tell, they are going to fudge this issue about force. They are going to work a way around granting full equal rights to the mad community. We worked hard in the UN to guarantee those rights within the UN convention on the rights of the disabled.

Under article 14 of that convention it is a breach of human rights to take a person’s liberty based on a disability. How are they going to square the circle of forced admission based on opinion of ‘mental illness’!
This is where you come in; the readers of this paper live in this constituency that gives you influence, we must encourage Minister Kathleen Lynch to find the moral courage to remove force from mental health.  She cannot do this alone; such a change is going to disempower so many in the present system of force. Change is always resisted by those about to lose power.

Kathleen must see she has the goodwill of you the voters to make such a paradigm shift in policy. She is a pragmatic woman with all the wisdom being born on the Northside grants us. Elections are a political reality.
They will fudge it by giving a wider circle of ‘professional’ opinion, the right to lock us away because we are different, a nuisance, a pain in the arse. We the mad community are all those things at times when we become self-obsessed, because we are so hurt we cannot love ourselves.
And so often those that hurt us, our families, are making the judgement call. That can be so confusing. When you try to express pain and distress and you are told get on with it. We all did!

John and Gráinne are brave people; they stood up as a family, and told of their pain inflicted on them by people believing they have the right to lock John up based on their judgement of his emotional behaviour.
If you have been abused while in the care of the state send your story on to us at http://www.madprideireland.ie.

Timing
Well stop the press! Jasus, talk of timing. I just got a call from the boss at the paper to say we have won an inaugural award from a crowd called Headline. We are the best regional paper in Ireland reporting mental health.
I really was just finished writing this piece of praise for the paper, when I got that call. Serendipity or wha! 
I went on the ran tan last Friday with the boss, to thank her for her courage and now this. Life is weird and wonderful. Mad and proud of it; who would have thought?   

Mad Pride Ireland Family Fun Days have grown in size and popularity each year since they started in 2008 and the organisers hope that 2012 will see events held in up to four regions across the country.  The focus of Mad Pride Family Fun Days is to engage the community through fun and laughter and thereby break down stigma and increase awareness and understanding of the normality of madness. Since the first event in Cork, in 2008 over 60,500 people have enjoyed the free Fun Days in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney Tullamore and even Mbula Uganda.

John Mc Carthy founder of the Mad Pride Ireland said, “We had a great day again in the Lloyd Town Park here in Tullamore, we would like to say a big thank you to all in the Town Council the Parks Office as well as the Civil Defence for all their help with the event. A special thank you goes out to all the members of the public who joined us in the park for some fun and laughter. While our summer events are over we have a lot of work yet to do this year, we have submissions on both the Capacity Legislation as well as the review of the Mental Health Act 2001. We are also planning a national advocacy campaign based around a call for the end of ‘Force’ in Irish mental health, this will be rolled out from mid September across regional and national radio stations as well through our website http://www.madprideireland.ie as well as social media.”

But then I get a note from someone who says thank you!
This accusation I have no defence against as the person who knows the truth is dead. It suits this man to believe his truth, I made the mistake of engaging with this man and his “truth” and I left completely upset.
Reality check why should I care what he “thinks” it is his truth as long as I know the my truth. But he hurt me, angered me; is that not amazing.
Saints are a rare breed.

I have broken a lot of the rules in my life and I have confessed to those who needed to hear that confession. Those I “sinned” against.
Humanity is the subject of temptation, timing, situation, all the excuses you care to bring up but in the end it is human weakness.
But I like to believe I have never robbed anybody deliberately and that was what I was accused of.
Not just that but I am supposed to have wronged a person who I respected and was kind to my family for years, now that really hurts.
The person who accused me never liked me he is weak in my opinion and using insult to stand in place of courage, held his accusation close until the only person who could deny it died.

Now it hurts, even though I know it is not true.
He spreads his “truth” what is even sadder he is convinced he is right, and I lost my temper trying to convince him he was wrong.
It is so stupid of me to care but what can I do.
I do care.

That is the point isn’t human nature a strange thing this man is close to people whose opinion I value, and I am hurt by false rumour.
This is how bullies/cowards thrive by lies/half truths by twisting lies/ half truths to suit an interpretation, by innuendo, plant a seed of doubt.
And the problem you have is that if you defend this rumour then you are giving it strength by the need for defence.
So I choose 99.99% of the time, to ignore this ass that is lying about me.

But it hurts me to know he is doing it.
Isn’t it strange and wondrous, shows how vulnerable the psyche is how the mind influences emotion, dictates feeling.
I have been upset for the last days by this ass and it has reflected right across my family we have all felt the undercurrent of my discontent, (I haven’t told them) caused by a lie.
But I can only fix this in me, I cannot stop what this man is saying. Even if I could I cannot stop what he is thinking.
I cannot stop others hearing what he is saying I cannot stop how they interrupt what he says, I can rely on those that love me and have felt my love for them to respect me.

I have been hurt before as we all have by false accusations of some kind but do you know what really hurt here was the venom and the pleasure that this man took in shouting this at me in my car.
I knew he never liked me to any great extent, but I did not know it went to such a depth.
Startling to see that, painful to feel that; must be what hate is like.
Or does it reflect a deep need/lack in him.

I keep saying there is an opportunity to learn from everything!
I have written this now a little purge of the soul I feel better already and do you know the Northside has a saying for everything “f..k de begrudgers boy”.
I have too much to do and too little time to do it to be to upset by little men.

”Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”
Benjamin Jowett Oxford

We brought the debate to parliament, Senator Dan Boyle fought for us to be there. It is in the parliament and now on the national record we have statements from leading politicians that forced ECT is wrong.
We now have to get the debate in the Dail; we are out of the Senate.
We have brought the issue of legal capacity into the public domain.
We are all over the media.
We have a new capacity act about to be introduced into the Dail. We all need to be alert.

This was never about ECT it was always about force and who decides capacity.
So as it stands you may still have forced ECT in Ireland on the signature of two consultant psychiatrists. BUT we are assured it will be dealt with in forthcoming legislation.

Stigma and the practise of it; how it effects the single citizen is dictated by LAW. Nothing else!

The simple fact of the matter is that so many in the mad community, which is anybody who has a mix of human emotions; and those speaking on our behalf do not grasp the fact that if we are to progress we must first believe we have the full capacity at ALL times to be equal citizens.

Every citizen needs help to retain that right it is called Common Law. We have Human Rights Conventions to reinforce it.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Disabled says we the mad community have that capacity. Article 12 states we all have the right to legal capacity.
The problem we have is that campaigners like Amnesty simply cannot encompass the fact that we the mad are different as women/gay/black/deaf/blind/ are different but equal.
Amnesty had a lobbyist in Lienster house handing out briefing papers saying our timing re: 59b was wrong. They were not saying we were wrong but our timing was wrong they were perfectly entitled to do so AS they were perfectly entitled to stay away and say nothing.
We won a victory you have no idea as to the time and effort that went into that victory. We have always said it is about debate.

A radical thought.
I want real community care, where the medical model and the doctors go to a backup position.
Where we the mad community are finally recognised as the real experts in this field.
I never feel such empathy and understanding as when I hold another member of the mad community, we listen to each other before the crisis develops.
The present medical model is dependent on the crisis to exist.
I speak with hundreds of people who are mad and I have one standard question
“do you get that uneasy feeling a few weeks before madness arrives”
all of them say yes.
I have to be careful now (the meaning of early intervention is being hijacked by the lads who sell pills) we want early intervention houses where a person can go and allow that uneasy feeling wash over without medical intervention if that is their wish.
I know of no place like that in this country.
We had mental health discussed in the last sitting of the current Senate and we had the first public contribution from our new minister on the issue of force in hospitals. Nothing else but the debate!!

Maybe TD Kathleen Lynch will listen. It was so good to hear her say she would, but who will she listen to, the status quo, or the growing radical view within the new national movement that is Critical Voices Network CVN.
Minister Lynch had the opportunity to stop the debate last week we thank her for not doing so. Minister Lynch gave me hope. She spoke of capacity as a legal issue not health.

Kathleen Lynch did state in the house that nobody should receive ECT against their will.
Yet labour Senators Prendergast and Bacik brought in the compromise amendment retaining the word “unable” to allow force to continue. Strange that; three labour women did this considering that 80% of forced ECT is given using “unable” as reason, that 50% of those “unable” are OAP’s, and the majority are women.
Amnesty were outside the chamber afraid for those “venerable “patients who might be “unable” to avail of forced ECT and the debate in the chamber was on whether ECT worked or not.
What I found most fascinating was that you heard over and over the statement

“we know it is a controversial treatment we do not know how it works we just know that it does work for some people and some would say it has saved their lives”

Eoghan Harris made great play of this.

Another senator stated the doctors might be sued if we removed 59b that was the whole point!! To bring the patient under the protection of the common law and make psychiatrists stand over their capacity to decide in extremis re the duty of care and the right to treat as all other doctors have to.
It is the little throw away comment the afterthought that comes from so many speakers that fascinates me.

“And of course we must acknowledge that some people are damaged by ECT”
Surely this major minority should be at the top of the list, but sure I’m mad.

We never see those who have been damaged, they have no voice, because the only way you can prove the result of ECT is AFTER it is given, a bit late for so many citizens of Ireland. 
That has always been our function within this debate to attempt to raise the level of the voice of the voiceless.

Very conveniently, I would blame my addiction to helplessness on either their, inability or lack of will or unwillingness to engage with me so that I could explain to them how my breakdown, my depression, being in the pit of despair, whatever you want to call it, my madness did not allow me to have a positive bone in my body.

“I became impossible to have a normal relationship with, as I was so self absorbed that there was no room in my life for any other problems family business ect can this also be reflected in communities ie that the community collectively becomes addicted to helplessness and resistant to all positive or forward movement. In my experience many voluntary and community groups for connivance encourage this addiction to helplessness by conforming to the status quo rather then take the more difficult route of challenge in a positive wat that very status quo.
Very often we pander to rather then engage in constructive challenge, tell people what we think they want to hear rather then the stark truth.”

This addiction to helplessness just does not exist within the area of mental health and I also believe that it permeates across all stratus of disadvantaged societies. For instance we have in this country right now young people who are growing up in homes that are third and fourth generation unemployed and are being taught the benefits of the addiction to helplessness. Being taught how to milk the system for everything its worth, being taught how to blame the system for everything that goes wrong in their lives and being taught how to exist within the misery of poverty in their spirit, in their homes and in their communities.  Being taught how to disparage those who exist within their communities and try to improve their lives in that community. Words like suckers, idiots, fools, do-gooder’s, would be used to describe those who work for the benefit of the community instead of those that suck it dry.

The sad thing is that very often the position of those that are addicted to helplessness is not challenged because of politic expediency. There is a certain risk taken if you criticise this addiction to helplessness. You risk the accusation that you lack understanding, of being cruel, of being a capitalist, of lacking a social conscience and while I very consciously understand these risks and the grain of truth that maybe contained in them, I also firmly believe that if action isn’t taken around the addiction of helplessness then more and more of our society are going to fall foul of it.

Let me go back to where I began, when you lose your dignity due to emotional distress or madness, being helpless can be a very comforting compensation for that loss of dignity. Pleading “I can’t” living in the negative is in the reality of it in the middle of your misery the only comfort that you can cling to but in the deepest part of your mind, you know the falseness that underlies your comfort zone and that makes that zone contradictory both comfortable and uncomfortable and that mix of emotion allows you for no peace. 

I was the proprietor of public houses in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  While in that business period of my life, I saw remarkable changes take place in Irish society. Prior to the mid 70’s you would be embarrassed to be seen in an unemployment queue because of irresponsible changes in our Social Welfare system we suddenly had a situation where you could earn more money out of work than you could in work and we created the black economy and the beginnings of the addiction to helplessness in a social sense.

The Celtic Tiger and a readjustment of our tax laws changed this for very many of our population but the real addicts, still addicts of helplessness, still exist. There are sections of this city of Cork where long term unemployment is endemic and we have ghettoised that fact. We have also allowed the infrastructure in these areas to fall way behind other areas of the city i.e. playgrounds, sports fields, schools, community centres, shopping are all of a substandard quality compared to other more progressive areas. All of the above are an endorsement of the addicts of helplessness to be addicted to it. So the questions that are being asked are “what’s the point?” “why should we? Nobody gives a shit about us, why should we give a shit about them?” “why would I clean up my own house when the city council will put somebody next door to me who doesn’t give a dam?” “we tried to improve the area once, within a week it was back to where it was because we got no proper support from our politicians or city fathers” “look at the rubbish on the streets, nobody cares”  worst of all, “we are forgotten up here”.

When you can in truth apply those questions to yourself then why would you bother trying in the first place? Community schemes come and go, policies devised by academia come and go. Money, time and effort are expended and, in the main, the situation remains the same. There must be a lesson to be learned from this type of failure. There has to be an exit from this never ending groove of hopelessness and helplessness, there has to be a way to break the addiction. Is the method to, in real terms, empower those that live there to come up with the solution that best suits there needs and not attempt to impose a solution on them that comes from the lofty heights of academia. Rather, develop a listening ear and ability to be non judgmental and an ability not to impose your view but to accept the view of those who presently live with helplessness but have the wish to break that addiction.

So to quote Paulo Freire 1921/1997 “…its impossible to talk of respect for students for the dignity that is in the process of coming to be, for the identity that are in the process of construction, without taking into consideration the conditions in which they are living and the importance of the knowledge derived from life experience, which they bring with them to school. I can in no way underestimate such knowledge. Or what is worse, ridicule it…”

“…if we have any serious regard for what it means to be human, the teaching of contents cannot be separated from the moral formation of the learners…  that to know how to teach is to create possibility for the construction and production of knowledge rather than to be engaged simply in a game of transferring knowledge. When I enter a classroom I should be someone who is open to new ideas, open to questions, and open to the curiosities of the students as well as their inhibitions…”

“…mass hunger and unemployment, side by side with opulence, are not the result of destiny, as certain reactionary circles would have us believe, claiming that people suffer because they can do nothing about the situation …”

Source: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy and Civic Courage, 1998 Rowman and Littlefield, Maryland.

Now we are told of the overuse of sedatives, benzos that are now shown to be addictive and in some cases brain damaging. But they keep you quiet, make you compliant, shut you up, close you down.
Again our OAP’s are the biggest victims. This is beginning to seep out of the Mental Health Commission, but the downside is that the CEO Hugh Kane, who I believe was leading this unravelling of information has retired, I wish him well.

Blanket reports are all well and good but we need to closely question the answers, the hidden detail not shown.
This is what Hugh Kane was beginning to do.
In the UK a cross party group is now asking for an urgent review of the use of prescribed drugs in mental health, stating that hundreds of thousands of British citizens have been brain damaged over the past decades.
We have begun a new national discussion forum in Ireland a good mix, the mad community separated from but including carers, doctor’s, academics, psychiatry, nurses, psychologists a wide mix

Join us on The Irish Network of Critical Voices in Mental Health name is up for discussion.
We started in Cork of course and we will meet next in Tullamore we are bringing over Bob Whitaker from the US you may remember I wrote a critique of his book Anatomy of an Epidemic.
People from UCC, Dr Lydia Sapouna, and Dr Harry Gijbels, from DCU Dr Richard Lakeman are speaking out at risk to their careers, asking awkward questions in the media.

Prof Agnes Higgins Trinity has invited me to open an international conference of mental health nursing in Dublin. Can you imagine that happening a few years ago?
Even Prof Patricia Casey UCD is stating in the public domain that life stress is not a mental illness. Progress!
We had to purge the private pain of the victims of child abuse in the public domain we are going to have to purge the pain of the mad community who have been abused and are still being abused today as the opening of information is showing more and more.

Anyway I wrote this poem I want to throw it at you it is an attempt to begin that process.
It is an attempt to get those who work in this “caring” sector of psychiatry to wake up and raise their voices to stand behind change. Change that will see the individual and their spiritual pain not as a disease/illness of the brain but rather a scar across the mind that love will cure.
(just so you know tardive dyskinesia and akathisia are well known side effects of psychiatric medications such as Benzos; those you see in the movies that classic image of patients unable the sit still who are jumping about scratching fidgeting twitching this is not as I in my ignorance thought was a sign of “mental illness” but a side effect of medications used in psychiatric units go and see it for yourself. These are Irish citizens.)
Let me know.

Abuse!

You have: rotated us, dunked us,
beat us, tied us, chained us, locked us,
deserted us, desecrated us, drugged us,
disgraced us, insulin ated us, shocked us,
ignored us, propagandises us, lied, put
your knives under our eyes detached our
lobes, stole our memories you are still at
it now. Chemical, not ice pick, but as
cold as ever.
You have failed us.

You have caused us to be
feared. To be afraid. Ashamed of who
we are. Through your arrogant educated
ignorance you have labelled us, made
a disease of life, while you guess and vote
your pitiless hands thrust into the air
salute, delves into our souls.
Your diagnostic box our living,
breathing, lifeless, coffin soul pallbearer!
Your incorrect guess, my fault!

Does failure teach you nothing
except to fail again. Or are you
as corrupt as some say you are. Your
hands chemically stained from the
pockets you pick to sustain you.

Failure of force as care obvious except
to you who thrive on the abuse you feed
from. Opinion as fact! Supported by do
gooders who never touched a tormented
soul, but know the law. Capacity judged as
those innocents before savagely damaged.
Similar law that protected the church while
a previous generation of do gooders pruned
themselves in the reflected glory of the abusers
held in high station by an older generation of educated
ignorance. Belief not knowledge, bible to
DSM, guess to access my soul how you
feel about how we feel impacts so much
on us; on you. Not at all.

Your call protected by law your co-conspirators
as Nuremburg plead orders, the job, family to
feed, as defence. Drugged up, dumbed down,
shaking, shivering, tardive dyskinesia, akathisia
by injection without request from Hammar
nightingales trained to abuse in the name of
care. Blind indifference to consequence.

Not much longer:
we are beginning to stand, we will not take it in
ass from ye any longer. We will not compliantly
turn and bend; you will face us now when we
refuse to be used.

I am always sticking my head above the parapet to take a cannon ball. I am going to do it again now.
I wrote a piece on voluntary agencies last year and I asked had we created a sacred cow. I want to pose the same question re: carers in the area of mental health. How do we address carers from the patients perspective. If you are dependent on your family to provide care what do you do if you have a mediocre or a bad carer.
I have the untimate carer Lizzy mac she is the ultimate carer for me might not suit everybody. Then again I am a fantastic husband father lover romantic friend and provider so “tis easy for her like” the lucky lady!!
She is not perfect if she was she would be a saint, and we have had great fun as sinners together all our lives.

But carers in the mad community have been on my radar for a long time now.
I was a member of the wheelchair association back in late 80’s for a few years went as a helper on holidays. Met lots of family members, who had dedicated their lives to their loved ones, great people.

I met others who gloried in the perception of the public martyrdom that life had bestowed on them. Family members; partners, husbands, wives, mothers and brothers, who never stopped telling anyone who cares to listen, how tough their lives have become; since their loved one got shagged up.

So often when the loved one who was shagged up is sitting in the room listening. Unheard and unnoticed, but that has changed, things like the special Olympics, para Olympics have changed the perception of the psychically/intellectually disabled. That and the improved thinking around ability away from disability, to glory in ability, and this happened because we take places that cater for housing sport life and independent life for those with physical/indevedual disability as a natural right.

WE look at the support system that is in place as a right now to allow people who are completely screwed up in wheelchairs that 25 yeras ago were condemended to live in the box room with ma and da as carers. They those shagged up could never live an independent life it was a impossible thought. Now it is a reality. With the correct support people with all sorts of extraordinary disabilities live full an rewarding lives and contribute so much to the fabric of Irish life.
I am now in the area of mental health, I am back 30 years, I listen to some family carers bitching about how awful their lives are as a consequence of having a relative in the mad community living in the box room at home.
Carers complaing how their lives are ruined by the person sittit to them, while others make chuckling noises in sympathy. As if the mad person did not exist bit like patting the lad in the wheelchair on the hear while asking the person behind the chair “how is he” your great to be looking after him all this time.

We don’t trust each other as a nation any longer and it is a sad thing. Trust is an old fashioned value and we have lost it at a great cost; to personal and community integrity.
I am a very lucky man I have friends across a wide strata of interests and occupations in my life. We argue the toss on so many issues. I have a friend who I was helping on a project; he is a bit of a hippie type, full of passion, impatient with people who do not understand; what he knows as simple fact. Which he! expresses, in complicated social language, and terminology.

I kept prodding him to break down his project and he got mad and shouted I am trying to bring a bit of trust back into this world. Eureka in a word trust, what an essential beautiful thing.
People doing things with their skills, freely, for nothing, for each other. Trusting, that the person; who received the gift of my skill, will give their skill back to me or another; in time.
But this fella is an arty fartie type anyway for the birds! But his idea http://www.mutantspace.com is up and working beautifully. A man with a plan and the drive to make it work.
I have another friend who is a business man I had a few pints with him, he is as far to the right, as the hippie lad to the left.
And he got a little animated the other evening and he said “Ah Jasus John trust is gone” and he said it with great sadness and regret.
Along with trust implies so many other values essential to society, honesty, decency, moral compass.
We are being bombarded with our major institutions betraying our trust in them. The church, politics, banks, business, oil companies, multinationals, voluntary, and state agencies!
Greed has been a guiding principle for too long, “greed is good” a motto. The flag too many marched under and we let them because crumbs fell from the table.
We are looking at Ml Lowery and Fine Gael avoiding the deep impact of their participation in the collapse of trust. We are looking at Fianna Fail standing on a high moral ground from a height made of quicksand.

Independents appear to be our best hope Mick Wallace in an inarticulate way but with plain stumbling language said honestly, where were all the TDs during the debate on the Morarity tribunal; a political innocent disappointed. Maureen O’Sullivan made a impassioned appeal, I would trust Maureen I have reason to.
Ming; (shush no mention of hash now) agree with him or no, we do know his clear position, he answers questions with fierce honesty, and that can be dangerous for a politician but refreshing for the public good. Of all the politicians in the Dail I would the Independents more than most.

We must reform our body politic, if we continue to deal with the crisis, if we allow our politicians continue to declare they have no time for reform of the body politic because of the banking crisis, then sure as god we will be back here again in ten years time, if we ever get out of this.

Trust we cannot function without it. The problem with trust is that it takes years to build and seconds to lose. We have a lot of work to do to find trust again. But I do not think we should look to the world for trust we should knock next door.
We have a great opportunity with recession to reflect we have more time, can’t afford to, or are too scared to spend; to go out.
We have the opportunity to revert back to ourselves. My buddy Moray put mutantspace arts skills exchange  together it is on line it is free it is about being creative it is growing, it is about a skills bank where I can register my skill as a van driver, you a lawyer, you an artist, you a designer, you willing to put up posters you collect tickets at a door you help clear up. So you put out a call that you are in Donegal, you have a band, you want to play in the local hall, all the above mentioned come together, create the show that the community come to listen and the show is put together free. Now the van driver has a need the band, fall in, free, to help.
Everybody in mutantspace arts skills exchange works for each other gives their skills to each other based on the principled idea of trust. And it will grow it now has 1200 skills in its creative bank. It works on the principal that the guy who becomes a part of the created community and walks the town joyfully and proudly handing out posters is as creative as the singer songwriter. Trust.

Our biggest single problem with our health services is trust and back to my pet area mental health where mistrust is rampant, you earn trust it is a two way street and we all have a responsibility when it comes to earning trust. Lack of trust is bad for everybody, doctor to patient and everybody in between.
Trust how are we going to bring that back to a place where we are no longer conscience of its presence in our society, but where we take trust in our leaders and ourselves as a given.
We are nearly at the point where we are no longer outraged at betrayal, we say
“sure they are all at it what did you expect”
That is an awful indictment of us as a nation as a community because they were not all at it.
Too many were at it, just too many of the greedy bastards were.
So what are we going to do I know what I am going to do I am going to increase my trust in my friends to perform as trusted friends, and I am going to return that trust by being a friend. If we all did the same who knows!

“History is a set of lies to be agreed upon”
Napoleon Bonaparte

I once asked a teaching professor of history is it possible to record history in real time. He gave me a funny look, but to my flawed memory no real answer. Is it not the job of the media to record history in real time?
I’m stuck in the bed a lot these days watching a lot of history in real time and it is truly distressing. We watch cruelty, live, life in the present, “the news” with great dispassion. But we gloat and congratulate ourselves when those responsible in the eyes of history are brought before the cameras and displayed for us to howl at.

Are we going to pile all of the responsibility for institutional child abuse onto the religious orders? Be satisfied when we have put a few brothers and priests in jail. Satisfied, when we have bankrupted the Catholic Church morally and financially.
What are we going to do with the civil servants who for their unknown vested interest; invested our states resources into these places that they knew abused children on our behalf? Those civil servants would state today it was the ethos at the time, there was no alternative, what were we to do.

Child abuse could not have existed in institutions if it had not been hidden by civil servants who investigated and signed off on further funding and state support for places like Upton and St Vincent’s.
What are we going do about those individuals who fed their families from covering up abuse because they were afraid to speak the truth?
Are they not as guilty as those who buggered and beat the children in the dark? They could have shouted stop; they did not.
We are writing whistleblowers legislation right now to protect those that speak out.

I pose the question; if we named, shamed and jailed those top civil servants we now know did not speak out in the past.
Would fear of consequence be a better leverage on the conscience of those who presently hide abuse within our state institutions and you all know of the rumours of physical abuse in psych units. It hides behind fear of standing up and being counted by those who work for you and me right now.
But if we did jail those civil servants who we now know buried reports of abuse in the church/state run institutions because it was in their considered opinion the right thing to do at the time. Would we cause those who stand over abuse today to pause before they sign off on a report that someday might see them in jail?

What are we going to do with the government ministers from all parties who colluded with the princes of the church to protect the institutions of both church and state?
Those who would stand up in a court today and still swear they did the right thing at the time, in the prevailing circumstances and with the information to hand.
They knew because a few courageous people told them. They simply choose to ignore those voices of the voiceless. Even worse and more damming they punished those that spoke out and rewarded those who defended the status quo as was their duty as loyal servants of the state, with promotion.
What if Enda Kenny stated in the Dail that they were to investigate the past cabinet members of this state, those who decided collectively to ignore, at best; child clerical abuse. What if he stated we were to investigate who among our past and present political leaders had been told of the child abuse and ignored those that told them? Made past cabinet members defend their decisions in a court of law.
Would it cause the present members of his cabinet to pause, before they sign off today on policy that allows abuse, if there is abuse, to continue?
If a former member of cabinet went to jail would it stop current abuse?
In the current economic state of this country can we afford those answers?
I doubt it very much but it would be interesting to find out.

Institutional abuse is not a crime of the individual but a collaboration of the many who feed from the status quo the abusers find protection within.
Institutional abuse is the crime of the herd.
Remember Cll. Michael O’Brien the Mayor of Clonmel on Questions and Answers when he cried into the camera at the then Minister Mr Noel Dempsey who was pontificating on the podium; the victim pleading from the audience of course where the voiceless always are until they, the voiceless explode with the passion of a Mr O’Brien and then we all suddenly wake up when he cried in humiliation “don’t tell me ye didn’t know, we told ye, I told ye, but ye would not listen”.

I was listening to one of our foremost Irish writers and a moral voice of this nation on radio recently pontificating on the failure of this nation to protect the venerable in the child abuse scandal. He was so indignant on our behalf.
After I told of abuse in psych units at writer’s week in Listowel that same guy approached me and advised “maybe if you changed the delivery softened the message” and he moved away before I could say “bollocks”
Hindsight is the great gift of the coward.

What if history and the next inquiry proved there was abuse in psych units, as it surely will, what will we do with those currently in power who have been informed and choose as they did in the past to take no real action, continue to prevaricate and pander to the status quo!
Where are we as a society going if we continue to address abuse with redress not action?
It’s just a thought.

We have storytellers who are now story therapists.
We have cognitive therapists I think.
We have behavioural therapists misbehaving.
We have Freudian therapists sex, dreams and mothers!
We have comedians who are now laughter therapists but not funny.
We have yoga therapists, twisting things.
Reiki therapists hands on hands off
Hypnotherapists in a trance.
Aroma therapists who smell.

There is no end to this list, it keeps on growing and as far as I can see no correct regulation on it. Therapy is different to medicine so by its nature needs different criteria of judging qualifications, I am not coming up with a solution here; I am asking the question.

So many entertainers and artists are now adding “therapy” to their repertoire. It’s a living!
Laughter is possibly the best therapy in existence, the emotional tonic that nature has supplied but are we witnessing a frenzy to call entrainment; “therapy”. Can you train serious people to be funny!

Mad pride employs professional clowns, face painters, storytellers, musicians at Mad Pride Ireland family fun days. They have a very specific task they are to make people who attend smile, tap their feet, and laugh out loud with the joy of life.

But Jasus we don’t advertise “therapists”, we give the best of therapy, but NOT as therapists, rather as professional entertainers, family and friends. They are doing what they do so well because they love it not as a career choice in therapy but simply as entertainers.
 
Don’t get me wrong I know the great value of the good therapist, but it seems that any Tom Dick or Harriet can put that word after their name these days.

If we don’t get a handle on this soon will it spiral out of control?
A bogus therapist is potentially as dangerous as a bogus doctor. How do we regulate this?
A doctor without a bedside manner is a pain in the arse, an overly intense therapist on a mission is a bigger pain in the arse!
I have always said we need more laughter and fun, creative thinking, writing, art all of it; in mental health, but what is this compulsion to call those who give “therapy” by loving entertainment “therapists”.

I go to sing songs for the love and joy of it. It is the best of therapy but jasus none of my buddies who sing, tell lies, play music, who relax my stress by being a community, by making me laugh call themselves therapists.

It appears to me what we have is a situation where anybody can hang the title therapist after their name and they can screw with your mind.
We are in real danger not from therapy but “therapists” who have no entitlement or any real qualification.
I am a therapist, I could if I so wished hang a shingle outside my door and treat patients, clients.
I am both educationally by accepted standards and in practise more qualified than most therapists I know.
I have two diplomas have studied and I have listened to hundreds of people for thousands of hours tell me over the last ten years, the secrets of their souls.
I have never charged to listen, I have just listened.

But I would not dream of trying to act in a professional manner in this delicate area.
Therapy possibly; the art of listening not judging, of understanding; without allowing preconceived notions interfere with outcome.

Psychotherapy in all its weird and wonderful formats has a duty to psychotherapy and to the general public to get a handle on this.

Charlatans in all shapes and forms must be exposed.

We as the mad community are fighting a battle against the over reliance and please note the word over reliance on the medical model in the area of mental health. These bogus “therapists” do not help.

I was at the launch of a new project recently and there were “therapists” there expounding on all sorts of crap. Stuff they had invented and decided to call themselves “therapists”.

I can call myself an architect with no qualifications but if a building falls down my lack of expertise is quickly exposed.
I was a qualified auctioneer not so hard to qualify in that area either but if you cannot sell property you will not survive long.
I was a trade union registered plasterer just not qualified, never served “my time” but registered, I bluffed my way. I only damaged walls.

But with therapy you may damage people and it may be done over years by unregulated therapists who are basically charlatans.

In the round of the current debate on the mental health of the nation we must address all sides’ warts an all. We can only move to a more balanced future in the national mental health debate if we look to all “professionals” and ask do they do what it says on the tin.

I don’t know the answer here but I do think the question needs to be asked?

When it does decide to move, when one medis outlet decides to challenge, then all jump on the bandwagon but they can be so slow, with worthy exceptions.
The media has a history of being so effective in questioning authority in the past. We all know the benefit of that public questioning.

I saw Prof. Paul Fearon on the RTE afternoon show talking of Catherine Zeta Jones being “bi polar” the interviewer, Maura Derrane, as so many of her collegues do in other programmes, with similar guests, left this comment from Professor Fearon
“it is really important to get a diagnoises” pass without asking her guest;
“and can you tell our viewers how do you ascertain such a diagnoise of bi polar and what test do you use to do so”
I think that is a reasonable journalistic question.
She also left his comment re: treatment pass without a question re: side effects.
But most important how are the side effects to the brain monitored while treatment is ongoing for any mental illness, i.e. what test?
No blame to anyone here but we are seeing this happening to often in the media debate on mental health, becoming a debate on “mental illness” without challenge, as to the science behind “mental illness”.
Now I know this was an afternoon show re: Catherine Zeta Jones as a celeb being “ill”. Catherines husband Michael Douglas has cancer and she is “out of her mind” with worry and now she has a disease of the brain for life. A label.
Across these types of interviews, unquestioning acceptance of the label we are told, is an essential part of the path to cure; we are told compliance with treatment esential, that people like myself who challange the authority behind that supposition are scaremongering, maybe we are, or are we looking for open honest debate!

The real point here is that there are so many people watching and reading this type of unchallenged opinion as medical scientific fact - the existence of bi polar as a brain diseases - that they will accept unquestionably that opinion of diagnoise as fact, without a request for a TEST as proof, when they hear it, from another Doctor.
If you told your doctor you had a pain in your right side as I had, described some other symptoms and had my doctor calmly declared “oh you have cancer” I would think it very reasonable to request that I be tested to confirm diagnosis. But when it comes to “Mental Illness”, we somehow have been ‘educated’  ‘propagandised’ to accept we have a lifelong disease in the brain, simply because the doctor says so and we never consider how stupid we are not to ask for a test.
The effect is bad enough when a doctor speaks unchallenged re: “mental illness” but a professor that is understood and assumed by so many of the public, to be real truth, real fact.
You see the fact is there is no test as we the public, understand a test to exist, as it does in so many other branchs of medicine, blood, xray, scan. A physical test!
We should be able to state that; without being told we are putting people in danger.
Psychiatry should not fear the question or the answer!

As the general public understand the word diagnoises as I believed, had always done, that any doctor would undertake many physical tests to come up with a diagnosis of a lifelong disease of the brain.  Would’nt it be if Professor Fearon informed us in simple language how does he come up with a diagnosis of “mental illness”/”bi polar” as a disease through this newspaper, or Critical voices network, we would love to know!
As far as I know and within my personal experience of getting such a diagnosis and being told I had “mental illness”/“bi polar” for life and being told I had to take medication for life, that test to ascertain if you have “bi polar” is based on educated opinion. If you are happy to accept that educated opinion in place of a physical scientific test so be it, that is your choice.

But for the media to let such statements pass as unchallenged fact then the fourth estate is not serving the state in my opinion.
Titles imply knowledge but all science should welcome challenge. Part of the responsibilities of the media is to supply the platform for that challange and to ask informed question on behalf of their public.
The extraordinary record of a questioning, challenging media is now being written in so many areas of public life in this country, we need that questioning, intelligent challange in the national debate on mental health.
No right or wrong here just questions to be asked and to be answered.
The media; if it is to perform in the national debate, as a public referee, has a duty to educate itself on all the rules, onside and offside, and in the difference between “mental illness” and “mental health”

Professor Paul Fearon may well be right when he speaks of “mental illness” as a disease of the brain, that he has the ability to stand over the diagnosis of a disease called “mental illness”/”bi polar”, but there are many diverse amateur and professional voices questioning that he is right and if we are to have a national debate on the mental health of the nation then do the media have a duty to listen without prior judgement, to all sides of the debate, educate themselves on how to ask the questions behind the answers given, and then decide.
The fact remains there is no physical scientific test beyond educated opinion for “bi polar” north or south we should question that fact. In my opinion!

We must question the truth of the above in an open national debate on the ‘mental health’ of the nation. Find the courage to ask the questions, without fear of finding the correct answers.
Recovery this is the new buzz word in “mental illness” but recovery to what?

Many of us are “normal” by society’s standards, respectable members of the wider community going about our lives. So many of us are so sad in heart and spirit and full of show and blow, subject to others approval to love us for who we are, always searching for another’s kind word! Are we to recover to that conformity that denial of difference, simply be who we really are.

The positive: joy!
Through the positive gift of madness. The gift that grants peace, the ability to love you unselfishly, quietly, confidently. That gift of madness that allows us to create, to be unique human beings with all our flaws, that is the positive message Mad Pride Ireland celebrates on our family fun days.

Peace in our spirit is not rocket science and you cannot find it in a pill, you distil it through your community, with love, laughter & FUN. So simple yet so seemingly complicated.
Discovery of the gift of madness is the route we want to explore. Discover the joy of expressing safely who we are warts and all

The positive beauty of madness is in us all, discover it by taking that first step. That is hard. So try saying thank you when you are paid a compliment, without equivocation and drive on.
There is no right or wrong here but we must have a roundtable debate on the human rights of the mad community within wider society. Decide the right moral voice through that open

Is everything about madness negative?
Is there a positive side to madness?
Is there a difference between insanity and madness?
Is “mental illness” a reality or a marketing ploy of the pharmaceutical industry endorsed by the medical model?
Are doctors unquestioningly standing over corrupt research?
Is UCC as a seat of learning being corrupted into a seat of propaganda by accepting “grants” from corrupt vested interest groups?
Should those who have ownership or vested interest in the pharmaceutical industry be allowed to teach in third level at the highest level?
Do good and evil exist in humanity?
Is losing our emotional balance due to life’s stress a disease of the brain?
Does the chemical imbalance theory deserve to be called proven science?
Where is the test for “mental illness”?
Do certain legal drugs kill?
Are prescribed psychotropic medications safe?
Are we entitled to ask questions re psychotropic drugs without fear?
Are we entitled to get answers without being afraid of those answers?
Should coroners record the level of prescribed medications in those who die by suicide?
Should the HSE suicide office make public the level of prescribed medications in all who attempt suicide? 
Is the truth around sudden unexplained acts of violence in “mental illness” being hidden?
Are sudden unexplained acts of violence caused by side effects of psychotropic medications?
Is fear being used as a weapon by the status quo in the mental health debate?
Is stigma being spread by those who preach from an anti stigma platform which insists we must accept “our psychiatric label” to progress?
Are certain voluntary agencies in the pockets of the medical model?
Is the pharmaceutical industry corrupt?
Does the pharmaceutical industry lie?
Are we told the truth re side effect of psychotropic drugs?
Are the side effects of psychotropic drugs more harmful then the “cure”
Why do psychiatrists need force to treat patients?
Is using force to medicate a crime?
Is forced ECT a crime?
What does “the patient lacks insight” really mean?
Is calling forced feeding a patient being called nutrition enhancement moral?
Are we disguising abuse in psych units behind locked doors?
Can all the rumours be wrong?
Just how many are silenced by shame?
Where are the whistleblowers?
What does “in the patient’s best interest” really mean?
Is control of feelings by heavy sedation a cure?
Are families buying into the medical model of control as a cure as an easy option?
Are staff working in lock up wards feeding their children from an abusive system?
Are those that do, guilty of abuse?
Why do people with “mental illness” die younger than others?
Do those on heavy dosage of prescribed psychotropic medications develop diabetes, heart disease, and other physical ill health due to side effects?
Where are the hidden cameras from Prime Time Investigates?
Where are the answers?
Where are our public representatives?
Why are they not making unannounced visits to Carrigmor Shanikiel?
Why can they not see where the patients sleep in Carrigmor?
Why cannot friends sit at a bedside of the beds behind locked doors in Carrigmor?
Why is it so hard to visit public hospitals like Carrigmor Shanakiel?
Why do the doctors there hide behind those locked doors?
Why all the secrecy?
Why the silence?
Why do we fear going to see psychiatrists?
Do psychiatrists deserve the Hollywood stereotyping and why did they get it?
Is it too late for John Hunt?
Is he institutionalised now?
Is his opportunity to live a “normal” life being destroyed while in care?
Why can we not see John the Painter?
Why is locked away upstairs in Carrigmor?
Why does his doctor deny access?
Would his doctor state it is in “in the patient’s best interest”?
Why was Josie locked away for 60 years for being a victim of rape?
Is “in the patient’s best interest” a catchall phrase to hide a painful truth?
What is wrong with the HSE the Mental Health Commission they inspect and issue licence?
Are tribunals a travesty of justice?
Why is it so hard to get any answers?
Finally is it time to raise your voice?
In my opinion it is!
The Magdalene laundries thrived behind society’s silence “in the patient’s best interest” of course.
What are YOU going to do NOW???

John Hunt is 29 he has been locked up and force treated “in his best interest” for the past 5 years. I do believe if I was locked away at 24, without trial before judge or jury, from my family and friends I would lash out at everybody around me.
Never been allowed to run and play with my son born when I was locked up, he is five. I would lash out. Not been allowed to love the woman I loved. I would lash out. Not allowed to go for a pint. I would lash out. Not allowed to sing. Not allowed to live life. I would lash out. No matter how often they told me “it is in my best interest”.
Would you lash out, be angry?
What of John’s rights, who will speak for John Hunt if he is accused of assault. Everything that happened “the incident” occurred behind the locked doors of a public hospital. Who will write the account of what happened, interrupt the circumstances, from John’s point of view?
Was John at the end of his tether, and that poor nurse a victim of timing? The last straw!
Did the anti psychotics John is being forced to take, have anything to do with his violet reaction, who will ask that question, and of whom?
Will the Mental Health Commission the statutory body empowered to protect John intervene? Can they? Under the current legal restrictions imposed on them I doubt that they can. Will they discover the root of the truth? I have requested the MHC to do so.
Secrecy and silence paramount “in the patients best interest” of course.

How can John Hunt speak his truth he is locked away and drugged up to his eyeballs, not allowed visitors? Jennifer Hough of the Examiner and I had scheduled an interview with John last week, cancelled!
If the case goes to court and his doctor states John Hunt does not have the capacity to speak for himself, and in reality he does not right now, because of legally forced drugging.
Not that he lacks intelligence he is an artist, but he is drugged out of his mind by legal force.  Has no voice.
The predetermined result of circuit court, is as I understand it John will be sent to the Central Mental Hospital for review. What future then for John.
As far as I know the judge has no leeway under the law re that decision. He has a solicitor now Mr Eamonn Moloney we wish him and John safe passage through this legal/moral quagmire.

The doctor and the system have total sway, complete authority, who is going to risk going against the “opinion” of a doctor, if the doctor states, John Hunt “might be a danger to himself and to others”, if released, under the current mental health law. Released into a society that completely lacks the support systems John needs to rehabilitate himself back into “normal” society.
This legal medical review, if it is carried out, it will be undertaken by the colleagues of those who legally forced John to become an addict within the system in the first place “in his best interest”!
Who will speak for John? Those that believe they have the right to force treat; to cure the theory of the chemical imbalance with drugs! He has a strong spirit, refuses to comply. That is John’s gift but his cross in the mental health system. Where to be cured you MUST comply. Indeed you will be legally forced “to show insight”. 
The UN is asking questions of this state re the fact that the Gardai arrested the women who escaped from the Magdalene Laundries in the past and forced them back into the convent “in the women’s best interest” of course.
But what is the staff to do. John Hunt is now a drug addict. He has been legally forced to become a drug addict. He has been forced to be addicted to legally prescribed drugs by the staff that care for him in Carrig Mor. Because they have been educated to believe that John Hunt has a disease in his brain called “mental illness”, and they can cure it with legal addictive drugs.

All who know John now believe that his future is bleak? How can his partner Grainne now be expected to take John back into her life! He is an addict now, totally dependent on the drugs he has been forced to take while in the care of this state, “in his best interest” of course.
I don’t have a solution for John, his family, or the staff in Carrig Mor. This is such a complicated convoluted area. The more solutions you find the more problems you create.
But if we have learned one lesson from child abuse and the Magdalene laundries it is this, if you take the right of force out of the hands of those in positions of power then the level of abuse drops dramatically. Allow the abused the protection of the common law as equal citizens of Ireland the institutional abuse stops!

We must dismantle the legal power to be judge jury and jailor, we Irish society have passed to Psychiatry when they care for those we are tired of.
There are too many rumours out there of abuse in psych units not to demand answers on behalf of those powerless and voiceless to ask questions.
Our elderly we are now learning are also being drugged into compliance with damaging psychotropic medications.
It is society’s dilemma now and we have to solve what we have allowed to evolve. Everybody is being abused here the staff and the patients.
We can’t just lash out no matter what the provocation the temptation the situation, the unjust circumstance, can we? Would that be retaliation, justification? A justified form of self defence, maybe?
I don’t know, do you?

Is it the media? God help us. They have done some good but they are so focused in the media on the media, so afraid to offend, the suit, has the media lost sight of the public good and the courage to print the truth?
Is it medicine it appears to me that; they medicine, are slowly attempting to assume that role. In any public debate they seem to have a moral tone to their voice now. They seem to slot very comfortably into speaking outside their brief. As to society’s behaviour, they make judgement on how we as a society “should live”. They are doctors, that is their brief, should they stick to it?

Is it our educators, is third level education so reliant on “sponsorship” now can they be neutral. Some say the cost of our modern universities is too high a price on the moral scale.
Where are the poets and philosophers of old the Celtic tradition? The bards and the balladeers they had the post as the moral voice. Am I just getting old, am I deaf, I simply do not hear them in the public debate. It is to our loss.

Politicians have a long crooked road to straighten out before they regain the public’s confidence. We have some great new blood in there now but can they resist being corrupted by those of the old regime. Can we expect real hard slash and burn reform of how the political system works to come from those who are conflicted by the very change they are expected to introduce.

Economists and bankers hard to imagine there was a time that when they spoke and society listened with respect. Financial advisors now recommending, that citizens send their savings out of the country. Just at the time we need to stand up and defend the gates. These patriots are recommending we open the flood gates and drain the economy! Good fees in that do you think!!

The voluntary agencies; we are learning of some of the leaders of these agencies are earning up to €425,000 per annum. Other leaders earning hundreds of thousands. I have written before of the quangos and the junkets that take place within the voluntary agencies. As to conferences and what they cost, we would all go into a state of shock.
Trade unions these show leadership to society by placing their members interests before societies. The Public and Civil servants union are unrelenting in insisting on the job for life concept. We must be able to fire our lazy civil servants for the benefit of our hard working ones and for the sake of us all.

Our sporting bodies are as close as we have right now, they can with victory or glorious defeat lift the nation, if we do not lose our stars to immigration.
We are evolving into a diverse culture, changes we have not experienced since the Vikings or the British. We have black lads and Muslims eastern Europeans playing hurling and football.
We had an incredibly diverse ethnic group sitting the leaving this year. Is that an untapped asset sitting right in the centre of us, waiting to explode.
It is all going to become so different so fast. It can be an exciting journey into the unknown or it can be a horror journey into the biased perceived future.
Will our youth step up, get over the cynicism that is now the pervading “feeling” that sits like a cloud, a damp blanket across Ireland. Will they find the moral courage to sacrifice for the welfare of our community, this evolving Ireland? It is not about self sacrifice it is about combining communities will, into a cohesive force to drive this country into a possibly less prosperous financial future but one that has joyous honour and love at its heart.

We have a vacancy coming up our President. As a nation we have never needed moral guidance more. We need leadership free of vested interest. Free of vested interest not simply because the job description demands it but someone who has displayed courage in their life by standing outside the system in order to change it.
There are a few candidates stepping up to the plate with this type of pedigree, I hope they shine.
When this election gets dirty and it will, those we can throw mud at, are very often those that spoke when it was risky to speak up against the status quo. Is it time to honour that courage?
We as a nation are fed up to the teeth of those who took the safe route to power. Conformed to expectation, the rules, in order to NOT rock the boat.
We need a different moral voice now one who will step up and outside, not to simply speak of the need for change , but one who has and will continue to lead change in who we are, as a modern Irish people, changing, evolving, multi cultural, multi ethnic exciting place to born in, be young in, grow old in .
Our last two Presidents have opened chinks in the doors and windows of Arus an Uachtarain it is time to let fresh air in, a fresh new moral voice, one that will give strength, courage, pride, in being Irish.
Really kick open the door. Drive on!!

Morgan’s psychiatrist has the legal capacity to judge her brothers capacity to say NO. The patient is saying NO, to ECT, his mother is saying NO to ECT, his whole family have made it clear that they or Morgan does not want this treatment ECT preformed on him. His GP wrote that MorganBut his doctor says YES and that is that. We in Mad Pride Ireland fought a little bit for Morgan Prichard and I am glad to say that his sister Sarah has been on to say that the procedure is now not going ahead.
We brought the situation to the attention of the Mental Health Commission they are powerless to intervene.
We brought the situation to the attention of the HSE powerless to intervene.
The department of health powerless!
To Minister Kathleen Lynch powerless!
The law as it is currently framed has vested complete authority into the hands of two consultant psychiatrists to force Morgan Pritchard to have ECT administered on him by force in a hospital in Nass Co Kildare.
Sarah, Morgan’s sister wrote of how they as a family are at their wits end in trying to find a way to stop this.

Mad pride Ireland informed the press with the consent of the family and for some reason Morgan will not have ECT preformed on him by force at this time. We are told by those that advocate for forced ECT that this is a life saving procedure and is only used by force when the patient is at risk of dying. What so dramatically changed in Morgan Pritchard’s diagnosis when public attention was brought to bear on his situation. If he was at such risk that he needed forced ECT, what changed?
I do believe that the psychiatrists who signed off on Morgan being forced to take involuntary ECT have a duty to his family to explain what changed with public attention.
According to Sarah, Morgan’s sister they cannot see their brother now he has been put in seclusion. They also cannot change his treating psychiatrists because of how the system works. No matter where they go they are powerless to help their son can you imagine how frustrating that must feel.

Can you imagine if Morgan did not have a family willing to fight for him. Willing to go public with his case, a family who stood up in the face of stigma and said this is my son my brother and whatever else we love him and we will fight for him and his right and our right as his family to be a part of the decision making process of his treatment regime, that the Mental health Act of Ireland 2001 denies all of us.
This is a brave family with a problem, Morgan does need help but his family believe he has been damaged by the medications he is being forced to take. They want another psychiatrist one they choose to review. Not possible. They cannot get Morgan out now they cannot see him and if those treating their son decide not to engage with them they are powerless, and so is every other legal arm in this state powerless to have the treating psychiatrist meet the family. A tribunal was held to decide Morgans fate the family were denied access.
Something is wrong in the state of Denmark
But we live in hope this from minister Kathleen Lynch in the Senate last week.

“Senator Gilroy asked about ECT and I am aware of it. Senator Norris mentioned the Bill introduced by the Green Party and Independents and it was agreed by everyone, including me, that forced ECT would no longer be part of what we offered and that will be put into legislation. That is all I can say about that now. We were all agreed that forced ECT was not the way to go.”

Morgan Prichard and his family are safe from forced ECT for now because the spotlight has been turned on but for how long?
Mad Pride Ireland helped in this case in a small way we brought the delete 59b campaign to the Oireachtas, but how many Morgan Pritchards have fallen foul of 59b this year we will not know until the next Mental Health Commission report and then it will be too late.

Children being diagnosed so casually with ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, personality disorders, or any of the other 600 current “mental illnesses” are people whose legal status has been changed. They now have a legal mental disorder for life.  They are classed as disabled with a mental disorder. 
If they are disabled, so be it but if they are not, what if the doctor is wrong, what then?
Mental illness is a disease for life we are told, by legal inference our children who are so casually diagnosed with a mental illness are presently legally defined as having a mental disorder and their rights as equal citizens are in question. 
I am referring to this again because we have a review of the capacity legislation flying down the tracks at us at a rate of knots. And it is sliding under the radar of the mainstream press as a conversation/debate and for the protection of our future generations we must have this debate nationally.
Article three of The Mental Act of Ireland 2001 defines a mental disorder as, “a person with severe dementia, intellectual disorder, and or mental illness”.

Mental Illness as a ‘disease’ of the brain is not being spread by any virus; there is no infection that is airborne. There are no scientists in zip up suits in laboratories trying to find a cure for this ‘disease of the brain’. Rather the opposite is the truth. There are scientists financed by drug companies in three piece Armani suits frantically trying to ‘invent’ new strains of this diseases of the brain. This is the first epidemic in the history of medical science that is being spread by marketing. In fact we are now seeing drug companies withdrawing from ‘financing’ research into ‘mental illness’ as the cost of paying for the damage the cure ‘the pills’ have caused is now growing so fast that the bottom line ‘profit’ is under real threat.
So back to the capacity legislation, it is being reviewed because we fought so hard in the UN in 2006 in New York to create in the Convention of the Rights of the Disabled article 12 which states every body is entitled to legal capacity. This forced a review of our current legislation, that definition of ‘mental illness’ as being a mental disorder is un lightly to change, within this review; as far as I can ascertain.

I asked the question of Patricia Richard Clarke who is heading up the review as to whether she agreed with the definition in article three she stated she did not agree with the wording. She did not state if she was going to do anything about it in the review of the capacity legislation and when I asked where did I go next she referred me to the Mental Health Commission.
I am now referring you to your local politicians and to your media. If you as citizens do not wake up to this as a problem that has been allowed to evolve over decades, it will have huge implications for your children and grandchildren as the number of young people being diagnosed with ‘mental illness’ and legally defined as having a ‘mental disorder’ has reached epidemic proportions.
But to the point. I am stating this to you to make you aware of the danger. The next time you take your child to your doctor and he tells you your child has a ‘mental illness’ please ask him if he is aware of the legal implications of that diagnosis for your child for the rest of your child’s life.

If your doctor informed you that your child had a mental disorder knowing the legal implications of that opinion, would you pause, consider it a serious issue. It appears to me that parents are taking a casual view on being told their children have a ‘mental illness’.
Will you, as a parent, continue to allow your child to be labelled as disabled without asking the doctor to prove by test that your child is, as he states he/she is? Will you the parent simply persist in accepting a diagnosis/opinion reached by nothing stronger than your doctor judging his or her; your child’s behaviour?

It amazes me when I bring this subject up, be it with Joe Soap in the general public, with politicians, with anybody, how frequently they ask ‘is Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) still being used!!

When I tell them that not only is ECT still being used but under Section 59b of the Mental Health Act 2001, we have given the right to two consultant psychiatrists to sign a piece of paper and FORCE people like me a patient in a hospital, to take ECT against their will. People if you will excuse the pun react to that information with shock.

We are on the cusp of a breakthrough with this move by Senators Dan Boyle and Déirdre de Búrca of the Green Party to propose an amendment in Private Members time to the Mental Health Act deleting Section 59b which states the following:

59 - (1)A programme of ECT shall not be administered to a patient unless either
(b) where the patient is unable or unwilling (emphasis author) to give such consent –
(i) the programme of therapy is approved (in form sprcified by the commission) by the consultant psychiatrist responsible for the care and treatment of the patient, and (ii) the programme of therapy is also authorised (in a form specified by the commission) by another consultant psychiatrist following referral to the matter to him or her by the first-mentioned psychiatrist.

I have lobbied members from both houses and representatives of every party including independents have agreed that the deletion of the above section of the Act by the forthcoming amendment is not only necessary but the right thing to do. 

I had spoken to the then Junior Minister for Health (with responsibility for Mental Health) Mr John Moloney a wonderful caring man the right man in the right place at the right time and he has agreed that the legal use of involuntary ECT should no longer remain on the statute books in this country.

When I was researching the whole issue in and around ECT, it amazed me when I asked the Mental Health Commission and indeed the Health Research Board to give me statistics referring to the use of forced ECT they replied that they could not, they could give me the figures for the use of ECT as a whole but they could differentiate between voluntary and involuntary because they were not mandated to, and therefore did not keep such a record. 

I am happy to report that as a result of mine and others continued lobbying of the Mental Health Commission the figures of voluntary and involuntary ECT will be recorded separately this year by the Commission in its 2009 report as it should have been in the past.  If this highlights the fact that forced ECT, as some psychiatrists would state, is never used then there is no reason why it should remain on the statute books and if it highlights that ECT is seldom or frequently used then it reinforces the need to remove this abuse of Human Rights from our statute books.

When it came to forced ECT a professor of psychiatry told me that he knows of no case where a patient was forced to have ECT.

If the above is a fact, then why is it written into the law in the first place, this law allowing for forced ECT was passed as recently as 2001. To the best of my knowledge not one sitting member of either House of the Oireachtas raised a question with regard to this blatant breach of the Human Rights of an entire section of the population.  There is an opportunity now for those members and the new members elected in 2007 to redress this situation.

Again I would urge if the above is true then it should be removed from the statute books as quickly as possible. Because I can tell you as a member of the mad community that there is a terrible fear among us in and around the whole issue of forced ECT.

How can we in all conscience in the modern post Celtic Tiger Ireland, in a time of recession, where stress and depression are more likely to become a reality in people’s lives continue to reinforce the fear ignorance and stigma that surrounds those of us who live with the normality of madness to be subjected to this medieval archaic practice?  While the medical profession, a caring profession, has to resort to force as its last line of defence then that is sure and true evidence that this caring profession has failed in its duty to its patients. There should and never should have been the legal right granted to one section of society to force another section of society to bend to their will and opinion based solely on the fact that they are different, not on the fact that they have ever been charged or tried before a judge or jury for a criminal offence but force is used because it is best opinion put forward by a section of our medical community that it is in the best interest of the patient.  How can we in all conscience stand over such abuse?
If I might paraphrase the Ryan Report into child abuse in our oh so respected religious institutions of the 50’s and 60’s, the right to control and force of one section of the community over another without proper protection of the law then abuse is bound to follow.  There is no right to appeal against forced ECT written into the Mental Health Act 2001, this is not about those who like I had strong caring and loving family support but about the protection of those who society has forgotten who have no one to speak on their behalf and exist on the margins.  I signed a form to have ECT performed on me, it would be suggested in a voluntary capacity, I was so sedated with medications at that time that I had no idea what I was signing, and would have signed anything.  My wife put a stop to it.  I meet people now who did not have that type of support and they tell me their lives will never be the same, it has to be said I also meet others who say their lives have been greatly improved by ECT.  If it is their wish and their choice to take ECT I have no problem with that choice, this is not about choice and voluntary ECT, this is about the use of forced and involuntary ECT. 

There is a whole other debate to be held at a future time as to what constitutes free and informed consent and legal capacity within the whole structure of the Mental Health system as it exists in this country and I would suggest that this debate needs to be held outside the parameters of the forthcoming Capacity Act which again is going to impose an overall solution instead of what is absolutely necessary in the area of Mental Health, allowing for individual need.

Does it not seem extraordinary that in today’s open, caring, loving society that we passed a law in 2001 that allows members of the mad community to be forced to take ECT, if, as the Act states, they are “unable or unwilling” to consent to its administration.

If there is one common thread as a consequence of so called “Mental Illness”, or as I prefer to call it madness. It is loneliness. If there is one thing that needs to be cured, that so quite simply can be cured, it is this issue of loneliness. 

When I stood in the General Election in 2007, I went to Schizophrenia Ireland to ask the members if they would join in my campaign. One of the guys challenged me by saying why should I, what are you going to do for me?
I replied I have no idea I don’t know you what do you want? His answer will stay with me for a long time. He quite simply said I want to stop living in an 8 x 10 bedsit. I want to stop being lonely. Not so very much of an ask is it really? 

The tiger has just stopped roaring and in the period of all that prosperity, we have left lonely and neglected people living in 8 x 10 bedsits. There are lonely people everywhere in our community. Living in mansions, in apartments, in crowds, and in isolated places. People who, when that loneliness becomes overbearing it descends into despair. When that despair spirals downwards it can become madness (depression).
It is an issue that we as a community urgently need to address. Not for any altruistic reason but for self preservation! Madness (depression) is spreading like a virus through our community, but this is a virus we can prevent from our own resources.
We can kill this virus, with a friendly wave, a smile, a hello to a stranger. A simple gesture: to acknowledge the existence of a total stranger.
We all see them those who look a little different, a little stressed while simply shopping. That stare in their eyes, that haunted look, the hunched shoulders, the shuffle, the stress.
Cleanliness leaving a lot to be desired, a little hum, we all know them and to our shame we walk around them.
How simple to smile at our fellow human beings.

I’m dying. My medical team has told me so. I’m dying with Motor Neuron Disease not the most pleasant way to go. A lot of pain, a lot of distress, and some exhaustion. I have to monitor what I do.  I have lost the use of my left leg, my right is getting weaker, both of my arms, I will lose my ability to swallow and to speak.
This is not just about me, my beautiful wife, my wonderful daughter and son feel every flinch I try to hide and they smile with love. This is a family affair!
But I am not dead yet a lot of fight in the old dog, I have too much to do and now maybe not enough time to do it. Shite happens and you move on.
I have a lot of pain with this. If you have ever experienced a cramp while running or in the night, you will have an idea! Now try to imagine cramps in both legs simultaneously and you cannot get out of bed to loosen up, that’s us, legs, arms, side cramped together.
Six months ago I was as good as bed bound, had the electric wheelchair at my bedside, needed help to get into that. Having a pee in a dignified way is so important to the human spirit. I was on the point of loosing that dignity.

I had stopped going to The Corner House for G and T where I am well loved. Where disabled bars are on the toilet walls for me to walk in. I did not say I was not going back because it would hurt those there that love me. I just said I was too tired, would go tomorrow.
I launched my new book The Human Condition made up of the weekly columns I still write for the Cork Independent in that pub recently. Had a pee independently!
I am not a part of any campaign here, I have nothing to gain. I have enough on my plate with Mad Pride Ireland and human rights. This is simply my experience.
Six months ago somebody asked me “have you tried cannabis for the pain” and I said no and I did. My son recorded me walking on my I Phone that day.
I am sixty one. I had smoked cannabis in the U.S. as a student, in 1971, not seen it since. Smoked cigarettes most of my adult life, lost a kidney to cancer last year, but I survived.
I know when it comes to health, not such great luck but in love I am a millionaire. The books balance!
And I am a criminal now, because I take a pinch of cannabis, as much as the old lads long ago did with snuff, in a yogurt on the days I am not going out. I eat it.  It helps. I am not cured but my medical team tells me the chemical reaction of the cannabis on my brain may have released the spasticity of my mussels.
I am told by Prof Orla Hardiman a really kind and honest lady, that her colleague Richard Bedlack is looking into this subjective evidence on a European medical forum since January. No reply from them yet.

I am in less pain, I can walk a few steps, I can have a dignified pee, I am not cured, it is all getting worse in some ways, but I have to wonder how much easier all this could have been if I had access to cannabis two years ago.
I have no idea what I am doing, how much to take, when where how. I can get no medical advice. It is against the law.
I have no hallucinations, no adverse effects.
I simply know my life is better with cannabis then without.
I get calls from so many who are suffering since I went public. Who are afraid to ask where to access this drug that helps me.  I am not advising anybody to take cannabis, I have no knowledge or authority to do so, but it does help me!
Shame on those who refuse to debate this issue, the medical use of cannabis on an open public forum.

“Never knew the chick” as Keith Richards said when he was asked to comment on the death of Diana. I never knew Aida either but I heard a bunch of Italians singing about her in Verona. I possibly like the live opera so much because Lizzy Mac loves it so much.

We drove to Verona just after I bought Liz a convertible, so with hood down we began with a mini cruise. A kind of taking the horse to France except we landed in northern Spain.
We had booked two operas and a hotel but for the rest of the fifteen days not a clue where we were staying. Onto the ferry like mini liners, except for the lads: langers , shouting “Rooney, Rooney”  etc in every bar, the lad in the corner playing piano, peeking notes,

“I’m just a man whose intentions are good”, 
To a chorus of; “offside, off, off, off, that ref is a blind bollocks”. 

While at the bar the overweight, poorly nutritional but richly imbibed traders were beginning the European leg of their current tour with their whole families in tow.

“I told ye before to ask your mother now feck off” a father shouted at the two year old tugging a card playing trouser leg, and the lad resting his belly on the counter calling the barman “you’re Polish are ye?” turns to the lads playing cards; “this is an Irish ship init?”
Back to the bar “how come your polish an working here an all dem lads at home wit no work?”

Turns to the lads in triumph, back to the bar, “we spends a lot of money, buys a langer load of drink like, have ye no bit a grub at all fer us, a few crisps an nuts like?”

All good stuff, great entertainment for a voyaging voyeur like myself, because we had a cabin and fecked off to bed and became genteel in the morning instead. 
Red convertible hood and foot down, we were off across northern Spain the Basques still fighting everyone around them, over the Pyrenees beauty abounding, beautiful land.
Into Southern France, diverted into the Camargue, white horses, white beaches, fish and chips that were posh in their simplicity magic.
Like explorers, found a route over and looking down on the Riviera, saw all its natural beauty while never being touched by its crass human created vulgarity. Little villages hosting us in quiet tranquility
Into Italy on the motorway, gained a day and stayed in a tiny village whose best restaurant (we were told) The Lord Nelson, served lumps of meat grilled with spuds, and it was the best for a man who can’t stand pasta. Italy is not a great culinary place for me, Liz loves it, but fish again swam with a wonderful range of veg to my rescue.
Verona; a Roman Circus, a Palace, and a large square. You walk about, theatre is already attacking you on all sides, the props huge, imposing, casually thrown outside, alongside the circus walls. Rome, Egypt, Pirates, garrets from Paris, big heads; no not the locals; the props everywhere!

It’s tea time our time and a ritual begins; the locals emerge, link arms and stroll the four corners of the square, men linking men or women or both, women linking women or men or both, and the animation of speak, gesture,  over the top, an overture without orchestra music or conductor .
Sipping coffee and cognac, nibbling Italian tapas; Pasta! Free show and not a cent paid.
The kids bought us the full package pre-opera dinner in the Palace ; where opera stars regaled us with arias and bits, a buffet of twenty six types of different colored pasta were served; now Verdi is one thing but this over-reliance on the pasta! I was thinking of the lad with his stomach resting on the bar and that I would fit right in on the way back; anyway I don’t like the stuff.
A short arm in arm stroll alongside the amphitheatre - stunning - the architecture, the wondrous engineering, in the arched entrance, up the cut stone steps, and lord of all gods you saw it.
A wonder, that inner space, tired stone cut steps, descending to the sand carpet covered floor, where those, the ruling classes sat on their collective asses on the very bloodstained sand, where the working classes whose blood drained into that sand now sat in the stone tiered stone seats where the ancient ruling class howled for more blood , the temptation to roar “bring on the lions” instead of “Rooney Rooney”! Life is weird sometimes.

Then your gaze drawn to the vast stage, the props, lighting, the amphitheatre and it all, stage and audience begins to evolve into a living whole you are drawn in by the terrible magnificence of it!
We sat, champagne and a small candle each, and the highly recommended cushion we hired, cushioning our old asses, evidentially not as tough as the ancient version.

It’s dusk, gods light fading on cue, lights down, unaided by man, the conductor raised his baton, the first note, perfect pitch, beautifully carried, acoustics somehow resounding astounding, in a space with the star studded sky as ceiling. No amplification, the amphitheatre designed pre Edison, the full Italian love filled moon rose behind centre stage. Natures prop, timing perfect, and the diva and tenor hit the high note together. Bellissimo!

The dilemma that is John Hunt is the perfect example of the dilemma of the entire mental health service. Who knows the real reason that John Hunt has for getting angry and is lashing out? Why he is so restless and discontented in his spirit? He is not a criminal yet he is locked up.

His family are tired and at their wits end. Those on the staff in Carrig Mor have no real answer. They can continue to pile on the medication, sedate him, control him, but they cannot cure him, they cannot bring peace to this man’s spirit. It appears they do not know how. His doctor has forbidden visitors I called up to see John, and a decent nurse explained “you can’t see John” doctor’s orders. In John Hunts “best interest” of course.

John lost it and hit one of the staff. John had no right to do that.

John Hunt is 29 he has been locked up and force treated “in his best interest” for the past 5 years. I do believe if I was locked away at 24, without trial before judge or jury, from my family and friends I would lash out at everybody around me.

Never been allowed to run and play with my son born when I was locked up, he is five. I would lash out. Not been allowed to love the woman I loved. I would lash out. Not allowed to go for a pint. I would lash out. Not allowed to sing. Not allowed to live life. I would lash out. No matter how often they told me “it is in my best interest”.

Would you lash out, be angry?

What of John’s rights, who will speak for John Hunt if he is accused of assault. Everything that happened “the incident” occurred behind the locked doors of a public hospital.  Who will write the account of what happened, interrupt the circumstances, from John’s point of view?

Was John at the end of his tether, and that poor nurse a victim of timing? The last straw!

Did the anti psychotics John is being forced to take, have anything to do with his violet reaction, who will ask that question, and of whom?

Will the Mental Health Commission the statutory body empowered to protect John intervene? Can they? Under the current legal restrictions imposed on them I doubt that they can. Will they discover the root of the truth? I have requested the MHC to do so.

Secrecy and silence paramount “in the patients best interest” of course.

How can John Hunt speak his truth he is locked away and drugged up to his eyeballs, not allowed visitors? Jennifer Hough of the Examiner and I had scheduled an interview with John last week, cancelled!

If the case goes to court and his doctor states John Hunt does not have the capacity to speak for himself, and in reality he does not right now, because of legally forced drugging.

Not that he lacks intelligence he is an artist, but he is drugged out of his mind by legal force.  Has no voice.

The predetermined result of circuit court, is as I understand it John will be sent to the Central Mental Hospital for review. What future then for John.

As far as I know the judge has no leeway under the law re that decision. He has a solicitor now Mr Eamonn Moloney we wish him and John safe passage through this legal/moral quagmire.

The doctor and the system have total sway, complete authority, who is going to risk going against the “opinion” of a doctor, if the doctor states,  John Hunt “might be a danger to himself and to others”, if released, under the current mental health law. Released into a society that completely lacks the support systems John needs to rehabilitate himself back into “normal” society.

This legal medical review, if it is carried out, it will be undertaken by the colleagues of those who legally forced John to become an addict within the system in the first place “in his best interest”!

Who will speak for John? Those that believe they have the right to force treat; to cure the theory of the chemical imbalance with drugs! He has a strong spirit, refuses to comply. That is John’s gift but his cross in the mental health system. Where to be cured you MUST comply. Indeed you will be legally forced “to show insight”. 

The UN is asking questions of this state re the fact that the Gardai arrested the women who escaped from the Magdalene Laundries in the past and forced them back into the convent “in the women’s best interest” of course.

But what is the staff to do. John Hunt is now a drug addict. He has been legally forced to become a drug addict. He has been forced to be addicted to legally prescribed drugs by the staff that care for him in Carrig Mor. Because they have been educated to believe that John Hunt has a disease in his brain called “mental illness”, and they can cure it with legal addictive drugs.

All who know John now believe that his future is bleak? How can his partner Grainne now be expected to take John back into her life! He is an addict now, totally dependent on the drugs he has been forced to take while in the care of this state, “in his best interest” of course.

I don’t have a solution for John, his family, or the staff in Carrig Mor. This is such a complicated convoluted area. The more solutions you find the more problems you create.

But if we have learned one lesson from child abuse and the Magdalene laundries it is this, if you take the right of force out of the hands of those in positions of power then the level of abuse drops dramatically. Allow the abused the protection of the common law as equal citizens of Ireland the institutional abuse stops!

We must dismantle the legal power to be judge jury and jailor, we Irish society have passed to Psychiatry when they care for those we are tired of.

There are too many rumours out there of abuse in psych units not to demand answers on behalf of those powerless and voiceless to ask questions.

Our elderly we are now learning are also being drugged into compliance with damaging psychotropic medications.

It is society’s dilemma now and we have to solve what we have allowed to evolve. Everybody is being abused here the staff and the patients.

We can’t just lash out no matter what the provocation the temptation the situation, the unjust circumstance, can we? Would that be retaliation, justification? A justified form of self defence, maybe?
I don’t know, do you? 

Questions???
Are the human rights of the Mad Community being breached on a daily basis?
Are lock up psych units a different version of Magdalene laundries where abuse of our unwanted is disguised as care?
Is it justice to be locked away based solely on a doctor’s opinion?
Is it justice that the mad community have no access to judge or jury “in the patient’s best interest”?
What is madness, why are we so afraid of it?
Are we right to be afraid of it?
Is everything about madness negative?
Is there a positive side to madness?
Is there a difference between insanity and madness?
Is “mental illness” a reality or a marketing ploy of the pharmaceutical industry endorsed by the medical model?
Are doctors unquestioningly standing over corrupt research?
Is UCC as a seat of learning being corrupted into a seat of propaganda by accepting “grants” from corrupt vested interest groups?
Should those who have ownership or vested interest in the pharmaceutical industry be allowed to teach in third level at the highest level?
Do good and evil exist in humanity?
Is losing our emotional balance due to life’s stress a disease of the brain?
Does the chemical imbalance theory deserve to be called proven science?
Where is the test for “mental illness”?
Do certain legal drugs kill?
Are prescribed psychotropic medications safe?
Are we entitled to ask questions re psychotropic drugs without fear?
Are we entitled to get answers without being afraid of those answers?
Should coroners record the level of prescribed medications in those who die by suicide?
Should the HSE suicide office make public the level of prescribed medications in all who attempt suicide? 
Is the truth around sudden unexplained acts of violence in “mental illness” being hidden?
Are sudden unexplained acts of violence caused by side effects of psychotropic medications?
Is fear being used as a weapon by the status quo in the mental health debate?
Is stigma being spread by those who preach from an anti stigma platform which insists we must accept “our psychiatric label” to progress?
Are certain voluntary agencies in the pockets of the medical model?
Is the pharmaceutical industry corrupt?
Does the pharmaceutical industry lie?
Are we told the truth re side effect of psychotropic drugs?
Are the side effects of psychotropic drugs more harmful then the “cure”
Why do psychiatrists need force to treat patients?
Is using force to medicate a crime?
Is forced ECT a crime?
What does “the patient lacks insight” really mean?
Is calling forced feeding a patient being called nutrition enhancement moral?
Are we disguising abuse in psych units behind locked doors?
Can all the rumours be wrong?
Just how many are silenced by shame?
Where are the whistleblowers?
What does “in the patient’s best interest” really mean?
Is control of feelings by heavy sedation a cure?
Are families buying into the medical model of control as a cure as an easy option?
Are staff working in lock up wards feeding their children from an abusive system?
Are those that do, guilty of abuse?
Why do people with “mental illness” die younger than others?
Do those on heavy dosage of prescribed psychotropic medications develop diabetes, heart disease, and other physical ill health due to side effects?
Where are the hidden cameras from Prime Time Investigates?
Where are the answers?
Where are our public representatives?
Why are they not making unannounced visits to Carrigmor Shanikiel?
Why can they not see where the patients sleep in Carrigmor?
Why cannot friends sit at a bedside of the beds behind locked doors in Carrigmor?
Why is it so hard to visit public hospitals like Carrigmor Shanakiel?
Why do the doctors there hide behind those locked doors?
Why all the secrecy?
Why the silence?
Why do we fear going to see psychiatrists?
Do psychiatrists deserve the Hollywood stereotyping and why did they get it?
Is it too late for John Hunt?
Is he institutionalised now?
Is his opportunity to live a “normal” life being destroyed while in care?
Why can we not see John the Painter?
Why is locked away upstairs in Carrigmor?
Why does his doctor deny access?
Would his doctor state it is in “in the patient’s best interest”?
Why was Josie locked away for 60 years for being a victim of rape?
Is “in the patient’s best interest” a catchall phrase to hide a painful truth?
What is wrong with the HSE the Mental Health Commission they inspect and issue licence?
Are tribunals a travesty of justice?
Why is it so hard to get any answers?
Finally is it time to raise your voice?
In my opinion it is!
The Magdalene laundries thrived behind society’s silence “in the patient’s best interest” of course.
What are YOU going to do NOW???

Superb!
Mad Pride Family Fun Day.
I am so proud of the people of Cork. 17,000 of them, over the course of the day yesterday, celebrated the great normality of madness, by celebrating difference and thereby stopping loneliness.
Superb, sunshine and smiles, from babies, from nanas!
We have a great Lord Mayor this year a man of natural charm grace and wit. Michael O’Connell and his charming wife our first citizen’s brought their grandchildren,  toured the park and the citizens of Cork responded with warmth and a bit of slagging, sure it was that kind of relaxed day.
I mean this was the Cork man who charmed the queen on our behalf.
Minister Kathleen Lynch just arrived, that was simply great! I just spotted her in the crowd smiling ye can’t beat that boy. We toured again (I had a golf cart thanks to Monkstown golf club). Kathleen also came to Ballydehob she was impressed by both Mad Pride events.
There was no depression in the park yesterday to much laughing.
“Against laughter there is no defence” Mark Twain.
There was a palpable sense of peace and harmony, LOVE in the community, FUN in the air, you just can’t buy that.
It was a beautiful day in the perfect sense of people relaxing in these stressful times and it was free to the public.
We had enough people in the park yesterday to fill City Hall 17 times the Opera house 17 times, more than the marathon on Monday and we run the event on a shoestring.
It was as smooth as silk, as to be expected when Goldiefish events (Roseanne and Moray), and McCarthy Consulting (David) are in charge. I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
Our board of directors all turned up a vote of confidence.
We are on the city calendar now as an annual event, we are grateful to City Hall and all the staff but our buddy Richie the park ranger is special.
We are going to need more help we are growing.
To all the press our thanks, my boss is so helpful, but we are big enough now to wonder why the TV news cameras were missing?
To the performers, all of them our thanks, it was a fantastic show; Kila headlined and blew us away.
We created employment for over a hundred people on Sunday much needed income for the Cork economy. We employ locally.
Fitzgerald’s Park is such a beautiful space, but when I looked out the window and saw the clouds early Sunday and then felt the cold I had a sense of dread.
But on cue at 12.30 the Sun in all its glory popped out and the people popped in, it never stopped from there, a constant stream, a flow of love around the normality of madness. Recognition of the human rights of the mad community to be equal citizens of Ireland with all the privileges and responsibilities that implies.
We must have a national roundtable debate on the rights of the mad community; we must stop using force as a means to cure/fix our emotions. The chemical imbalance is simply a theory. We must ask questions of the medical model and the medical model must not be afraid of the answers.
Mad Pride Ireland is creating that space, thank you to all our sponsors.
Love replacing force how bad a notion is that.
It was some week last week I tested Lizzy Mac to the limit.
John Lonergan was chairing an Amnesty debate in Blackhall Place DublinTuesday, he gave me great latitude to make my point I thank him.
Wednesday I did interviews with Matt Cooper and Newstalk. Then I attended a dinner in the Stillorgan Park Hotel.
Thursday I was the keynote speaker at a symposium of Irish Mental Health Nurses Institute in UCD.
I was not gentle in my 45 minute address, I spoke my truth with strength, but they listened and later challenged, we had a day long debate how bad.  My thanks to Dr Harry Gijbels UCC ,and Prof. Agnes Higgins Trinity for the opportunity.
Friday drove to Writers Week in Listowel to launch my book, had great craic and gin at poet’s corner, and launched my book in Woulfes bookshop. Friends I meet at writers week for over 25 years arrived.
I ended up in the afternoon singing summertime with John Sheahan on the fiddle. Mickey MacConnell “only the rivers run free” and Patsi telling yarns. Fecking great.
Met Lonergan again and we bartered each other’s books, we launched on the same day. Small world.
I did a stupid but worthwhile tour of Listowel a little pissed late Friday night in the scooter, left some anger outside instead of bringing into my beautiful daughters Jill’s family.
Drove home Saturday evening was nearly killed by a young farmer who swung a tractor and trailor across our path, my old reflexes still to the good, swung into a boithrin and skidded to a halt. The overworked youngfella got a bigger fright than Liz and I.
Sunday Mad Pride all my family there loving me, it’s great to be alive lads, great to be able to challenge life, it gives meaning to life.
Love, unselfish love of self, radiates out and like a magnet draws love back in.
Yehaa! L’Chaim!!

Finally posting up a radio interview that was broadcast last Friday 10th June on Today FM. Matt Cooper, the presenter of The Last Word had a good 30 minutes of conversation with John on a variety of issues to do with mental health, love, joy and life. Well worth listening too - inspiring stuff. I’m afraid its in 2 parts - but bear with it… 

Mad Pride Ireland interviews: part 1 and 2

Lords Mayor of Cork and Dublin and Mayor of Tullamore make visits to their local mental health facilities

Wednesday April 13th: Mad Pride Ireland Visitors Project will see Mayors and Lords Mayor across the country visiting mental health facilities in their local areas in an attempt to encourage family and friends of patients to make regular visits. As Mayors are the first citizens and the office is a-political it would be a great lead into encouraging family, friends and relations to follow.  This Project, which has the support of the HSE, is an attempt to maintain a link between patients and their community circle.
Lord Mayor Cllr. Michael O’Connell will visit Carrig Mór and St. Michaels facilities with John Mc Carthy, founder of Mad Pride Ireland, on Monday April 18th.  Visits will also be made by the Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr. Gerry Breen and Mayor of Tullamore Cllr. Molly Buckley to local mental health facilities.

John Mc Carthy said, “Wouldn’t it be great to see more flowers and cards at the bedsides in psychiatric units?  We have been very lucky to have the support of the HSE as well as the Lord Mayor of Dublin Cllr. Gerry Breen, Lord Mayor of Cork Cllr. Michael O’Connell and Mayor of Tullamore Cllr. Molly Buckley.  This level of support is a further sign that the area of emotional distress is coming more and more to the mainstream in our society.  This project is designed to help patients maintain contact with their circle of family and friends while in a facility, which we hope will make their return to the community a little easier.

‘The Human Condition’ a collection of articles and thoughts from John Mc Carthy, founder of Mad Pride Ireland, will be launched in the Corner House Pub, on Coburg Street, Cork at 6pm on Monday April 18th.  The book is the result of over two years of contributions by John Mc Carthy to the Cork Independent and other publications both national and international.

This is the second publication from Mr. Mc Carthy following the successful release of ‘Hope on a rope’, a poetry collection, in 2004.  Speaking ahead of the launch John said, “This is very exciting, I have been writing for many years now and was delighted when the chance of a weekly column came up with the Cork Independent.  Since starting I have received many notes, emails calls and letters from people who agree and disagree with what I am saying each week but it was the continued popularity of the column that prompted me to compile them in this book.  These are just a few random thoughts about life, about love, about emotion and how you can get screwed up when these are not balanced. They’re simply my thoughts do what you like with them.”

The book will be on sale in good bookshops and is also available online at http://www.madprideireland.ie

For more information contact David Mc Carthy, McCarthy Consulting, 086 662 0448 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 

Thursday March 24th: The debate on the Deletion of section 591b, dealing with the use of forced Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT), ended today in the Seanad.  A compromise was reached between Senator Dan Boyle and his Labour colleagues with the agreement of Minister Kathleen Lynch to delete the word ‘unwilling’ from the Act and to insert the need for ‘written informed consent’ from the patient.  While the word ‘unable’ remains in the Act some strong safeguards have been added, the debate will continue as the Bill moves onto the Dail.

John Mc Carthy, from the Delete59b.com lobby group and founder of Mad Pride Ireland said, “This is the result of a lot of work over the past three years, and we feel very proud that we have been involved in the last piece of legislation to be discussed and passed through this Seanad, possibly the last act of the upper house.  The removal of the word ‘unwilling’ is a great step toward the end of forced ECT in Irish Mental Health but we still have to fight on, and we will bring the fight to the Dail debate when it is introduced.  We are however delighted that our new Minister in this area Deputy Kathleen Lynch has taken such an immediate and compassionate interest in this area and we look forward to working with her over the coming months to bring this debate to a conclusion.  The final text of the Bill will be available in the coming days ad when it is we will make a further statement.”

People who would like to support the efforts of the Delete 59b campaign can log on to their petition site at http://www.delete59b.com and sign up.  The Delete 59b group includes Dr. Pat Bracken, Psychiatrist West Cork Mental Health Services/HSE, Harry Gijbels Dept. Of Nursing UCC, Richard Lakemen Dept. Of Nursing DCU, Lydia Sapouna Dept. Of Social Studies UCC and John Mc Carthy Mad Pride Ireland.

Presidential hopeful Senator David Norris is set to join David and John Mc Carthy of Mad Pride Ireland on a visit to Carrigmore as part of a trip to Cork this weekend.  Mad Pride Ireland launched this project last year in an effort to encourage the family and friends of patients to visit them more often.

David Mc Carthy of Mad Pride Ireland, who is also standing as an Independent candidate in Cork South Central said, “We have been doing a lot of work particularly within the media to highlight the level of services and conditions in some of our facilities and now we want to take that campaign to the public.  We launched this project with Lord Mayor Mick O’Connell last year and now we have someone of the calibre of Senator Norris supporting the initiative.  Our plan is to have all the Mayor’s in the country visit their local facility in April of this year and we have been working closely with the HSE and the Mayors to make this happen.  Our hope is that people will take time out and visit facilities like St. Michael’s, Carrigmore and Sarsfields Court and talk or sit with some of the patients who are suffering the isolation and loneliness of their emotional distress.”

The focus of Mad Pride Family Fun Days is to engage the community through fun and laughter and thereby break down stigma and increase awareness and understanding.  Visitors at this fully free event will be entertained by musical acts, street performers, clowns and food stalls.  Since the first event in Cork, in 2008 over 40,000 people have enjoyed the free Fun Days in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney, Tullamore and even Mbula Uganda.

To learn more about Mad Pride Ireland and Mad Pride Family Fun Days log on to http://www.madprideireland.ie

Contacts for further information:
For Mad Pride Ireland: David McCarthy, McCarthy Consulting, Tel: (086) 662 0448

Cork group is held up as best practice in the fight against ignorance in mental health in Europe

Tuesday Nov 2nd: Mad Pride Ireland has been invited to showcase its work in Lisbon, Portugal as part of the EC Thematic Conference on Mental Health “Promoting Social Inclusion and Combating Stigma for better Mental Health and Well- being”.  Mad Pride Ireland’s work has been identified as best practice in the fight against ignorance in mental health.  This invite follows the group’s participation in a similar conference in Budapest in 2009.

“This a great honour for us, and it is recognition of our work that has seen over 40,000 people attend our events since our first in Cork in 2008.  We have made massive strides in Ireland too with the HSE, Dept. Of Health and Junior Minister John Moloney supporting our work.  We also work to change the law surrounding the use of force in treatment, specifically ECT under section 59b of the 2001 mental health act.  At our urging the Green Party has adopted the deletion of section 59b as party policy and Junior Minister Moloney informed us recently that a decision is imminent”, commented John Mc Carthy founder of Mad Pride Ireland.

The focus of Mad Pride Family Fun Days is to engage the community through fun and laughter and thereby break down stigma and increase awareness and understanding of the normality of madness.  Visitors at this fully free event will be entertained by musical acts, street performers, clowns and food stalls.  Since the first event in Cork, in 2008 over 40,000 people have enjoyed the free Fun Days in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney, Tullamore and even Mbula Uganda.

to Amnesty Ireland’s Position of ‘Informed Consent’ Prior to the Use of ECT

Friday September 17th: The Delete 59b lobby group have publicly announced their support for Amnesty Ireland’s position paper calling on the government to review the Mental Health Act 2001 and in particular section 59b which allows for the use of forced ECT, a situation that both Amnesty Ireland and Delete 59b feel is a breach of basic Human Rights.
The College of Psychiatry Ireland has played down the problems associated with this treatment and have argued that there should be minimal changes only to the Mental Health Act.  The Delete 59b group have been strenuously lobbying to have section 59(b) removed.  They have secured the backing of the Green Party, whose Chairman Senator Dan Boyle recently announced that the deletion of section 59b is now Green Party Policy. Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan has also supported the campaign.

The position of Amnesty Ireland is that the law needs to change to ensure that ‘Informed Consent’ is required prior to the administration of ECT as a treatment.  Their position paper states ‘...the right of a patient who has capacity to refuse ECT must be unequivocally protected by section 59. The Act is clearly currently in breach of human rights standards as the use of the word ‘unwilling’ denies the right of a competent patient to refuse ECT.’ 

The Delete 59b campaign is adding its support to this position, however they feel it still does not go far enough as it does not deal with the underlying issue of force under the law in the treatment of mental ill health.  Pending a more extensive review of the Mental Health Act 2001, the Delete 59(b) Campaign now calls for the College of Psychiatry and the National Service User Executive (NSUE), to support the proposal put forward by Amnesty International.  While this does not ask for the deletion of Section 59(b), its sets out clearly a set of safeguards for patients that are in line with best international standards. Similar safeguards are already in place in England and Wales.

John Mc Carthy of the Delete 59b campaign said, “We are offering our support to the calls from Amnesty Ireland to introduce a policy of ‘Informed Consent’ because we believe it may effectively end the use of ECT as a so called treatment.  However, as we see it fails to deal with the issue of force under the law as a form of treatment and we will continue to lobby the government and keep the pressure on Minister Moloney to introduce the Heads Of Bill to the floor of the Dail in this next session that will see the deletion of Section 59b in its totality.  So as we continue the battle for human rights this step by Amnesty may help those trapped in the system and ensure they do not have to be subjected to this archaic and barbaric form of so called treatment.’

Dr Pat Bracken, Clinical Director of Mental Health Services in West Cork, said: ‘ECT is a controversial treatment.  There is accumulating evidence that its benefits are extremely short lived and that a substantial minority of recipients suffer significant memory loss which can be permanent in nature.  It has been used less and less in Britain and Ireland over the past 20 years.  Many hospitals do not use the treatment at all and seem able to help very depressed patients without recourse to this very invasive procedure.  However, the wide variation in its use is a major cause of concern.  It is clear that some psychiatrists are ‘ECT enthusiasts’.”  He continued, “  In these circumstances, it is vital that robust safeguards for patients are in place. We are anxious to see some progress on this issue soon. We are hoping that if the College of Psychiatry and NSUE also support the position put forward by Amnesty, the Minister’s job will be made easier’.”

The Delete 59b Campaign comprises John Mc Carthy founder of Mad Pride Ireland, Dr. Pat Bracken Consultant Psychiatrist, Harry Gijbels UCC and Richard Lakeman of DCU.  The campaign has an online petition at HYPERLINK “http://www.delete59b.com” http://www.delete59b.com, for more information check out their Blog at HYPERLINK “http://www.delete59b.wordpress.com” http://www.delete59b.wordpress.com

To Delete Section 59b Of The Mental Health Act 2001

Thursday August 25th:  John Mc Carthy founder of Mad Pride Ireland today welcomed the announcement by Senator Dan Boyle of the Green Party that the deletion of section 59b of the Mental Health Act 2001 is now Green Party Policy.  Senator Boyle made his comments to local media in Cork.
Section 59b of the Mental Health Act deals with the forced use of Electro Shock Therapy on patients without their consent but on the say of two psychiatrists, and John Mc Carthy has been lobbying for its deletion for a number of years on the grounds that it is a direct violation of patients human rights.  He has set up a group with Dr.Pat Bracken, Harry Gjibels and Richard Lakeman called The Delete 59b Campaign ( HYPERLINK “http://www.delete59b.com” http://www.delete59b.com)

The group have successfully lobbied in the Oireachtas to have this issue brought to the fore, the group secured a commitment from Junior Minister John Moloney in December 2009 to have the Heads Of A Bill, dealing with the deletion of section 59b, on the floor of Dail Eireann in 2010.  They have also secured the support of Independent TD Maureen O’Sullivan who is also working on gaining the support of her Independent colleagues.

Speaking today John Mc Carthy said, “This is a significant boost to the campaign to end this barbaric and archaic treatment.  We have worked hard to engage politicians and media on the issue, and have succeeded with the help of Senator Boyle in having a debate on the issue in the houses of the Oireachtas.  Now with the Green Party making it party policy to delete section 59b in its entirety the pressure will be firmly put on Minister Moloney to introduce the promised Heads Of Bill to the floor of the Dail.”

Monday August 16th: Mad Pride Family Fun Day Tullamore saw close to 3500 people enjoy the fun, music, and glorious sun at the Lloyd Town Park, Tullamore on Sunday August 15th.  This was the second such event held in the Midlands, the first in Tullamore,  and organisers say it was a massive success and are looking forward to returning to the venue next year.
Founder of Mad Pride Ireland and organiser of the Family Fun Day events John Mc Carthy said, “We love putting on our events in new places and when the HSE asked us to come to Tullamore we were delighted, the Lloyd own Park is such a wonderful venue.  We had 1500 people in Portlaoise last year, so to more than double that today was amazing this means we now have had close to 40,000 people attend our events in three years which shows that the simplicity of our message and our approach is having an impact on people.”

He went on to say, “We have already been invited back by the HSE and Tullamore Town Council for next summer so that is great, and we would like to thank both for all their help and assistance in getting the event off the ground.  With no speeches and no leaflets we simply ask those attending to smile at a stranger and shake a hand before they leave, Mad Pride Ireland believes in its message of ‘Celebrate Difference, Stop Loneliness’ and the success of our events today shows that the public and the establishment do as well.  Stigma will only be defeated through community and love.”

The Tullamore event saw the addition of a ‘Busking Competition’ to the programme of events with local acts asked to turn up and perform.  Young Valene Greer, 14, from Tullamore took the €150 prize money and was delighted to have the chance to perform to the crowds from the main stage.
The focus of Mad Pride Family Fun Days is to engage the community through fun and laughter and thereby break down stigma and increase awareness and understanding of the normality of madness.  Visitors at this fully free event will be entertained by musical acts, street performers, clowns and food stalls.  Since the first event in 2008 close to 40,000 people have enjoyed the free Fun Days in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney, Mbula Uganda and now Tullamore.

Launch Mad Pride Family Fun Day Tullamore

Monday August 9th: Junior Minister John Moloney joined with John Mc Carthy Founder of Mad Pride Ireland today, Monday, at the Lloyd Town Park Tullamore to launch the upcoming Mad Pride Family Fun Day at the Park on Sunday August 15th next.
Mad Pride Family Fun Day is hosting its first event in Tullamore in the Lloyd Town Park on Saturday August 15th from 1pm to 5pm.  This event comes hot on the heels of a massively successful event in Cork on June 6th which saw over 12,000 people attend the free family fun event.  The event in Tullamore is the result of an invitation by the HSE to bring the fully free family event to the Midlands.

The event is set to be headlined by Ian Whitty and the Exchange along with Freddie White, the Tullamore Town Band and a host of other acts.  Families at this fully free event will also be able to enjoy Clowns, Puppets, Face Painting and Fun.  John Mc Carthy organiser of the Mad Pride Family Fun Days said, “We started three years ago now and since then over 36,000 people have enjoyed our events and have engaged with our philosophy to Celebrate Difference, Stop Loneliness in the fight against stigma in mental health.  Having the support of Minister Moloney is a great boost to what we are trying to achieve with our events similarly with the HSE who had us put on an event in Killarney in May of this year as part of their international conference as an example of best practice in the fight against stigma.”
He continued, “We had a great event in Portlaoise last year and we are hoping that the people of the midlands turn up in support again this year at the Lloyd Town Park, we have a fantastic line up of acts and lots of fun events planned for all the family on the day.  So join us on Sunday August 15th so that together as a community we can battle stigma and show through the normality of madness that we of the mad community are no different.  See ye there.”

Minister Moloney said, “It gives me great pleasure to support the efforts of Mad Pride Ireland to reduce the impact of stigma around Mental Health in our society. For too long we have isolated a section of society because of a lack of understanding, Mad Pride Ireland is helping to bridge that gap in understanding with its fun events. Laughter is a tonic we cannot have enough of, so I hope to see the people of the midlands come out on 15th Aug and welcome and support this worthy effort. My department which deals with mental health issues is happy to be part of the support team behind Mad Pride Ireland as indeed is the HSE, and its efforts in Tullamore and into the future. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Mad Pride Ireland on its great progress in the last three years.”

The focus of Mad Pride Family Fun Days is to engage the community through fun and laughter and thereby break down stigma and increase awareness and understanding of the normality of madness.  Visitors at this fully free event will be entertained by musical acts, street performers, and clowns.  Since the first event in Cork, in 2008 over 36,000 people have enjoyed the free Fun Days in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney and even Mbula Uganda.

Mad Pride Family Fun Day Sunday August 15th Lloyd Town Park Tullamore

Monday August 2nd: Mad Pride Family Fun Day is coming returns to the Midlands when it hosts its full free family event in Tullamore’s Lloyd Park on Sunday August 15th.  Acts at the event include, Ian Whitty and the Exchange, Freddie White, Novella Hermosa, The Dizzy Blues Band and others including the Tullamore Town Band.
A new item on the Mad Pride Family Fun Day event calender is an open ‘Buskers Competition’ with a prize fund of €150 to the act voted best Busker on the day! Performers just need to arrive sign up and play to the crowds, it’s that simple.

The event will also see street theatre, clowns, face painting that is all free and open to the public.  For those looking to make it a picnic day there will also be various stalls selling food and drink at the event.
Mad Pride Family Fun Days have been run for the past three years in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney and Mbula Uganda.  Its inaugural event was held in Cork’s Fitzgerald’s Park in 2008 it has since seen over 36,000 people attend its annual events.  Organiser John Mc Carthy is hoping that the people of the midlands will come out in huge numbers for the August 15th event, which follows a very successful Mad Pride Family Fun Day that saw over 12,000 people attend in Cork’s Fitzgerald’s Park on Sunday June 6th last.
“We are delighted to be coming back to the Midlands we really had the crowd rocking in Cork and Killarney earlier this year, and we hope that people will come and enjoy all the events on the 15th.  Mad Pride is all about breaking down stigma and showing the normality of madness through laughter and engagement.  It is time to stop the negativity that surrounds emotional distress and to begin to focus on the positive gifts we bring to society such as music, literature, art, poetry, none of these would exist without deep emotional feeling.  Our recent Killarney event, held as an example of best practice in the fight against stigma as part of the IIMHL conference in Killarney was a great success.  With over 3000 people attending in Killarney and over 12,000 people attending in Cork it just shows the power of our very simple message of celebrate difference, stop loneliness.”

The complete line up of music and events is:

Music:
FREDDIE WHITE
COWBELL
DIZZY BLUES BAND
NOVELLA HERMOSA
CORK ACADEMY OF MUSIC
COWBELL
TULLAMORE TOWN BAND
BUSKERS COMPETITION
Theatre:
LUGI THE PUPPETEER & PUPPET MAKING WORKSHOPS
CLOWN DOCTORS
CIRCUS WALKABOUTS & WORKSHOPS
STORYTELLING
FACEPAINTING

As It Hosts Its First Mad Pride Family Fun Day

Monday July 26th: Mad Pride Family Fun Day is hosting its first event in Tullamore in the Lloyd Town Park on Saturday August 15th from 1pm to 5pm.  This event comes hot on the heels of a massively successful event in Cork on June 6th which saw over 12,000 people attend the free family fun event.  The event in Tullamore is the result of an invitation by the HSE to bring the fully free family event to the Midlands.
The focus of Mad Pride Family Fun Days is to engage the community through fun and laughter and thereby break down stigma and increase awareness and understanding of the normality of madness.  Visitors at this fully free event will be entertained by musical acts, street performers, clowns and food stalls.  Since the first event in Cork, in 2008 over 36,000 people have enjoyed the free Fun Days in Cork, Portlaoise, Killarney and even Mbula Uganda.
John Mc Carthy said, “What a summer we have had we were invited by the HSE to host an event in Killarney showcasing Mad Pride as best practice in the fight against stigma, 3,000 people attended, we had our third Cork event 12,000 people attended now we are off to Tullamore, we can’t wait.  The reaction of the public has been great but it is the fact that the establishment are waking up to the message we are spreading that gives us most encouragement.  There seems to be an awakening to the need to look outside the current medical model, there seems to be awareness among some in the system that those suffering from emotional distress may not be best served through medication and incarceration.  We will continue to spread our message that through love and hope the community as a whole can live together with equality and dignity, and quite simply embrace difference and recognise the normality of madness.”
Liam O’Callaghan, Laois/Offaly Local Health Manager said, “The HSE is happy to be associated with Mad Pride Family Fun Day and hopes, through fun and entertainment, to create a better understanding of mental health issue, Lloyd Park – what a great location.”

Mr. Mc Carthy continued, “We ask that families and individuals alike come along on June 6th and join in the fun, laughter and music there will be no speeches, no preaching and no lectures we will simply enjoy each other’s company in an open friendly fun way and hope that by doing so we can begin to focus on the positive gifts that we in the mad community bring to society, art, poetry, literature, eccentricity and sensitivity and dispense with the prejudice and fear that presently surrounds us.”