Dear All,
It happens more and more often that people, clients and their families contact me and my colleagues to ask if there are places like Family Care Foundation in other countries. I am not so sure about that, but if some of you know a place a bit like ours, please let me know!!!
The other thing is that I would deeply love to encourage other people to start something like our place since so many people are asking for that kind of “treatment”. I dislike the word treatment, but for lack of better alternatives it might be called that now.
I often meet people saying that they wish to start something like Family Care Foundation, Some weeks ago I met colleagues in NZ who have ideas about how to do it. I really hope they make it come true. It is “just” to start, since it is anyhow impossible to know beforehand what will happen and what it will be like. The main thing is to have a vision, to find some people to collaborate and to realize it will be very hard at times, but that is how life and work is. And the benefits are huge. That is what I have experienced myself and it is also what people around me say when talking about our shared experience.
There is a need for places which combine a so-called “ordinary life” with therapeutic knowledge, and so many people are asking for places like that. Daniel Mackler has indeed shown an alternative by his movies. Now we have to find a way together to make it come true in a very concrete way.
Best wishes,
Carina
The language… Most people underestimate its significance. The following is from an article, http://magasinet-selvsagt.no/fp/diskriminering/ukjente_fiender.php , in the Norwegian magazine “Selvsagt!”:
“To deprive people of the power to define themselves is at the core of discrimination, says Salman Rushdie. This is language of power, you are in control of the person in question. The first step on the way to respect people, or groups of people as equal, is to listen to them when they define themselves. The greatest victory for the other discriminated against groups [the article refers to women, gay people, and black people] has probably been that they won the power to define themselves. They have decided on their own who and what they are. They have defined their own group’s problems, and they’ve acted out of this definition. We disabled people haven’t managed to do this. We’ve left it to medical and other professionals, to politicians and the media to define us. We’ve left it to them to describe us in their language, out of their understanding of us. And we have adopted this understanding, and made it our own.” (My translation)
“We disabled people haven’t managed to do this.” The same can be said about psychiatrized people. Which they can’t really be blamed for, since psychiatry’s Orwellian logic will have it that each attempt to define yourself in other than their words is a “symptom”, and in addition the ultimate proof, of your “insanity”… But each time we use the medical language, we give both the language and the ideology behind it, the medical model, the seal of our approval. I’d rather have them call me “insane” than approve of it, and renounce my right to define myself.
Why not simply use “help”, instead of “treatment”?
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