UK Disability History Month

UK Disability History Month logo, yellow circle with black triangle

UK Disability History Month started this week and runs until 22 December 2010. It's the first one and we are delighted to be able to be part of it.

Their aims are to

• Celebrate our struggles and achievements as disabled people, with our allies: this could be our parents, friends, professionals, work colleagues and neighbours
• Create a greater understanding of the barriers in society that disable people. Looking at the history of how such barriers and inhuman treatment are fuelled by negative attitudes and customs, whilst recognising this as oppressive disablism.
• Develop and campaign on what needs to be changed for disabled people to achieve full equality in all areas of life
• Make equality a daily reality. The UK Government have passed the Equalities Act 2010 and ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. Much has to happen to make these Rights a daily reality for the 12 million disabled children and adults in the UK.
• Recognising the multiple identities of disabled people. We want to cover the full range of impairments and link with disabled people also struggling against sexism, racism and homophobia and other forms of discrimination.

These are very similar to the aims of Oor Mad History.

I think people with mental health problems need to see ourselves as disabled people and recognise our common cause with other groups of disabled people. We are all affected in our own ways by the same thing - lack of understanding, discrimination, inequality, stereotyping...

UK Disability History Month is an ideal time to explore what we have in common and what are our differences.

What do you think these are?

Talk, talk, talk...

Sorry for not posting yesterday but we are quite busy right now. Kirsten and volunteers are beavering away at the archive. And we are preparing two talks about Oor Mad History.

The first one is at 'Doing the 'right thing': Tension between the popular, political and scientific', the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Scottish Mental Health Research Network. It's on Tuesday in Glasgow, and I am speaking in the 3.15 pm slot. The other speaker is Neil Quinn who is involved in the development of the Scottish Service User Research Network.

I am going to talk about about the service users doing research. Oor Mad History is primarily an oral history and archiving project, so I will focus on oral history. 

I will also talk about some of the other research that service users supported by CAPS have done. One is about people's experiences of detention [PDF] under the Mental Health Act. Another is about the work done by people with a diagnosis of personality disorder.

The research we do can be considered as Action Research - that is, doing the research is part of changing things. Simply put, people talk about their experiences and say what needs to be done differently. Of course, doing this is a bit more complicated!

The second talk is at the University of Edinburgh on Monday 29th November at 5pm. The Public Policy Network is holding an event called The different experiences of mental health and illness. We are still talking through the ideas for this talk so I won't tell you anymore for now. Other speakers come from backgrounds in therapy and theology, social anthropology and psychiatry. We'll all be talking about about how perceptions of mental illness has changed over time.

Both events are open to the public but you need to book - see the links for each talk for the details.

I'll be doing both talks and I tend to talk from notes as opposed to reading a prepared talk, so I won't have the full text to put up here. But I will put those notes and any slides.

History in the making...

One of the reasons Oor Mad History started was because we didn't want to forget the past. But history isn't just about the past, it is about now. We want the archive to be a living archive with new material being added all the time. We want people now to see themselves as part of a history, and their actions now are creating history.

The user movement started in the 1980s. People then didn't think that they were making history, at least I doubt they were. I think they were just busy doing what they thought needed doing. 

Almost thirty years on, we are still making history.

Spending cuts review, welfare reforms, public service cuts... it is an anxious time for most people with mental health problems, whether on benefits or not. The fear of what will happen the services and benefits that most of us need is made worse by the way the government and some of the media talk about the "workshy".

I know a lot of people who turn off the news and avoid the papers because of this.

But I know some people who are saying "right, what can we do about this?" That is history in the making. 

ashtray

In my last post I finished with a reference to smoking.

 

We put an ashtray in the exhibition because it was central to my memories of meetings of Lothian Users Forum in the 1990s:

And the other thing I remember is the amount of smoking that went on [laughter] and when sort of rules were brought, because I don’t smoke, to minimise it, that only two people could smoke at any one time could smoke or only the person who had the ashtray could smoke and people just staring at the ashtray waiting for it to become free. Even as a non smoker I wasn’t bothered, but I remember there was a really strong sense that people had to smoke, that it was their right to smoke and I don’t think could believe at the time that hospitals would become smoke free or people would have to stand outside meetings to have a smoke, you know that was kind of unthinkable at the time. I’m sure at meetings I was often the only person who didn’t smoke, but that was a big thing then.

It is strange that so few people referred to smoking in their interviews. It was a big thing, in my mind. Maybe as a non-smoker, I really noticed it.

The smoking rules came in later, in EUF days. It was contentious because of the purpose smoking served. Many people started smoking in hospital, for instance. A cigarette was a way of bonding between staff and patients, a way of relieving boredom and stress, it was part of being a mental patient.

So when people came together to talk about mental health services, people lit up, offered one another cigarettes, bonded with each other...

Do you have memories of smoking in meetings, of the debates and arguments about smoking in meetings, about the rights and wrongs of smoking bans on the wards and in day services?