WelcomeSubmitted by shana on Sun, 09/21/2014 - 17:57
The Freedom Center is transforming! Please see our update post for info.
The Freedom Center is a support and activism community run by and for people labeled with severe 'mental disorders.' We call for compassion, human rights, self-determination, and holistic options. We create alternatives to the mental health system's widespread despair, abuse, fraudulent science and dangerous treatments. We are based in pro-choice harm reduction philosophy regarding medical treatments, and include people taking or not talking medications. The Freedom Center is one of the only Pioneer Valley advocacy groups run by and for people labeled with severe 'mental illnesses.' We are also a member of the Mind Freedom Support Coalition International, a United Nations-recognized Non-Governmental Organization network of grassroots groups worldwide working to transform psychiatry and the mental health system, the Statewide Harm Reduction Coalition, and part of M-POWER, the state-wide advocacy group of people receiving mental health services in Massachusetts. We are associated with The Icarus Project and ARISE for Social Justice. The Western Massachusetts Recovery Learning Community grew out of years of organizing efforts including work by the Freedom Center and is now a leading resource for psychiatric survivors in the area. If you are labeled with 'mental illness,' are a psychiatric abuse survivor, or go through extreme mental and emotional states, we invite you to join us. Allies and supporters willing to share their personal experiences are also welcome (mental health staff allies are welcome but should contact us first). We alert people to the serious dangers of psychiatric drugs so that they can make truly informed decisions, and we oppose how the system pushes drugs on people, but we support everyone's choice in their own recovery as they define it for themselves. We don't judge people. Whether you take psychiatric drugs or you don't take psychiatric drugs, you are welcome at the Freedom Center. We respect self-determination and choice, and approach all drug use and lifestyle choices from a harm reduction philosophy. Freedom Center is a valuable option for many of our residents. It is a welcome addition to services available to citizens of our city.-- Mary Clare Higgins, Mayor of Northampton The Freedom Center is one of a collection of grassroots organizations springing up across the country in reaction to the prevalance of medication in America. It alerts people to the downside of psychiatric drugs but does not try to force people off them: it seeks instead to help sufferers find the best methods of coping, even if their solution is unconventional by the standards of the medical establishment.-- Forbes magazine, Sept. 6, 2004, p.122 The Freedom Center's goals are:
The Freedom Center has offered support groups such as the Extreme States Peer Support Group, free yoga classes, advocacy against coercion and dehumanization, protest against dehumanizing treatment in area psychiatric facilities, effective holistic alternatives education, support in continuing/reducing/going off psychiatric drugs, support against housing discrimination, general resource referrals, and public speaking about our experiences as survivors of psychiatric violence. Currently, we are working to revitalize support groups and other community events. Please check out our Resources page for information on these issues and the movement we are part of. Please download and distribute our general brochure (legal size paper). We also have a weekly live FM radio show and an archive of past audio interviews with psychiatric survivors and activists you can listen to. Subscribe to our radio show podcast by adding this link to your iTunes or other music player: subscribe to podcast:"http://feeds.feedburner.com/madnessradio" Feel free to sign up to receive email on our list by emailing fc-discuss-subscribe@lists.riseup.net. You will also find the archives of our email lists here. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought.-- Article 18, Universal Declaration of Human Rights We welcome and are always looking for volunteers and supporters! To get involved, please email freedomcenter.northampton@gmail.com Please note that we have a tiny budget and are all volunteer. We are people who are surviving and struggling with psych diagnoses and extreme states of consciousness. We receive more requests for advocacy, information, and other help than we can handle -- from throughout MA and beyond, even internationally sometimes. We have very limited resources and we do what we can. If you try to reach us but don't hear back right away, please be persistent and just try again. The best way to contact us is in person, especially through our events and groups. Also, we are a mutual aid community of equals, and we ask that everyone who receives any kind of help through the Freedom Center please turn around and help someone else in the future with your time, resources, or a money donation (money donations are always optional). This does not have to be 'officially' volunteering with the Freedom Center, it just means that in your life you need to turn around and help others when you've been helped and you're feeling able to do so. That way the whole world gets better. MindFreedom psychiatric protest 1998
In order to learn more about the problems of psychiatric disability, the National Council on Disabilities conducted a hearing specifically on this topic and heard testimony from mental health professionals, lawyers, advocates, and relatives of people with psychiatric disabilities. However, unlike most investigations on the topic of psychiatric disability, the primary participants in this hearing were people with psychiatric disabilities themselves [...]-- National Council on Disabilities Report: From Privileges to Rights: People Labeled with Psychiatric Disabilities Speak for Themselves ...Restoring mental health does not mean simply adjusting individuals to the modern world of rapid economic growth. The world is ill, and adapting to an ill environment cannot bring real mental health. Psychiatric treatment requires environmental change and psychiatrists must participate in efforts to change the environment, but that is only half the task. The other half is to help individuals be themselves, not by helping them adapt to an ill environment, but by providing them with the strength to change it. To tranquilize them is not The Way. The explosion of bombs, the burning of napalm, the violent death of our neighbors and relatives, the pressure of time, noise, and pollution, the lonely crowds-- these have all been created by the disruptive course of our economic growth. They are all sources of mental illness, and they must be ended.-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist peace activist, from "The Path of Compassion" (1995) ...neuroleptics [psychiatric drugs] are a medical treatment with roots in frontal lobotomy and the brain-damaging therapeutics of the eugenics era... If we wanted to be candid today in our talk about schizophrenia, we would admit this: little is known about what causes schizophrenia. Antipsychotic drugs do not fix any known brain abnormality, nor do they put brain chemistry back in balance. What they do is alter brain function in a manner that diminishes certain characteristic symptoms. We also know that they cause an increase in dopamine receptors, which is a change associated both with tardive dyskinesia and an increased biological vulnerability to psychosis, and that long-term outcomes are much better in countries where such medications are less frequently used. Such candor [...] might lead us to rethink what we, as a society, should do to help those who struggle with 'madness'.-- Robert Whitaker, Pulitzer Prize nominated author of "Mad In America" The Low Road by Marge Piercy What can they do to you? Whatever they want. They can set you up. They can bust you. They can break your fingers. They can burn your brain with electricity, blur you with drugs till you can't walk, can't remember. They can take your child, wall up your lover. They can do anything you can't stop them from doing. How can you stop them? Alone, you can fight. You can refuse. You can take what revenge you can. But they roll over you. But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob, a snake-dancing file can break a cordon, an army can meet an army. Two people can keep each other sane, can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, and sex. Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge. With four, you play bridge and start an organization. With six, you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds, and hold a fund-raising party. A dozen make a demonstration. A hundred can fill a hall. A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter; ten thousand, power and your own paper; a hundred thousand, your own media; ten million, your own country. It goes on one at a time. It starts when you care to act. It starts when you do it again after they said "No." It starts when you say "We" and know who you mean and each day you mean one more. -- Recent advances in understanding mental illness and psychotic experiences: A report by The British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology ( categories: )
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