MindFreedom International Protest at American Psychiatric Association Conference 2019

Performed by Xinlin Chen (megaphone), Nadya Goest, JH Miretaskay, and .... (to be added soon)
To Be a Mental Patient
by Rae Unzicker (1948-2001)
To be a mental patient is to be stigmatized, ostracized, socialized, patronized, psychiatrized.
To be a mental patient is to have everyone controlling your life but you.
You're watched by your shrink, your social worker, your friends, your family.
And then you're diagnosed as paranoid.
To be a mental patient is to live with the constant threat and possibility of being locked up at any time, for almost any reason.
To be a mental patient is to live on $82 a month in food stamps, which won't let you buy Kleenex to dry your tears. And to watch your shrink come back to his office from lunch, driving a Mercedes Benz.
To be a mental patient is to take drugs that dull your mind, deaden your senses, make you jitter and drool and then you take more drugs to lessen the "side effects."
To be a mental patient is to apply for jobs and lie about the last few months or years, because you've been in the hospital, and then you don't get the job anyway because you're a mental patient. To be a mental patient is not to matter.
To be a mental patient is never to be taken seriously.
To be a mental patient is to be a resident of a ghetto, surrounded by other mental patients who are as scared and hungry and bored and broke as you are.
To be a mental patient is to watch TV and see how violent and dangerous and dumb and incompetent and crazy you are.
To be a mental patient is to be a statistic.
To be a mental patient is to wear a label, and that label never goes away, a label that says little about what you are and even less about who you are.
To be a mental patient is to never to say what you mean, but to sound like you mean what you say.
To be a mental patient is to tell your psychiatrist he's helping you, even if he is not.
To be a mental patient is to act glad when you're sad and calm when you're mad, and to always be "appropriate."
To be a mental patient is to participate in stupid groups that call themselves therapy. Music isn't music, its therapy; volleyball isn't sport, it's therapy; sewing is therapy; washing dishes is therapy. Even the air you breathe is therapy and that's called "the milieu."
To be a mental patient is not to die, even if you want to -- and not cry, and not hurt, and not be scared, and not be angry, and not be vulnerable, and not to laugh too loud -- because, if you do, you only prove that you are a mental patient even if you are not. And so you become a no-thing, in a no-world, and you are not.
Rae Unzicker © 1984

[@Malaikatrendy]

I'm one of the channels subscribers- I have respect for these people protesting, and the channel. I'm thinking : if this talking on the megaphone in front of the building doesn't make them folks inside to institute better policy , perhaps making appointments to talk to them might?¿ I don't know.
They probably only listen to lawsuits and 💰. Veterans maybe they'll do some slight patronage, but then they (companies) usually ignore individuals after that

[@upendasana7857]

i love these protests even though there might not be many listening but I think more direct action outisde of the Royal college of psychiatry as we have in the UK and more open protest to compliment the other forms of challenge going on in other ways.
I think if we had more vocal and open protests against psychiatry then it is mostly for the public and maybe even garner media interst because at the moment I don't think psychiatric abuses are talked about at all in the mainstream media and I never see programme crtiquing the current mental health system as it has stood for at least the three decades I've had dealings with it.
I think having protests which engage the public more and where others who maybe thought they did not have a voice might think ...hhhmm yeah that sounds about right.." I think there must be many out there who do not even have a framework to understand their treatment with psychiatry in terms of abuse and mistreatment and are maybe too scared to even speak up for fear of not being believed because afterall "you are a mental patient "