Tangata Motuhake is the name reclaimed by Maori people to embrace people with alternative realities, mad people to you and me.
Seer, Prophet, Sacred Clown, were once respected positions in our communities given to those whose realities and spiritual experiences challenged the norm. Those people who saw and heard things that were outside of the experience of the common mass were perceived as blessed.
Nowadays in Western culture we call these people nutter, psycho, schizo, mad, crazy, loony tunes, loop the loop, a sandwich short of a picnic, batty, loco, balmy, bananas etc. etc.
And definitions are not just located in a certain epoch, they are also culturally defined. My grandmother from Ireland would set the table for her husband long years after his death, talking to all the saints as she did so. In some parts of the UK if she was open about her rants, she’d be in danger of falling foul of the mental health system. Black people from the Caribbean may be louder, more expressive and demonstrative than UK city dwellers would like. That too puts them at risk of being defined as mad in a white dominated, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant defined world.
Our fear of losing control and our fear of difference rest at the core of our hatred and often terror of those set apart from us, who we define as out of order, out of control or just plain odd.
I was 23 years old when I first truly understood the prejudice and discrimination towards those who we deem mad. It was 1983 and I’d just received a letter congratulating me on a ‘successful application for a Residential Social Work’ post in St. Albans. I had been invited to meet the staff team, had established my new rota and attended a Christmas party for the staff. Imagine my surprise then when January 4th 1984 I received a letter regretfully informing me that I had been ‘unsuccessful in my application to this post’. The letter had been hastily typed with little consideration given to typing errors and had been hand delivered i.e. slid underneath my front door. Needless to say, I ignored the letter and turned in for work as planned. The Social worker in charge was duly embarrassed and apparently speechless. On enquiry I was informed that I had failed my medical test.
I had in fact never been invited to take a medical test. The occupational health team had contacted my GP, a man I had never met, as I was newly arrived in town. The GP had in turn read my notes from childhood and informed the soon-to-be employers that I was ‘fundamentally emotionally unstable and unfit for such work’.
I am an intelligent, articulate woman with a strong sense of justice. I decided to fight. I went to the local press and I also went to the leader of the local branch of the Communist party, known to me as a comrade. Together, we challenged both the Social Services and their practices and challenged the local General Practitioner who had sealed my fate without a single meeting!
Six months later I was offered my job back, with an apology and a caution that I should not rock the boat too much. I was invited by the new GP concerned to examine my notes and select what was relevant. We went through the exercise of shedding unnecessary information which I was encouraged to rip up. This I did with relish, only to discover the same documents in the file some years later!
I learned the hard way that whilst criminal records are shredded and spent after 5 years, a psychiatric record will follow you around for the rest of your life. I have chosen to challenge the prejudices around people who have used, or who use the mental health services ever since.
What does it mean to me?
Madness?
What does it mean to be deemed mad?
These are two very different questions and are only connected because I am willing to consent that there is behaviour within our communities, that we may describe as ‘odd’ or ‘eccentric’ that arouses fear. I am talking about the ways of people like myself who just do not fit in with the chosen pattern of societal ‘norms’.
The following speech delivered at the Making a Difference conference in Wanganui, New Zealand in May 2004 addresses some of the ways I think we should be responding to the oppression of people in mental distress.
- - - - - - - -
To read Julie's speech 'Making a Difference' from the Mental Health Conference Good Health Wanganui, New Zealand May 11 th & 12 th 2004... click here
To read Julie's interview for RADAR Bulletin.. click here
"Each and every village has its fool.
Every village that I visit I discover that it's me."
