Overview

"This book holds survivor accounts of misogyny in the mental health system and asks if the mental health system is intrinsically sexist and damaging to women. With psychiatry's dubious history of labelling insubordinate Victorian women, right up to modern times where the labels have changed but not the misogyny behind it. Cuckoo's Nest Books is a survivor run book project set up to counter the fact that in most mental health archives and libraries, the mental health survivor voice is in the extreme minority. ""Why should the people who've never visited a land be that country's prime historians? How can we tell our true stories when our words are seen as sickness? This book is our truth."

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9781739358907

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"Maya Angelou says ""There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you"" - and she should know. But telling your story can also cause pain. We have to fight for a platform. We are often judged, dismissed or disbelieved. Talking from experience may mean that you are always defined or lessened by those experiences, potentially for the rest of your life. The writers in this book took that risk. And the result is epic; a work of groundbreaking power and scope. Together, these stories are call to arms, where arms are weapons, where arms can defend us, where arms can keep us from drowning. Where arms can change the world. Where arms can hold us. Thank you for the gift of this book. Clare Shaw, Writer & Activist Fiercely brave and compelling testimonies that bear witness to appalling, gendered forms of discrimination in the system. These testimonies must be heard and put to good use, before progress towards a fair and just mental health system is possible. A system based upon an awareness of what's happened to people, their living, social context is needed and these powerful narratives provide every clue as to how states of powerlessness and distress can be transformed into modes of empowerment and reclamation. Professor Paula Reavey Professor of Psychology and Mental Health, South Bank University This book is dynamite - and a clarion call to people with the power to make changes to our mental health services - which are currently, persistently, failing to support women in distress. It's packed full of important testimonies from women of the treatment they received from these services - which are neglectful and bungling at best, but often cruel and abusive in extremes. So pick it up and read what you can! Bobby Baker, Artist First off, I need to say that this is an important book. An important book I have no reservations in recommending to anyone with any interest whatsoever in what is continuing to happen within the mental health system. Second, for me at least, this has been a difficult and - at times - painful book to read. This difficulty doesn't lay with the writers of each testimony. These writers have taken some of the most painful and raw moments and entrusted us with hearing them, as is. No, the difficulty - for me at least - lay in the knowledge that these devastating accounts of misogyny are the tip of a very large ice burg that I'm only just opening myself up to seeing and feeling. Thank you to all those who were part of creating it. I am in your debt. RAI WADDINGHAM, Survivor, Trainer & Practitioner"

Author Information

My arts practices crosses writing, performance, film and visual art. My work is seen as subversive, humorous and radical. I am interested in debate and social experiment around themes of madness, sanity, the other, and acceptable behaviours, from an unusual and unconventional position of power. I am interested in this because I have been labelled mad, although I think my challenging of inequality and vicious systems of the 'normal' world makes perfect sense. I am interested in society's perception of mental health and madness - whether people think 'it's all in the head' and not a response to social and political issues. Madness is partly political.

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