Transgenerational protest and social change

 

My mother’s big protest kabooie was sexism and so was my nana’s. Nana receiving half the wages of a male teacher, to feed her family with, really wasn’t okay; particularly as her husband died as a result of doing things in the war he didn’t want to do, like mowing down people with a tank. He relived the horror of doing such a disgusting act, blaming himself over and over for those he was ordered to kill… My mother’s experience involved severe trauma, so she hurled her protest around in a way that was upsetting to her children. But she didn’t do it all the time and she really didn’t have full control when society was still blaming her for the violence perpetuated against her. The mental health system at the time treated trauma, as it mostly still does, like the victim of crime has ‘problems.’ Court cases were discussed and I knew at quite a young age that a woman could be horrifically brutalised, but if she could be proven to be ‘loose,’ then she would not win a case against her attackers…

 

                My father, although he didn’t talk much, carried environmental and wartime conspiracies. His father had been pushed off a building in Cairo during WW2. My father had also worked on environmental studies where, any information that contravened what the mining companies wanted to do disappeared, and, a colleague leading the environmental project ‘suicided.’ My father was also stopped from teaching ‘the hothouse effect’ which is a precursor theory to ‘the greenhouse effect.’ He was a very silent man, my father. But he did show his anger on occasions, generally with a big fog-horn booming voice. So I somewhat felt his protest at a young age.

                I think most people carry some of the baggage from their parents and do try to make the changes to society happen, which their parents couldn’t. It kind of is the subliminal ‘job’ of the progeny to do that. But the progeny have to do it differently from the parents, if the parents really couldn’t handle the backlash of their times, together with the trauma they most likely suffered, it's no good parroting what they said.

Transgenerational protest… it’s not about genes, it’s about society, what society needs to do to become more humane, and, it’s definitely not a chemical imbalance and not something that should be said to be the ‘fault/ illness/ disease’ of the progeny, who understand the previous generation of protestors, and are trying to cope with that, and get their own needs met... lest we forget.

Please sign our petition to stop psychiatric abuse
 get T-shirt

 

click here to purchase T-shirt and browse other merchandise

I am like the Prime Minister

I am an atheist

Like the Aussie

Prime Minister.

And, similar again

Because both our fathers

Studied science.

But mine was

A secondary school teacher,

Where as hers

Was a psychiatric nurse.

My father taught me

About nature’s ecology

And a range of maths equations.

Don’t know though,

If Julia’s father taught her

About how he had to

Participate in torturing people

In order to feed her.

Even if he did

And this upset her,

Does she actually have

The power to do anything

To stop laws that force

Psychiatric nurses from

Doing what goes against

Most people’s ethics?

I am an atheist

Like the Aussie PM.

We have fathers

Who were scientists.

My father never

Beat a student

When it was legal.

But if Julia’s father

Didn’t forcefully drug

People under his care,

He would’ve got the sack

And little Julia

Would’ve gone hungry.

I wonder how

An atheist can believe

Into the cult of psychiatry.

It doesn’t seem logical,

Now Julia has power

And enough money,

For her to continue to do

What her father did

In torturing people,

In order to feed her

When she was a child.

Psychiatrists are now

Under her rule.

She’s not an underdog

Nurse like her father

Trying to pay bills

And keep a family.

Julia like me,

Has no children, see.

I am an atheist

Like the Aussie PM

Who needs to change

The law so that she

Won’t do what her father

Had to, in order to

Feed his family.

 

Government call for reform in psychiatric hospitals?!

TONY EASTLEY says, 'The National Mental Health Commission wants to know more about how Australians with mental illnesses are being confined and restrained in institutions.'

 

Other protests: http://www.jeffpolachek.com/blog/269-protests-scheduled-at-apa-annual-meeting-5-5-12-in-philadelphia


for reverse side of Atheist T, click here.

The Stables Studio: the end of a decade of rehabilitation

For around a decade I went to a place called The Stables Studio. This never received government funding, but Prahran Mission (Uniting Care) sponsored it.

It was a place where artists who had some kind of psychiatric diagnosis could do art. No religious pushing. It was amazing. A decade ago, I had only just found out about Prahran Mission’s Second Story program, that ran rehabilitation, via Job Supply (who the clinic had recommended). I said I could possibly work doing framing and they said Second Story did a program in that, which is not offered anymore. I was thinking it might help the metaphorical framing I wanted to do too. So I went there, found I was okay, but not accurate enough to work in the industry. Then The Stables Studio started and I was asked if I wanted to join. It was different from all these other programs, there was no structure, artists were free to create what they wanted and there was space to have an annual solo exhibition. But you had to be interviewed, have a folio and ability to work on your own and a huge love of visual art.

            The Stables Studio, gave me enough space to create a six-foot by eight-foot canvas and a life-sized papier-mâché crocodile and so much more. I was inspired and I really needed to get the visions in my mind outside myself.

Every year there, I thematically changed my approach to art. Highlights were my found objects exhibition that allowed me to express the way I linked things together in my mind and an abstract exhibition called, ‘But, what is it?’ I also got to do an intense recycling project called, ‘Containers’. For a whole year I threw nothing in the rubbish. All my paint water was put into papier-mâché and any dried left over paint was peeled and attached to some object I was making. My dead television got gutted and recycled into many things. Cunningham Dax bought one of these ‘Containers’ projects. Other things I made got bought as well, but I have many works still in storage.

            I was given a sketch pad at one stage when I first joined and I then began sketching all the time, relieving myself of unwanted emotions by putting them into spontaneous images. I dubbed this ‘The Automatic Hand’. It was a type of drawing where I had no idea what was going to happen on the page, but I trusted my intuition so much my hand tapped into my visual part of my mind and came up with the wild image conglomeration associated with the emotion.

            The people who worked in the office and organising things were fantastic, empathetic, but often over worked. They were all amazing artists, some of which had a history in creating iconic Australian sculptures and sold-out exhibitions.

            I got to do my first protest against psychiatric practices in an exhibition called, ‘Crowds and characters’.

And then there were life-drawing sessions…

But this year I felt I needed to move on. I hadn’t fully recovered my visual part of the brain from the bombardment of psychiatric chemicals, but my partner was encouraging me to paint landscapes with him and I was studying art therapy… I felt I didn’t need to be in rehabilitation anymore. And that urge that I had for ten years of going to a space daily to paint had dwindled.

Over the years the Stables Studio has moved three times. It was originally in an old dairy in one of Prahran’s side streets, that’s where it got its name, ‘The Stables’. Then it moved to a warehouse in South Yarra. This was the best place and individual spaces were built. But then due to costs of the warehouse, the studio moved again, to a church in Burke Road Malvern. It will continue to be there for the rest of this year, but after that, next year,  the whole project is being sized down to a small room at the back of Prahran Mission in Chapel Street.

I went to the Prahran Mission’s annual exhibition at Chapel Off Chapel this year, 2012, and all the Stables artists seemed really in shock. I know I would be if I was still in that stage of my life where I really needed the human contact of other artists, encouragement to create and space to do so, while at the same time the freedom of an unstructured program. But it just wasn’t financially viable apparently.

The Victorian government has put in changes to the way funds are allocated for mental health rehabilitation programs. The participant gets to choose where the funding goes. That sounds all good in theory. But I’m worried that there may be a tendency for psychiatrists, who are in control of things like CTOs, to point out what programs the psychiatrically diagnosed have to do in order to get off the CTO. Psychiatrists are very good at coercive control. They’re also very good at promoting their pockets. This may mean people never get access to programs that help people to express themselves, gain confidence, learn what is an isn’t okay for ‘friends’ to do, and, via their own explorations in things like visual art, writing and music, that they might not really have a disease causing a chemical imbalance and might not have to live as a zombie the rest of their life, that there is hope and ways of becoming what you love.

Here's the link to the Stables Studio (they even have a picture of my 2010 exhibition, 'Crowds and Characters' in their chapel gallery space.) http://www.prahranmission.org.au/stables-art-studio.htm Please visit, I'm sure there are some fantastic artists selling up for bottom dollar prices now they don't have any space to store their art.