1. Torture and psychiatric assault Slides by Tina Minkowitz Part of Presentation on The Relationship Between Spiritual and Political Resistance to Psychiatric Assault PsychOut: A Conference for Organizing Resistance Against Psychiatry: Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, May 7, 2010

2. Why think of it as torture? Victimization/Not staying in victim identity State repression Spiritual death and rebirth Encounter with evil Witnessing

3. How to work with painful memory Moral dilemmas – shutting down/openness Honoring the archetypes Who suffers? Drugs/ECT shutting us down – part of the trauma Public/private spaces – shelter and sharing

4. Public Advocacy Transforming individual pain into collective resistance Abstraction and theory Making the violations visible: window into our experience Role of outside affirmation/ ambivalence/ transformation from partial to impartial

5. Experience of forced drugging Self-not-self blurred or new (not-self in self, appearance of self as not-self) Psychic apathy/anosognosia/ECT – shame of absence Re-making connections in/of self Patience and waiting/ what to do in the meantime Creativity lost and found

6. Torture and madness Does psychiatric torture take away our madness? Change its course? Impose its own structure on it? Become part of the history? Do drugs and ECT change the self? What is it to change self against one’s will?

7. Tikkun olam/ Reparations Healing the self: healing the world Repair …to a secluded place …hearts and minds …the damage and destruction …knit or sew back together …harmony? Justice Self-reparations/ we create/co-create

8. Working with torture advocacy Wanting justice in particular Immediate to stop the violation Reparations as compensation and giving back – giving us our due Detailed sympathetic reporting of facts/ persuasive argument Using the tools now created

9. Spirituality and advocacy Are they in contradiction? Forgiveness? Parallel paths traveled at once? Intertwining? Torture as depth that shakes and changes the self – opening doorways: how is that not an argument for S/M? Love and betrayal What if you can’t heal?

10. Finding hope Does advocacy give us hope? Light a pathway – will we get to the end? Silence and mystery/ uncertainty Humility and honor Persuasion, human rights, non-discrimination, alternatives Willingness to accept consequences Engagement with people & their pain & ours

11. To end torture… Somehow needs acceptance Spiritual truth that harm is harm and it harms Thawing and melting – love hurts but is not all abuse Encounters and repair/ self-nurturing Forgiving self failures of nerve, of love, of truth etc. Accepting love

12. Does it matter? Saying psychiatric assault is torture cannot be taken back We are already on the path Each of us makes the world anew for everyone What do we do with this?

13. As always, contact info: tminkowitz@earthlink.net www.chrusp.org www.wnusp.net www.internationaldisabilityalliance.org www.un.org/disabilities www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/disability