Will Hall
Freedom Center Rabble Rousing Report

Freedom Center, Northampton's only psychiatric survivor run advocacy and human rights group, is continuing to rock the boat of the mental health system into our third year of operation. Here are some recent developments:

· Our campaign to end the forced Haldol drugging of James Bower stirred up a lot of press and controversy, with front-page coverage in the Springfield daily paper (though local newspapers are continuing to avoid covering us, it seems). We put the system on notice that they need to listen to clients, not control them. The next move remains up to James, whose leadership we have looked to from the beginning of this effort.

· Our public event Dr. Loren Mosher, former Chief of the National Institute of Mental Health's Center for Schizophrenia Studies, was a smash success. More than 175 people jammed into a room at Mt. Holyoke College to hear Dr. Mosher talk about Soteria House, the residential project he directed that proved people can recover from schizophrenia without use of medications. The interest in the topic was overwhelming -- local NPR radio affiliate even aired an interview with D. Mosher twice during rush hour. Efforts are underway to realize the vision of a Soteria-style house in New England. People can learn more about Soteria at www.moshersoteria.com.

· The weekly free yoga class, led by the talented and compassionate Ursula Kiczkowski, is so popular it is usually full, and sometimes we even have to turn people away. Though the DMH cut funding, we found a private foundation source we hope will continue. With the growing interest, we need a second class -- maybe the DMH will see the light and take us off their funding blacklist.

· Chaya Grossberg and Marc Israel have been leading a weekly Freedom Center writing group that is open to all. Co-sponsored with a mysterious foundation called Homemade Hobo Hotdogs, the group is entering its third month and features fiction, autobiography, poetry, and anything the group is interested in.

· Vikki Gilbert, Leah Harris, Alex Asch and Oryx Cohen presented to over 150 mostly young people at the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) in Washington D.C. on "Fighting Corporate Psychiatry" just last month. 18-year-old Alex was recently freed from psychiatric confinement in Utah after his parents locked him up because of his anarchist political views; doctors labeled him with "opposition defiant disorder" and his plight gained nationwide attention. More and more young people are seeing through the propaganda of psychiatry and its bad science and dangerous treatments.

· After making some dishonest comments about Freedom Center to the press, ten year Western MA NAMI President Jane Moser resigned. Her move may or may not be directly related to the conflict with Freedom Center, but it does clear the air and make way for possible improvements in relations with NAMI around shared goals. The controversy made Springfield front page headlines twice (again, where is the local Northampton coverage?).

· Thursday support groups regularly have 14 people or more, and we get a steady stream of phone calls and emails from people needing support, even from other states. Our website gets 15-20,000 hits and more than 1,000 unique visitors a month.
· We received donations from the Haymarket People's Fund and Mt. Holyoke College Honors psychology association, as well as the Disability Task Force -- which invited us to consult on improving services for people labeled with psych disability who are crime victims. Thanks to the Northampton Society of Friends (the Quakers) and the First Churches for their continued support providing us meeting space in times when our budget has dropped to zero.

· Members who live at ServiceNet's Valley Inn are still concerned they have no confidential phones, which impedes emotional support and advocacy. We're still waiting for a response from the Disability Law Center, federally designated to act on these kinds of issues.

· We were excited to learn in _Newsday_ that in an historic court ruling, a Manhattan man was recently award $975,000 -- that's right, **$975,000** -- for being forcibly confined at Bellevue Hospital and drugged against his will. The jury found that it didn't matter if the man was psychotic or mentally ill, was angry or yelling, or had a history of psychiatric diagnosis: the hospital had no justification for forced treatment. He was lucky -- a law professor took his case and got help from his students. Considering how flimsy the "danger to self and others" justification often is when people are locked up, we hope legal action can eventually tear down the abuses of forced treatment in our area, as well. We're working with a survivor attorney Jim Gottstein on legal challenges; Jim runs Law Project for Psychiatric Rights, www.psychrights.org.

· More than a hundred people attended the "Experiencing Madness" Tuesday night film series Mt. Holyoke Professor Gail Hornstein organized with Freedom Center last fall. Gail was so inspired by a recent letter from NAMI, which called the series "dangerous propaganda," that she is organizing a second series to start soon. Fall screenings included HBO and BBC documentaries, and examined such topics as cutting, the hearing voices movement in England, and the role of political oppression like sexism, racism, and homophobia play in mental illness. Check the Freedom Center website for details on the upcoming films.

· Zuzu's Place, a peer-run collective house of psychiatric survivors outside of Boston, needs support to continue. A March 26-28th conference with David Oaks, Judy Chamberlin, Robert Whitaker, Dan Kriegman, Gail Hornstein and others is being co-sponsored with the Freedom Center, and will be an opportunity to strategize, renew our commitment to activist work for the psychiatric abuse survivor movement, and raise money and support for Zuzu's Place.

Will Hall is Freedom Center co-founder. For more information about Freedom Center, check out our website at www.freedom-center.org, email info@freedom-center.org, or call (413) 582-9948.