Anti-Psychiatry
Break the Silence (update about the arrests in Bologne, Italy)
(inspired by a few leaflets from 'Fuoriluogo')
Saturday 13th October 2007 at around 4am: a girl is sleeping in piazza Verdi in Bologna (northern Italy). Police on patrol decide that the girl's behaviour is 'abnormal' and must be corrected by compulsory sanitary treatment (TSO), which means internment in a psychiatric hospital and forced administration of psychotropic drugs. The cops call the ambulance while keeping the girl under their custody against her will.
Five comrades of the anarchist place 'Fuoriluogo' witness the episode and cannot help expressing their contempt at the police. They do their best to prevent the arrest of the girl. The police's answer is brutal: armed with truncheons and even guns they chase the comrades. As the latter flee, six more police vans are called on the scene and the short escape ends in piazza San Vitale. The 5 are handcuffed while being severely beaten by the cops. A few residents in the area are clearly indignant at the police's behaviour but do not intervene...(More)
5 anarchists are beaten and arrested in Bologne, Italy
A night of ordinary democracy:
On Saturday October 13, at around 4am, a girl who is sleeping in piazza Verdi is noticed by police on patrol. The latter decide that the girl's behaviour is 'abnormal' and must be corrected by compulsory sanitary treatment (TSO). They call the ambulance while keeping the girl under their custody against her will. Five comrades of the anarchist place 'Fuoriluogo' witness the episode and cannot help expressing their contempt at the police. They do their best to prevent the arrest of the girl. The police's answer is brutal: armed with truncheons and even guns they chase the comrades....(More)
Beyond Amnesty
Sometimes I catch myself laughing...and the sound of joy in the dead, walled space that is the civilised world catches in my throat.
Is it provocative or contentious to say there are times when I long for an enemy I can see. That my soul yearns to be a guerilla, an insurgent, to experience insurrection, and, with that, that I also accept that I or my friends might be injured, imprisoned or die in battle but that we do this with the joy of clear-drawn lines and the sense that something better than this might follow. My body longs to fight and to free itself. To move. To climb. To dance. To make love. To push past and through. To run. To smash.
I long to live among people who know there is a war on. A war against life. Against spirit. I want to live among people who don't look down at their hands or take their eyes away from yours when you talk of struggle and of insurrection because they know in their hearts they have acquiesced, and because - maybe, just maybe - they never really hated the system. Amongst people who haven't been bought out. Who didn't take the pills offered because they preferred to struggle with their feeling of dis-ease than to live in the dead zone. Who don't pretend they are still fighting when it is obvious that they are making a garden out of a battlefield. I wish to be somewhere the war is admissible.
I see someone I haven't seen for 5 years. We talk about the people we share and some we don't - how they are doing, what they up to. Many of them are broken. Depressed, lost, on the edge. Some have committed suicide. Still others have settled down and found contentment, striking an emotional compromise with the system because, as a friend wrote, if it was easy they wouldn't call it struggle and sometimes you just get too tired to fight the phantom anymore.
You don't need a gun to kill someone.
You don't need prison walls to make a prison. ...(More)
Free Casey Hardison
"..the so-called 'War on Drugs' is not a war on pills, powder, plants and potions, it is a war on mental states - a war on consciousness itself - how much, what sort we are permitted to experience, and who gets to control it.
A government that is permitted to set punishments for drug 'offences' in which a person has done nothing more than grow, manufacture, distribute, or use, the psychoactive agents which have been denoted as "controlled substances," participates in an even more pernicious form of censorship - a censorship of consciousness itself - by choosing to punish people for no other crime than choosing to experience or enable particular states of mind." - Casey to the Judge.
The Judge was upset that Hardison believed everyone had the "right to take hallucinogenic drugs to alter their consciousness by freeing their minds", and was not pleased that Hardison was "imploring the human race to expand their horizons by exploring the world through hallucinogenic drugs".....(More)
Albert Hofmann´s 100th Birthday
On the 11 January 2006, Dr. Albert Hofmann, the well-spoken inventor of the hallucinogen LSD celebrated his 100th Birthday, at a conference held in his honour in Switzerland. Since 19 April 1943, the day Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann discovered this psychoactive compound, millions of people from all over the world have used the unique substance LSD with profound and far-reaching insight; created innovative social transformation, music, art, and fashion; were healed from addiction, and depression; experienced enlightened persepectives into the human consciousness and were able to bring an energetic renewal of meaning to their lives.
By 1965, Dr. Hofmann was well aware of the potential of LSD to be of considerable aid in psychotherapy, and particularly under appropriate conditions to reveal the hidden aspects of human nature. Such a tool was sorely needed to counter what he felt were the painful deep-seated sociological causes of public interest: "..materialism, alienation from nature through industrialization and increasing urbanization, lack of satisfaction in professional employment in a mechanized, lifeless working world, ennui and purposelessness in wealthy, saturated society.."
You can no doubt imagine Dr. Hofmann's deep disappointment when his unique discovery was criminalised......(More)
Reclaim Your Mind: A Manifesto
Selling cures for the problems they created
It is well known that depression has been on a steady rise in the past few decades. This increase apparently isn't about to stop since the World Health Organization (WHO) recently predicted that, by 2020, depression would be the second most prevalent health problem in the world, just below heart disease, and offered as an explanation that this was due to a previous underestimation of the number of people suffering from this "illness".
Couldn't the increasing feeling of emptiness and worthlessness characteristic of depression be related to the society we live in, at a time when people lose themselves in consumption and mass entertainment to avoid thinking about their miserable life, their economic survival or the ongoing destruction of the planet? While the "experts" paid by pharmacology corporations will invariably answer that depression is a brain disorder due to a "chemical imbalance", the result of some faulty genes they have yet to identity, we cannot help to wonder how this could not be environmental considering there was no such thing as depression in Africa before colonization.....(More)