Had the great pleasure of meeting Paddy McGowan at the INTAR conference in Toronto a few days ago. Paddy spoke at the Psychosium and also co presented on Trialogue with Michaela Amering and Liam MacGabhann .
Paddy has a way with words, a gift for story telling and speaks with a natural, simple, and honest courage.
If you don’t catch at least some of his energy and enthusiasm for the possibilities that come with being a human being then you simply might not be one.
Here’s Paddy talking at “A Full Life” , a national cross-disability and mental health public event in Ireland, Dublin 19th April 2010.
“So, I believe that hospitals are universities; places where people go to learn how to become good mental health patients…
The language of madness does not describe people. Words like schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar, what do they describe? They describe a collection of symptoms – they don’t describe the peron the symptoms are given to…
And to use these words stigmatises people – they hold people in that place where they are being mentally ill…
…we need to be creating the conditions that don’t trap people, that don’t hold them in boxes, that allow them to develop as citizens, as equal citizens …
That we do not hold people and say to them “this is what you are capable of”
Paddy McGowan
More Paddy McGowan
more to come…