MindFreedom Ireland would like to invite you to join them at their third annual protest against ECT and psychiatric malpractices at the GPO in Dublin on May 31st, 2025, from 12 noon until 3pm. Politicians and the media are sensitive to people power, so the more people who join the better. Please come forward and help them to make their voices heard.
A little history
In 2003, the year I moved to Ireland with my young family, MindFreedom Ireland was set up by a number of people from Cork, amongst others Mary Maddock and her dedicated husband Jim Maddock. Mary encountered coercive, deceptive psychiatry in 1976, was subjected to ECT numerous times and was forced to take a range of mind-debilitating and life-undermining toxic drugs. Only after 30 years she managed to liberate herself from the psychiatric spell. MindFreedom Ireland is affiliated with MindFreedom International, which is currently headed by Ron Bassmann. MindFreedom Ireland had its first annual protest against ECT in Cork in 2007, and this is the first time they joined MindFreedom in Dublin.
In 2014 I had my last psychiatric admission. “At odds with my life as I was.”, I vowed that I would do anything to make sure that something like that wouldn’t happen to anyone else. A few months later, after meeting with my psychiatrist, I met my friend and peer Breeda once again in the waiting room. She is a remarkable person whom I met in St Loman’s Psychiatric Hospital, Mullingar. Cheerful, friendly and bubbly as she was, we made a good connection, and together we established Listen to your Heart. This is a self-help group with a format that I have developed myself as a practitioner of homeopathic medicine and social entrepreneur soon after my psychiatric ordeal. The difficulty at the time was that it was so hard when living lonely and isolated to come by like-minded peers who feel too that psychiatry has a negative impact on our lives. Initially, I was very reluctant to buy into the marvels of social media for good reasons. But one day I realised many like-minded survivors were active on social media and in that way, I got to know MindFreedom Ireland and the Critical Voices Network Ireland.
In the summer of 2020, I visited several friends in Ireland who I got to know through Facebook. Me and my wife organised our summer holiday in such a way that I would be able to visit Mary and Jim Maddock. While in contact with the others we tried to arrange to meet face-to-face in the middle of the country on a regular basis but that was deemed practically impossible due to distances. So, we made it the MindFreedom Ireland Zoom Group, and we had our inaugural Zoom group meeting on February 20th, 2021.
At the start, the Zoom Group operated independently but in support of MindFreedom Ireland. We assessed our own values and norms in relation to how to care for the most vulnerable among our peers through rounds of deep listening in line with the group format that was intended for face-to-face meetings in Listen-to-your-Heart. We discovered that we had a lot in common and we presented ourselves at the first time at Critical Voices Network Ireland Conference in November 2021. In January 2022 we amalgamated with MindFreedom Ireland and increased in strength and decisiveness.
MindFreedom Ireland rejects all discriminatory psychiatric labels and work to win human rights and alternatives for people who experience emotional distress.
MindFreedom Ireland goals are:
- Full human rights for people experiencing emotional distress
- Challenge abuse by the psychiatric drug industry
- Campaign for full legal recognition of Advanced Directives
- Promote safe, humane and effective alternatives
- Campaigns to abolish electroshock, also called ECT, and has had more than 10 public electroshock protests since its establishment.
MindFreedon Ireland – Expertise from lived experience
No one knows better than we do what it is like to have your will totally controlled by the psychiatrist and having to take psychiatric medication against your will. We have seen the insides of the seclusion rooms, some of us have experience of adverse effects of ECT, we know what it is like to be humiliated, to be stripped naked in the presence of strangers of the opposite sex. We know what it is like to be physically restrained, held down and forcibly injected with copious amounts of toxic chemicals. We know the discriminatory effect of the psychiatric diagnosis. But we remain in awe, and we feel it is outrageous why politicians, Mental Health Ireland, Mental Health Reform and the media do not listen to us?
Action speaks louder than words
A lot of our work is in mutual support. We go to the extremes to help each other in times of trouble. We feel very alone in this work, as no one truly seems to understand the outrageous situations our vulnerable peers have to face. We are eager to fill you in on the perverse details of abuse by several institutions. We challenge the establishment through directly addressing politics and organisations that proclaim they have our best interests at heart.
For instance, we engaged with Mark Ward, Sinn Fein Mental Health Spokesperson, who has cross-party connections in this field. He is the only politician, as far as we know, who addresses the blatant exclusion from the Advanced Directives. We have also been in contact with other politicians besides Mr Ward. We wrote generic letters to GP practices in which we drew their attention to the need for tapering from psychiatric drugs.
In February 2024, we met with two representatives from the National Women’s Council and spoke about our issues. They were not aware that older women are at the highest risk of being subjected to inhumane ECT. We were made aware that they have a mental health program in cooperation with St Patrick’s Mental Hospital, which we acknowledge to be an electroshock paradise. The National Women’s Council admitted that they serve conflicting interests and that addressing the silent suffering of older women who are being subjected to ECT with their “mental health” counterparts is not within their remit.
In all our efforts to achieve justice, we teach professionals and the wider public to abstain from using bad discriminatory language such as the words ‘mental health’, ‘mental health condition’, ‘mental ill-health’, and psychiatric terminology in general. We are also working towards establishing beneficial relationships with like-minded organisations such as the Irish Society of Homeopaths, Family Carers Ireland and ALONE. In 2023 we joined the Community Development Mental Health Network (Established in 2019)[1] and we are cosignatories of the Ballymun Declaration [2]. To us this declaration is a call to action to shift the paradigm on mental unwell-being. It underpins norms and values that warrant community-based solutions away from the medicalisation of personal problems, alleviating loneliness and social isolation. In this way, we hope to establish cooperation with like-minded organisations outside the survivor movement. Thus, we will be able to build strong supportive networks and increase the preparedness for raising our voices together against harmful psychiatric practices.
With the help of four testimonies of my peers I have written a book called ‘Psychiatry and the Joy of Living Together’ (March 2025)[3] With my book I aim to provoke the urgent changes required in how we care for those who are marginalised by the medical establishment while at the same time I make a case for homeopathic medicine. In my book I am integrating homeopathy with social sciences, making it a social medicine. From a medical perspective, besides trauma also loneliness and isolation can be seen as the main contributors to mental and emotional distress. Distress is the main cause to many physical ailments, from high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, obesity and diabetes. It can also impact the immune system, digestive system, and cardiovascular system, leading to a range of health complications. Loneliness and isolation in their turn, are the effects of marginalisation, which is enhanced by how our economy works for the wealthy. Homeopathy has demonstrated its effectiveness[4] again and again since it was invented by the German doctor Samuel Hahnemann in the late eighteenth century.
Again, we call for all survivors of psychiatric abuse to join us at our annual protest. Also our supporters are very welcome to join us at our annual protest against ECT and other psychiatric malpractices. It will be held at the GPO, Dublin, on May 31st, 2025, from 12 noon until 3pm. Afterwards, we will have a chat in a coffee shop in the area. Please let us know in advance if you are coming, and bring your own placard. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to use electric sound amplification systems. Please let us know in advance if you are joining us by contacting me.[5]
_____________________________________
[1] https://www.cwi.ie/mental-health-network
[1] https://recoverycollege.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Ballymun-Declaration-1.pdf
[1] https://www.homeopathy3fold.com/publications/
[1] Homeopathy Research Institute https://www.hri-research.org/
[1] Jeroen Holtkamp, MindFreedom Ireland, phone: 0877503242
[1] https://www.cwi.ie/mental-health-network
[2] https://recoverycollege.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Ballymun-Declaration-1.pdf
[3] https://www.homeopathy3fold.com/publications/
[4] Homeopathy Research Institute https://www.hri-research.org/
[5] Jeroen Holtkamp, MindFreedom Ireland, phone: 0877503242
____________________________________________________
Mad in Ireland hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.