Statement of Purpose Concerning the International Network

*Editor’s Note

Below, we’ve reproduced the Network’s first official statement from 1975 as printed from David Cooper’s The Language of Madness, published in 1978. The text was produced collectively by a group that would go on to become the international Network of Alternatives to Psychiatry [Réseau-Alternative à la psychiatrie]. We, as the current North American branch, reproduce it here in full, with little commentary, both as a document of historical interest, but also because we share their research plans and the spirit of their strategic agenda, which, being fifty years old, naturally needs updates and refinements. Additionally, we will publish multiple texts on our writing page pertaining to the history and theories of branches of the Network.

Alternative to Psychiatry

The persons and the groups present at the meeting, 'An Alternative to the Sector', held in Brussels on 24, 25 and 26 January 1975, comprising teams of mental health workers, nurses, the psychiatrized population (les psychiatrises), lawyers, members of communes, etc., have decided to set up a European Network that will serve to bring about a coordination among these various groups and persons, as well as contribute a link with any and all teams in agreement with this statement of purpose and who would like to connect up with the network. 

This network brings together the following people: 

— First of all the psychiatrized population and also any group determined to struggle against the oppression weighing on this population. 

—All those who really promote or organize psychiatric or non-psychiatric collective experiences and who thereby create alternatives to the official divisions into catchment areas and districts or who attempt to destroy the psychiatric institution.

—Finally, all those—whether workers in the mental health field or not—who refuse to occupy the position of agents of a repressive psychiatric order and who demand that the real problems be treated in a mode other than the medico-technocratic mode. 

Two or three persons per country will carry out this coordination on the European scale. This coordination is comprised of the following elements:

—Exchanges of information on the experiences and the struggles of those involved.

—A struggle against repression.

—The concretization of common actions. 

The position of European Secretary for the network will be filled by a Belgian person until the next general meeting of the group. From the time of this meeting, to be held in about six months, the European Secretariat will be taken over by a person from the country where this meeting is to be held.

Preamble

We feel the struggles in the area of mental health must be inserted into the entire constellation of struggles of workers for the defence of their own health and in co- ordination with all of the struggles of the social and political forces for a transformation of the society. For us it is not a question of obtaining a tolerance for madness, but rather of making it understood that madness is the expression of social contradictions against which we must struggle as such. Without the transformation of the society there is never a 'better psychiatry' but always an oppressive psychiatry.

We refuse to confine the problems of alienation and marginalization, created by the socio-political system, in a psychiatric terminology.

We demand to have done with the position of being passive agents of a system of repression that in effect represses marginal populations under the guise of treatment and re-adaptation.

The network fixes for itself the following objectives:

—The largest possible circulation of information on non-psychiatric institutions, and creating alternatives to the 'sector', community projects, the support and the defence of these experiences through every possible means (the press, financial and legal aid, etc.).

—The collective political analysis of local situations and established institutions, by means of a dismantling of the economic and political mechanisms which justify and perpetuate the repressive institutions at the same time as maintaining the processes of marginalization.

—The support of struggles in progress within the field of psychiatric institutions and hence inseparable from other struggles led by the marginalized populations themselves and by the oppressed social classes.

—Active research into the means aimed at dissolving the monopoly of psychiatric power in favour of a struggle led by those immediately concerned within the framework of the social struggles that begin in school, in the community, in the workplace and in the city.

—The demand for a concrete relation between the practices and the theoretical discourses put forth in their behalf.

The Psychiatric Hospital

The psychiatric hospital is the backbone of a psychiatric sector. Every attempt at sectorization, or psychiatry in the 'community', will merely lead to a miniaturization of the hospital if the logic of the hospital is not broken. This rupture —which constitutes one of the fundamental axes of the international network which we have set up—seeks to have done, in the first place, with the medical perspective of treatment and of' mental health' and with the imperatives of profitability which systematically constitute a part of this perspective (for example the notion of honorariums for medical consultations and services, the price of a day in the hospital, the number of beds, etc.). The existence of fields for the care of madness (psychiatrists, nurses, educators, etc.) participates in the general system of control, of normalization and of repression. Madness raises questions whose answers are to be sought at an altogether different level than the answers put forward by different bodies in specialized fields. The fact that there is suffering somewhere does not mean that one must defer automatically to the medical machine.

Whatever the case may be, there is no doubt that in the immediate future it is necessary to:

—Stop all new construction of psychiatric hospitals and specialized services. In those countries saturated by this kind of repressive equipment and where the effective force of the hospitals is growing ever weaker, why seek to fill them up by force? In those countries where such equipment and structures are 'behind', it is of utmost importance to struggle against their construction and the sort of impasse they entail.

—Set immediately into motion a process of reconversion of existing psychiatric hospitals. This in no way implies a bureaucratic liquidation such as took place in California. It is not a question of undermining one level of workers and throwing patients on to the streets. This process of reconversion ought to be undertaken by the entire constellation of people who live madness, who live with madness and who live off madness, along with the different social groups interested in this reconversion who are not necessarily connected with madness.

Childhood

At a progressive younger age children are marginalized and excluded from school, and led to psychiatric or psycho-paedagogic institutions. Hence childhood is an essential front for struggle for our network. The 'Sector' or zone and its parallel institutions are the guarantee and the privileged instrument of this exclusion, since these structures afford children, adults and teachers geared-down possibilities for taking charge, possibilities that are proposed as individual technical solutions for problems that are political in nature. The psychoanalysing ideology is one of the most subtle forms now in use for maintaining this system. The present function of childhood psychiatry is medically to treat those children sent there for slowness in school or for maladaptation to the school structure. In our struggle the school itself is of an essential strategic importance.

We propose the constitution of several international work groups at the heart of the network:

—In order to analyse precisely the situation of child psychiatry and the school within the different national, local and other contexts.

—To bring together experiences which once isolated are immediately recuperated by the system.

—To work out possibilities for concrete ties at the level of the community with workers, political groups, action groups, teachers, taking into account the lack of understanding which might possibly arise in union organizations.

—To elaborate forms of struggle and the possibility for bringing to fruition an alternative practice.

—Finally to allow children, as the ones most immediately concerned, the greatest space for speaking out.

Law and Psychiatry

The law and psychiatry are two complementary modalities for intervention against deviance. Delinquency control and mental health become equivalent. Against the alliance of penal law and psychiatry, we want to develop the alliance of mental health workers, lawyers  ‘of the left' and magistrates. It is a matter of using their respective powers, not for the repression of deviants, but in order to cause the social contradictions at the base of deviance to explode.

1. We must participate in the defence of the imprisoned and the psychiatrically interned, and obtain for them the respect of the rights guaranteed by the constitutions for all citizens, the elementary rights of the individual.

2. We must especially struggle for the right of these populations to information on what takes place in the institutions where they are confined. The network must force the press to approach these questions. It must permit reciprocal exchange of information on the struggles led by each country against psychiatric repression.

3. We can begin immediately to publish widely documents of psychiatric information. We can also set up groups of psychiatrists who are at the disposal of the accused.

4. We demand the abolition of laws on prison psychiatric hospitals and centres, on drug addiction, against dangerous alcoholics, on compulsory hospitalization.

5. We denounce the growing intervention of psychiatrists in prisons and the use of tranquillizers on the detained population to maintain order in the Institution.

6. We dispute the types of prison surveillance in which psychiatrists—who are delegated more and more of their power through the courts —participate. We refuse the law enforcement role of the psychiatric sector (files, treatment by force, etc.).

7. The network we are setting up is open to all groups of magistrates, lawyers and legal defence groups, and the detained populations which struggle in the same direction. Its coordinating organ will work in close touch with international movements of democratic justice.

The psychiatrized and confined are not merely marginals, since they are workers (or out of work due to the exploitation or the repression of capitalist society).

Only a transformation of the society, a class confrontation, with this population participating, will be able to suppress the psychiatric institution with its numerous branches (psychiatric hospitals, catchment areas and districts, etc.). We must struggle against the psychoanalytic ideology that takes over this population's discourse and struggles within a new, subtle framework of repression and of police surveillance and control throughout the sector as passage from the psychiatric hospital to the community.

We must also abolish the relations between those administering treatment, the attendants, and those receiving it which reproduce class domination. We demand for movements of confined and psychiatrized people the right to information, organization and freedom of expression, the right to consultation and withdrawal of material from dossiers, the right to medical information and to the refusal of medication, and the abolition of all laws of confinement and classification.