They diagnosed me a schizophrenic when I was just a Gemini.

 

The London Hearing Voices Network presents Co-Production in Mental Health as a Path to Race Equality, which is facilitated by Dr Colin King and is in two sections.

 

Part One is a first person narrative exploring the Lived Experience and two-sided world of a Gemini: The frontstage first world of a diagnosed black, male schizophrenic and the backstage second world of a black mental health practitioner, commissioner & teacher.

 

Part Two examines how these worlds are informed historically. We will evaluate — through the concept of the 'escalator' — the ways in which European  diagnostic/legal frameworks and theories of eugenics emerged from the period of slavery, influencing values and behaviours.  And we will see how race emerges as the conceptual, philosophical, and psychiatric forms of whiteness that define schizophrenia. 

 

We will look at the processes of racialised compliance produced inside the family, school and prison system when black men — currently over-represented in the mental health system — are exposed by European psychiatry to forms of whiteness and intrusive models of ‘drapetomania’, as travelling escalators.