Vara Adams survived forced hospitalization, drugging, and multiple electroshocks as a teen in Melbourne Australia. She went on to become a heavy metal-influenced songwriter about her experiences as part of the healing process.Show includes several of Vara's songs. www.varaadams.com

Leah Harris reads her powerful poem I Was a Teenage Mental Patient and discusses how communities can work to prevent suicide by looking beyong mainstream approaches and rethinking our alienating school system.

 

 

Keely Malone, organizer with Freedom Center, and Arise for Social Justice, talks about her work with Quabbin Mediation training people in "Active Bystandership:" teaching how to not passively witness harm such as bullying, violence, or crisis, but to become actively involved, and how this can change situations and make communities more responsible.

http://www.quabbinmediation.org/html/tba.html

17 year old Sonia Peterson speaks with great insight about being locked up and forced to take drugs at age 12 and living with a bipolar diagnosis. Plus a short documentaty produced by Darbey Penney and Peter Stastny on Nazi killings of psychiatric patients, and an interview with original Freedom Center leading organizer Vikki Gilbert.

Below is important info about HR 2387 - which would end federal funding for mental health screenings.

Feb 2007 Freedom Center and Information Collective sponsored a legal training on the Department of Social Services MA foster care system, addressing legal rights and DSS mistreatment and harm inflicted on children and familes. Presented by Attorney David Roulston.

Film director discusses his harrowing documentary film of six families devastated by the dangerous violence-causing effects of anti-depressant drugs.

Activist Carey Lamprecht on her experiences as a staffperson in high security locked facilities with violent children and adolescents, and her creation of successful alternatives to restraints and coercion, alternatives that were blocked by facility administrators. Carey is herself a psych survivor with a bipolar diagnosis.