Repositori URV

Identifier: TDX:1507

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX1507

Authors:
Correa Urquiza, Martin

Abstract:
This work its based on Radio Nikosia, a radio program broadcast weekly on an independent radio station in Barcelona, that is produced and directed entirely by 40 persons in psychiatric treatment. Its intent is to create a new social dynamic, one of active participation and social integration outside the narrow confines of existing mental health care services and patient-therapist relations, by pursuing two objectives: deconstructing the social stigma surrounding mental illness; and developing spaces of normality in which persons with a diagnosis of mental illness can become, and represent themselves through the media as, active social subjects rather than passive objects of psychiatric intervention. This de-pathologization of identity is in no sense a denial of the reality of mental illness and the suffering it causes, but a rejection of a social phenomenon analyzed here as 'total illness,' in which a diagnosis of mental illness overwhelms and trumps any and all other aspects of personhood, identity and experience.