Mad Pride coming to Toronto

by Paul Denison

Celebrated all over the world, from Ghana to Ireland, Mad Pride had its origins in Toronto.

The first “psychiatric survivor pride day” was held in Parkdale on September 18, 1993—in response to discrimination from local residents against psych survivors living in boarding homes.

The date was later moved to coincide with Bastille Day—the celebration of the French Revolution. This was a significant event as it was during the course of the revolution that Jean Baptiste Pussin, a recovered ex-inmate of the Bicetere Asylum who later served as the governor of the asylum, worked along with his wife Marguerite and Phillipe Pinel, the director of Bicetere, to unshackle the inmates and innovate humane, compassionate, non-coercive treatments.

Mad Pride is a part of the psychiatric survivor movement, a civil rights movement that fights stigma against people living with mental illness, fights for the right to adequate, peer driven, non-coercive services, the right for service users to define what treatments work for them, to question what normality is and what it is to be human.

There will be workshops, panel discussions, theatre, music and the culminating event is the Annual Bed Push, during which participants dressed in pyjamas push a hospital gurney from the CAMH site at Queen and Ossington to the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre in Parkdale, the scene of much psych survivor history.

For more info, visit www.madpridenetwork.com or call 416-539-0690 ext. 258.