typewriter

One of the exhibits was a typewriter, inspired by a couple of things that Graham Morgan told us.

…I remember I was the minute writer [of Awareness] and I had my rickety old typewriter. I’d tap away on it very, very, very badly with one finger

and talking about Margaret Temple, the first worker with the Patients Council at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

Yes, the very first memory… was of Margaret Temple sitting in her room, I can’t remember even what building it was… it was an office with a chair which might have been missing a leg. She either had a chair, no the chair had a leg, and the chair doubled as a table for her typewriter, or a seat for her. So if she was doing her typewriter and she’d be sitting on the floor typing it, it was a manual one, and if she wasn’t doing her typewriter she could sit on the chair.

These quotes brought me back to the days when everything was written by hand or on manual typewriters. The sound of keys being pressed very hard, the ping of the return, the copious use of tippex. A lot of the papers we have from those early days are not fully dated - 10 October was enough, but was it 1992 or 1995? A bit of detective work is needed to figure it out - who is mentioned, what were the issues?

The yellow keys on this typewriter remind of how much everyone smoked back then... but that's a post for another day.

The archive

Our book and exhibition have mostly focused (but not entirely) on the oral history but what about our archive?

It is currently (October 2010) in the CAPS basement which is not ideal - a flood could destory a lot of it and it isn't very accessible either. So we are thinking about where to keep it in the longer-term. 

It consists of all kinds of printed materials - minutes of meetings, reports, newsletters, posters, letters, bills, draft articles, expense sheets... and a lot more.

Survivors Speak Out newsletter from the 1980s

We have some non-paper based items - the t-shirts which had been on display at the exhibition, for instance. And the tulip you might be able to see to the left of the photo - that was a present from a Dutch user group, and for a while was used to show who had the right to speak at EUF meetings. 

Kirsten and Jim are the main people who have worked on the archive over the past couple of years. There is a lot involved in sorting through an archive. 

is this bit of paper worth keeping? where does it fit? what year is it from? 

Kirsten has had a lot of advice from the Lothian Health Services Archive, based at the University of Edinburgh Library, and we have been using a version of their cataloguing system. 

Despite having such a lot of paper to deal with, we are still looking for new items. We would really love to get photos, posters, personal accounts... If you have something you think might interest us, please email Kirsten at kirsten@capsadvocacy.org 

Mentioned in the Scottish Parliament

As we said in previous posts, our exhibition and book launch was opened by Malcolm Chisholm, MSP. He mentioned us in a speech he made at the Scottish Parliament on the 29th of February, on a debate on the "see me" anti-stigma campaign.

I have a particular interest in the matter this week because, on Friday, "Oor Mad History: A Community History of the Lothian Mental Health Service User Movement" is being launched in my constituency. I was honoured to be asked to write a foreword and I will speak at the launch. I am certainly aware from the work that people have done in Lothian that significant progress has been made on the wider front in relation to respecting people with mental health problems. It is appropriate to mention that and to see the see me campaign as part of a wider movement for change and improvement.

The Service User Movement in Lothians was first mentioned in the Scottish Parliament during the campaign for what we still call the new Mental Health Act: The Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act (2003) which became law in 2005. 

Exhibition

Last night we took the exhibition down. We felt quite sad - we had been so excited putting it up, and it has been wonderful to see so many people visit it, talk with them, read the comments...

We started before the exhibition with this:

then during the exhibition, it looked like this:

and last night it was back to this:

The exhibition ran from Friday 1 October to Thursday 14 October at the Drill Hall, Dalmeny Street, off Leith Walk, Edinburgh.

We shared the space with

• Much More Than A Label - art works by people who were involved with the PD work which CAPS has been working on;
• Outlook, the mental health community education project who displayed posters that students made about recovery and
• Equally Connected a mental health project for people from Black and Minority Ethnic communities.

It was part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival which runs every October and aims to help challenge attitudes towards mental health through the arts.

A book, a CD, an exhibition - what next?

The book!

After a busy summer, working on the Oor Mad History book, on the CD and on the Oor Mad History exhibition, we are back blogging.

We launched the book on the afternoon of Friday 2 October, which was the first day of the exhibition.

Over 100 people attended, a great mix of activists from all eras, allies old and new, and interested members of the public. It was so good to see so many people coming together and I got a thrill out of seeing people talking intently about the exhibition, sharing memories, and swapping ideas.

We had great speeches from Malcolm Chisholm who opened the event, Jim McGill and Kirsten MacLean.

Malcolm Chisholm is MSP for Edinburgh North and Leith and a long-term ally of the user movement in the Lothians.

Jim McGill is a long-term activist and now a volunteer interviewer, archivist and member of the steering group for Oor Mad History. He spoke about his experience with Oor Mad History and his hopes for the future.

Kirsten MacLean, community history worker, has worked tirelessly over the past 2 years on so many aspects of the project. She explained some of what we have done, and thanked a long list of people who have been involved in so many different ways in Oor Mad History.

Kirsten shows off the book

The overwhelming interest in the book and exhibition has confirmed what we have always thought - this is too good to stop. We have lots of ideas on what we want to do next. Now we need to plan for the future.

If you have ideas on what we should do, how we could do it, or want to get involved in any way, please contact Kirsten MacLean, our community history worker, at kirsten@capsadvocacy.org

You can get a copy of the book and the CD from Kirsten as well. A PDF of the book will be available on this blog soon.