World Mad Pride Schedule
June 2 ? July 2, 2006
Program subject to change.

World Mad Pride festival features visual arts, film screenings, spoken word, and panel discussions in Vancouver venues, including Simon Fraser University and Gallery Gachet. In the gallery, throughout the month, view artwork from Peru, Iraq, Guinea, and from across Canada. Local and international artists, both emerging and professional, were invited to contribute work addressing mental health issues, art and healing, and human rights and psychiatry.

In June Vancouver welcomes the world to the World Peace Forum 2006 (June 23-28), United Nations World Urban Forum III (June 19-23), Towards a Just and Lasting Peace Conference (June 16-19), and World Mad Pride!

World Mad Pride Purpose:
? Challenge stigmas of people living with mental health issues.
? Build awareness of the connection between war, human rights, and health.
? Create links to the rights of individuals for health and security worldwide.
? Connect artists? work that addresses the social determinants of mental health, including the impact of militarism, conflict, economic, and social insecurity.
? Provide a forum to discuss and educate on these issues.
? Profile the work of the United Nations and the World Health Organization on mental health and human rights www.who.int/mental_health
? Contribute to dialogue on mental health human rights through the sharing and showcasing of artistic expression on these themes.

World Mad Pride Committee, hosted by Gallery Gachet in association with various mental health and cultural organizations in British Columbia. madpride@gachet.org 604.687.2468

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Healthy Mind, Body, Planet Cross-Canada Tour
Monday, June 5, 7pm, By donation. Simon Fraser University, Harbour Centre, Room 1900, 515 W. Hastings.
Presenters: Angela Bischoff, Greenspiration! and Kelly Reinhardt, Boiling Frog
Healthy Mind, Body, Planet is a cross-Canada multi-media tour, tabloid and documentary celebrating the most current information, analysis and inspiration related to mental, physical and planetary health. We will look at the reasons for the recent rise in depression, and at the myriad of treatments available, including pharmaceutical and holistic, within the context of Big-Pharma and corporate culture.
The Tour honours the late social/environmental activist Tooker Gomberg by concentrating on the role that mental illness and associated treatments played in his tragic death, and provides comprehensive information on sustainable activism, as well as complementary and alternative treatments to sound mental health.
This presentation is a multi-media kaleidoscope of images, sounds, and stories critiquing our current state and offering direction for positive change. Participants will walk away motivated to influence their world with greater awareness and tools.
The tour presentations will be complemented by a newspaper tabloid, websites, podcast/ blogs (written, audio and video), and a video documentary.
www.greenspiration.org
www.boilingfrog.ca

Prescription Suicide
Friday, June 9, 7:30pm,
Gallery Gachet, By donation
A documentary film by Robert Manciero, Rich Samuels and David Garland (co-producer).
Preceded by Mad Pride video shorts!
The documentary Prescription: Suicide takes an intimate look at the personal impact of anti-depressant drugs on children and teenagers. The filmmakers have weaved together six distinct stories of real people and real experiences. They have captured a sense of the arguments in an ongoing controversy that affects millions of Americans in a documentary that ultimately asks the question if these so-called revolutionary medications can be used safely. Some people call them ?miracle? drugs. But can they be safely administered? Can physicians - can the drug manufacturers themselves - adequately understand the risks these newly developed drugs pose to their patients?
This program lets families directly impacted take the center stage. They are sharing their stories, speaking from their hearts. Through their experiences an understanding is being gained that is essential, even critical, when making a decision about the use of these medications.
http://www.prescriptionsuicide.com

Living Beyond Chemistry: Paintbrushes,
Parks, or Prozac?
Sunday, June 18. 2-4pm, Gallery Gachet
Panel discussion:
Hester Parr (University of Dundee, Scotland)
Coast Foundation?s ?Coast Gardens?
MOBY (My Own Back Yard)
Gallery Gachet Collective
Gallery Gachet hosts a day of exploration around alternatives to medical model, pharmaceutical-based treatment of mental illness
Dr. Hester Parr of the University of Dundee will give a talk on her recent research into the use of nature spaces and art to assist in mental health recovery. We will view highlights of her documentary film, Recovering Lives: Mental Health, Gardening, and the Arts. This film, soon to be shown on the UK's Sky Community Channel and recently shown in a national arts and mental health event in Glasgow, covers how horticultural and arts activities for mental health assist in individual recovery. It is also about social recovery, whereby other communities? members re-evaluate people with mental health problems as valuable citizens and not simply noxious ?others.?
Also present will be local green advocates and community garden builders to discuss our disconnection from nature and community, and its effect on our collective and individual mental health. Could reconnecting with our natural environment constitute a cutting edge prescription for intelligent health care? What is occurring in the collective psyche of a species that systematically destroys its own habitat?
Members of Gallery Gachet will be on hand to speak about the role art can play in recovering from mental health crisies, trauma, and maintaining health. Coast Foundation?s social enterprise landscaping company, Coast Gardens, will also present the experiences of their gardeners.

Crisis Call
Film Screening (with post-film discussion)
Thursday, June 22, 7pm, Carnegie Theatre,
Main & Hastings, Free
Director: Laura Sky, 90 mins.
What happens when the boundaries between policing and mental health care disappear.... when the police become our new frontline health care workers? Crisis Call addresses a critical issue affecting the police, psychiatric survivors, legal experts, mental health workers and the public. The starting point for this unique documentary is the story of Edmond Yu, a psychiatric survivor in crisis who was shot and killed by Toronto police after a 1997 altercation on a city transit bus.
Award-winning producer-director Laura Sky asks, is there any way to prevent a mental health crisis from escalating into violence? For answers she looks to the police, psychiatric survivors, and to many others involved in crisis interventions. Crisis Call documents their candid, often compelling stories as they challenge the current system and search for solutions.
Twenty-five to thirty percent of the prison population suffers from a major mental illness... Jail is the only place that's open to the homeless mentally ill person 24 hours a day.? Crisis Call visits the Montreal Detention Centre, revealing the disturbing conditions inside its psychiatric unit. Sergeant Alan McKenzie, Thunder Bay Emergency Task Unit (ETU), who states "...we've now learned through a hard lesson that people who are psychiatric survivors in crisis are in fact, in crisis, not criminals." Viewers meet Sergeant McKenzie during a tense and vivid ETU training exercise that ends with a successfully negotiated surrender. But the question remains: are survivors traumatized by encounters with military-like ETU's, or do these units represent a de-escalation of force, by offering a range of response options for police?
Crisis Call presents many first-hand experiences Andria Cowan - one of three Toronto police officers involved in the 1997 shooting of Edmond Yu. Cowan, who has never before spoken publicly about that tragic event, offers her personal response to the shooting and its aftermath. Stella Montour - who talks about the multi-layered prejudice she's experienced as a woman, as an Aboriginal person and as a psychiatric survivor. She also describes how she was assaulted in a psychiatric facility, and how police ignored her crisis. Shaun Davis - a young man, who in a full-blown psychotic state triggered by a medication overdose, forced a bus off the highway near Thunder Bay in 2000, resulting in the death of one of the passengers. In an exclusive interview, Davis tells how he could not find help for his impending crisis in a small, northern Ontario town. The Honourable Mr. Justice Edward F. Ormston, Mental Health Diversion Court, Toronto region

The Women of Al Rashad: Photographs of Rita Leistner
Sunday, June 25, 2pm, Gallery Gachet
Direct from Brooklyn, NY, and born in Toronto, Rita Leistner speaks about her experiences in Baghdad, Iraq, with the women at Al Rashad psychiatric hospital.
World Mad Pride presents her photographic portraits of women residents at the al-Rashad Psychiatric Hospital in Baghdad. Other recent projects include a profile of an American Cavalry Unit during a three-month embed in the spring and summer of 2003;, and a feature on the gravediggers at the cemetery of Najaf during the August-September siege of 2004.
Her photographs and stories from Iraq have been published in The Walrus, Newsweek, Time, Colors, Rolling Stone and Macleans, among other publications. She is co-author, with Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, and Thorne Anderson, of Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq, which was published by Chelsea Green Press in October 2005.
Rita is a graduate of the International Center for Photography in New York, and has an MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She focuses on in-depth, long-term projects, and often writes the text that accompanies her photographs. Between April 2003 and September 2004 she spent ten months covering the war in Iraq, and is currently working on stories in Canada and Cambodia.
Rita?s work has received awards from The Best of Photojournalism and the Canadian National Magazine Awards. In addition, she has won bursaries from The Rory Peck Trust and The Canada Council for the Arts, as well as a fellowship from The International Center for Photography.
We would like to acknowledge Rita Leistner for coming to Vancouver to share this important work. www.ritaleistner.com
Following Artist's Talk is a reception with Rita Leistner
Sunday, June 25, 3:15-3:45,
Gallery Gachet
Join us for complimentary beverages and food

Madness and 9/11: Zahra Rasul
Sunday, June 25, 3:45-5pm, Gallery Gachet, Free
Post 9/11, Canadian Muslims have become the targets of discrimination and violence, sensational and inflammatory media coverage, and prejudicial and draconian legislation in the form of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001. In the ?War on Terror,? moral panic has been incited by the state in an effort to delineate ?us? and ?them,? the ?terrorist? and the ?Westerner,? the ?familiar? and the ?stranger.?
In this new geo-political climate, how are Canadians are educated about ?insiders? and ?outsiders? to the nation? What are the processes by which ?outsiders? are relegated to Othered ?official space? that falls outside the ideological and sometimes, physical, borders of the nation? In this racialized and gendered space, violence and injustice are naturalized.
This talk will, using Foucault?s conception of madness, explore the construction of Muslim men as ?crazed terrorists,? ?suicidal,? and ?homicidal.? Historical and contemporary examples will be used to show that the representation of Muslim men as ?mad? provides a vehicle for the contemporary neo-colonial exclusionary nation-building.
Zahra Rasul is an aspiring academic and feminist activist, who currently works with teen moms from the downtown east side and Musqueam reserve in an alternative education program. She has just completed her MA in Educational Studies at UBC and will begin her PhD at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto in a collaborative program in Equity Studies in Education and Women's Studies. Her research interests involve anti-colonial, anti-racist feminist work, especially post 9/11; she is particularly interested in the ways in which contemporary Canadian nation-building is facilitated in the post 9/11 world through discriminatory legislation and exclusionary policy.

we don?t live under NORMAL CONDITIONS
Sunday, June 25. 5-6:30, Gallery Gachet, By donation
Feature film screening
This day will wrap up with a screening at Gallery Gachet of this enlightening and empowering documentary film directed by Rhonda Collins, described by The Oakland Tribune as ?an extraordinary piece of filmmaking.?
There is a tendency afoot today to blame the epidemic sweep of depression in the US on bad genes or screwy brain chemistry. But what if the causes do not emanate from the individual? This artful documentary brings six people together for three days of emotional, and sometimes heated, discussion about the sources of their despair. Intermixed are hard-to-find facts which challenge the psychiatric industry?s claims that depression is a biological disorder. Fundamentally about empowerment and the resistance of the human spirit, this surprisingly inspirational film will change the way you think about ?normal.?

Mad Pride Cabaret
Friday, June 30, 7pm, Gallery Gachet, By donation
Live music, comedy, readings and performance with Stand Up For Mental Health (comedy), Sara Griffin (Toronto graphic novelist show ?n tell), Irit Shimrat (music video from this movement veteran), Ron Carten (reading from his new book), Jan Derbyshire (Blue Head solo performance), Cherise Clarke (stage reading), Al Mader (Vancouver slam poet), and Barbara Phillips (Kamloops? performance poet).
Stand Up For Mental Health was founded by counsellor and stand-up comic David Granirer. The troupe teaches stand up comedy to people with mental illness as a way of building confidence and fighting public stigma. Their acts look at the lighter side of surviving the mental health system. www.standupformentalhealth.com

Asylum Squad Workshop
Sunday, July 2, 12-4pm, Gallery Gachet
Direct from Toronto, Sarah Griffin, creator of Asylum Squad comics with a hands-on workshop to express yourself and produce your own cartoon or zine!