Yes, I confess, the proposed press release was a spoof. Thankfully my ruse
has been spotted because it prevented my next email this evening which would
have announced to the list that the statement had been released and picked
up in the lead editorial of the Norfolk and Goode Evening Echo!
The spoof statement was sent to the list as a piece of theatre intended to
stimulate thought and discussion in anticipation of our forthcoming CPUK
gathering in Edinburgh and for, to quote Rhona, "facilitat[ing] interaction
amongst the 3 parallel workshops on the Thursday afternoon - media & press
management; our online community; and developing our collective
voice....[and to throw] into relief all of these issues and how they
intersect - who are 'we' as a community? How does/can an online community
function and make decisions? To whom are we accountable? And what
relationship do we want to have with the media?". As a list and as a
network, we have issued a number of public statements since our last
conference. I suspect that the themes of the forthcoming CPUK conference -
the relationship between critical and community psychology (day one) and
mental health in our communities (day two) - might cause us to want to make
our voice heard once more...
In my spoof press release I sought to issue a statement to the list that
would contain factual inaccuracies, ideological inconsistencies and an
underlying oppressive discourse (both in terms of relationships within our
network and in terms of our network's relationship with those outside of it)
but to contain sufficient linguistic snares to make enough of it appear
plausible enough to enough of us. The intent was to raise some issues in
relation to how statements are generated, agreed and released by our network
and to give us a glimpse, through a grotesque characterisation of what our
network might do, of what our network might be.
Now, to point to one of the statements we collectively(?) agreed(?) upon and
which I was responsible for generating, agreeing and releasing and which was
not done in jest - the statement of support to the Seroxat User Group. Here
is a reminder of that statement:
"“The Community Psychology UK Network (CPUK) supports the work of the
Seroxat & SSRI User Group (SUG) in their efforts to protect public health
from any inadvertent harm caused by the pharmaceutical industry and the
medical and allied professions. CPUK support SUG's aims to ensure UK health
regulatory bodies have sufficient remit, responsibility and resource to
guarantee public health and to ensure that those harmed by the products of
psychopharmacy are given the support they need to seek justice and get
well."
With the best of intention, our network produced a statement of support that
was, at best, asinine and, at worst, undermining of the work of SUG - our
use of the phrase 'inadvertent harm'. This phrase suggest that the
pharmaceutical industry unknowingly caused harm to public health. This is
not the case. SUG and others have accumulated compelling evidence that the
harm is caused knowingly (and this evidence has been 'proven true' in legal
action taken against GSK in the US). So, a message of support, though
gratefully received by SUG, was not as helpful as it could have been - some
list members (but not enough) pointed out to me at the time their
disappointment with the inclusion of the phrase 'inadvertent'.. I say all of
this as the author of that statement having gone through the process of
seeking a collective voice from our community (our network) through our
online community (our list) that could be publicly released (our voice).
p
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