Mad Pride Day Toronto Part 3

Took place on July 14, 2007.


The Mad Pride Organizing Committee is a group of psychiatric survivors/consumers and friends within the City of Toronto. We have gathered yearly over the past 14 years to organize and host pride and recognition activity for a diverse community of psychiatric and consumer survivors.

Administration for this activity is managed by The Friendly Spike Theatre Band, with assistance from Parkdale Community Legal Services, Parkdale Activity Recreation Centre, and Soundtimes Support Services.

The Friendly Spike Theatre Band (founded 1989) is a community theatre arts company which works with mental health support service consumers, and people with disabilities for cultural inclusion and representation.

This year, July 14th 2007 had been officially proclaimed Mad Pride Day in the City of Toronto. Mad Pride was also celebrating across the world in North America, Europe, and Africa on the same day linking mental health system users around the globe.

This year the main event included a "Bed Push", which was a parade that involved the crowd dressing up in pajamas and pushing hospital beds down the street. The idea was to promote community development for mental health system users and create awareness about mental health issues.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Mad
• Pride
• Day
• Toronto
• Psychiatric
• Survivors
• Consumer
• Mental
• Health
• Illness
• Disability
• Disabilities
• Stigma

[truerose42]

I am proud to share my birthday with Mad Pride Day in the City of Toronto!!! Keep up the great work! Great issue are brought up in this, same things we are fighting in the states. Rock On!!!

[madpridetoronto]

Thanks so much for your support and kind words, truerose42!

Hopefully one day people with mental illnesses can live stigma free. Gay Pride has certainly done that for the Gay community. Maybe we can achieve their kind of success one day!

Rich

[filmFlicka]

You're welcome! We worked a bit more after Lava got here. It's a priviledge to be editing this documentary! I've got another long day ahead of me today and then I'm heading north tomorrow for a week.

[madpridetoronto]

Great things are going to come from this documentary! It's going to help improve the lives of everyone who has a mental illness. Have a great vacation, you've earned it!

- Rich

[filmFlicka]

That was GREAT!

[madpridetoronto]

Thanks so much! I had a nice BBQ lunch with Lava today at "Sound Times", and he showed me and others there the first draft of your Mad Pride Day documentary --- very, very nice! Thanks so much for all of your hard work! Lava's going to have my two boys do some sound bytes on Sunday.

- Rich

[socialconscience100]

Mad Pride is just a tool of the status quo. One bed-pull a year, then collaborative silence.

When pressed to state what it is they want to express pride in, they stutter and stammer a lot, or like the patsies here, spew a lot of cliches.

They add nothing to our understanding of madness and mental illness. It's just low-level demagoguery by con-artists.

Is that Reaume, in York U professor drag? He offers the worst sort of tripe.

Who PAYS them? SCAMH?

[BarrelLifter]

I'm not sure having mental health survivors dressing in odd clothing is presenting the right image. Aren't we looking to change the stigma and public image of mental health?