- CAPV has the highest rate of electroshock practice in the Spanish State, while in Navarre, mechanical patient containment is common in psychiatric hospital units. The manifestation of Radical Crazy Prisoners of the State for the first time in Bilbao to denounce psychiatric violence and overmedication. “Psychiatric people are in a very serious situation.”
There is a lot of talk about mental health, “but there is still no talk of violations of the mental health system and human rights violations,” the Harro Zoroa movement criticized. Composed of psychiatric or psychiatric people, born in Toronto in the 1990s and spread to other territories.
In Euskal Herria, Zoroa GAM was born in 2018 and in our country medication is also administered forcefully, mechanical sustenances and threats are the daily bread, people go into psychiatric involuntary and electroshocks are practiced. The member of the movement Heiko Elbira told us that in the hospital of Basurto there are six electroshock machines, with CAPV being the highest rate of practice in Spain. In 2018, a response report to a request to the Government of Navarra also stresses that “Mechanical containment is a common and systematized activity in the clinical practice of psychiatric hospital units, much more common than professionals, users, public opinion and managers and politicians believe”.
Neither mechanical restraint, nor electroshock, nor medication… The movement will demand in Bilbao the cessation of psychiatric violence. “We do not ask for another model of psychiatry, but the abolition of psychiatry,” adds Heiko Elbira to ARGIA: “The psychiatric discourse individualizes the oppression that we suffer and gives answers like this, because the psychiatric systems are necessary to keep the system the same, all of them drugged.”
In Navarra, mechanical restraint is a common and systematized practice in the clinical practice of psychiatric hospital units, much more common than professionals, users, public opinion and politicians believe
The movement denounces that torture is carried out systematically in psychiatric practice, as reported in the reports of the United Nations Special Rapporteur 2017 and 2018. The report also points out that many people who are at a crossroads between race, class and gender are at greater risk of suffering the consequences of excessive medication. That is, “in psychiatry, they put the poorest, women, racialized, alone… The rich don’t end there,” says Elbira.
25 May, demonstration
Members of the state movement will meet for the first time in Bilbao on 25 May. From the Plaza de Unamuno you will head to Kiosko del Arenal and after the mobilization you will make a guateada in the Karmela.
Last June, the Basque Country movement organized the first Harro Zoroa, also in Bilbao.