This year Les Laboratoires d’Aubervillers will once again be running reading workshops held every two weeks which invite the public to collectively conduct research and a reflection on a specific problematic approached from various disciplinary angles (art, humanities, politics). These workshops contribute to developing “Le Printemps des Laboratoires”, a programme which unfolds all year long, via workshops, round-table discussions, screenings, and culminating in an intense public gathering. Scheduled to take place on June 4-5 2016, this public event, with an international dimension, will offer a presentation of the projects carried out throughout the year. Each year the programme engages with a specific notion; this year it will be investigating the “Psychotropification of society”.
This expression combines the terms “psychopharmacy” and “tropism” and refers to the exponential rise in the prescription and use of medication for the treatment of mental health disorders. By highlighting this “tropism” our intention is to show that, behind the normalisation of such prescriptions, a fascistic ideology is at work, infiltrating and governing Western societies — more concerned with the freedom of action of pharmaceutical companies than with the freedom of action of the individuals that make up society.
In order to bring to fruition this collective reflection which will engage at once with the normalisation underlying the phenomenon we have described, with the current state of psychiatry and the place given to mental illness in today’s society, we invite you to join us every other Thursday, from October 22nd 2015, from 4-6 pm. Each session, one or several texts will be proposed or selected for the following session.
Workshop #1
This reading cycle will kick off with a workshop devoted to two texts that echo one another. The first text is “La psychiatrie biologique : une bulle speculative ?” by François Gonon, a neurobiologist and CNRS research director at the institute of neurodegenerative illness, University of Bordeaux, which shows how Research (and the politics that fund it) is governed by a genetic and biological perspective on psychiatric illness which is necessarily reductive and therefore dangerous. The second text is “Ne tirez pas sur le messager ! Le mouvement international des entendeurs de voix” by Caroline von Taysen, a Berlin-based psychologist specialising in crisis intervention. The latter text presents Intervoice, the international Voice Hearing Network composed of opponents of the psychiatric model of so-called schizophrenia. Rejecting the prescription of neuroleptic drugs, a considerable number of voice hearers claim harmonious negotiation of ‘their voices’, which make sense in relation to their personal life experiences.
The texts are selected by the group and read in preparation for each workshop. The workshops are free of charge and open to all; they will run every other Thursday from 4 to 6 pm. Enrolment is required. To receive the texts studied, session notes, and to enrol, please contact Clara Gensburger: c.gensburger@leslaboratoires.org
Dates: Following Thursday 22th October, 5th and 19th November, 3rd and 17th December, 7th and 21st January, 4th and 18th February, 10th et 24th March, 7th April (from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm)