Special Hearings — Mental Health Workshop — 1997-11-20

CHAIRPERSON: Thank you very much Dr Cooper.  Thank you also for making this room feel very big.  It was beginning to feel a little bit small and full and comprehensive.
 I just got a note from a Dr Madega Mabla who is representing Melvin Freedman, who is willing to answer some questions on legislation, but I feel you weren't here in the introduction, we are actually going to, it is a very task driven forum, this is not a sort of normal type hearing.  I think we will have a chance tomorrow in the workshop to actually, and I think you have actually given us a lot of material which we can use to guide our thinking around the legislation.
 So I would ask the Doctor to join that group tomorrow.  In terms of time, we are not going to be able to open this section up to the floor and I would like to thank you very much, and hope you didn't feel too, as you say like (indistinct) when our job today is not to hold a glove over the coals, at these participants here.

UNKNOWN: I don't feel responsible for the past. I feel very responsible for the present and the future.

CHAIRPERSON: Excellent.  All right, if we could move on to the next section which in Psychiatric Interventions in Government Hospitals and Community Settings.  Could I also invite participants and Dr Zanele Baqwa will be speaking to this and Ms Jeanette Mohapi, who is a Psychiatric nurse.  If you could get to the table.  Could I also invite participants to make notes with the view to tomorrow and really try to sort of think quite concretely about where we can go with these groups tomorrow, because we do want a product at the end of these two days, a very concrete product.
 I hope you will stay, Sats.  Are you coming tomorrow?  Okay, good.

DR BAQWA: I would have loved to comment on what Sats was saying, because I have been doing a little bit of thinking about it, but I think if I want to split myself into two, which I tend to do, ever since I came back from exile, is that I would like to be part of that workshop on legislation as much as I am also, I know I am involved in another workshop on community Psychiatry because there are a lot of multi-variate factors in the process of changing rather than just change or reform as Hlengiwe was saying.
 Let me just now go to my submission which is I hope, won't bore you because I tend to have a sort of literary philosophic incline in everything I do.  I don't know whether it is a talent.
 I have covered my submission in three parts and I would like to tell you what those parts involve.  The first part I have just tried to introduce, my introduction was an attempt to depict in context the violence prevailing in our society, wherein I tried to pull a thread through organised violence from the apartheid area to the organised violence of the immediately pre and post-1994 periods, and also violence as manifested recently in what I term social violence including abuses of human rights in psychiatry institutions, what I term this whole part 1 as a prismatic view on our national psyche.
 Part 2, was sort of an examination of conduct and use of psychological interventions, by individuals and institutions in relation to conflicts of the past.
 I am looking at specific examples of practises at different psychiatric institutions today. I am looking at the disjuncture as it still exists today between psychiatric care for white and black patients.  I am looking at antithetical views to human rights and human dignity at psychiatric hospitals.  I am also taking a critic of psychiatric academic teaching of medical students and registrars much in line with what Sats was saying.
 I am also looking into the enquiry into the transformation and reconstruction attempts so far and I would like a little bit to have a critic at the TRC Health Sector Hearings of June 1997 in Cape Town, which I think it is called for.  We always have to evaluate ourselves as we move on.
 Part 3 might go over to the workshop really, where I am looking at improving the legacy of apartheid on Health Care.  Strategies that will consolidate and contribute to the prevention of gross human rights' violations and I think that is where that philosophical basis of the Mental Health Act and other ... (tape ends)