KEY POINTS:
New Zealand's first national "Nutters' Conference" in Napier this month aims to value the experience of madness, organisers say.
The three-day conference is a project of the Lighthouse Trust, an organisation run by psychiatric patients for people with a broad spectrum of mental health issues.
Lighthouse Trust general manager Susie Crooks said 120 mental health patients and workers will attend the conference, which she said was "run by nutters for the whole mental health sector".
Ms Crooks said that although the Nutters Conference title had offended some people, many others had been supportive.
"It's about reclaiming the language," she said.
Ms Crooks said a highlight of the conference was expected to be the premiere of Auckland filmmaker Jim Marbrook's 40-minute documentary A Town Like Alice, about the former psychiatric hospital Lake Alice, near Marton, which closed in 1999.
"We've interviewed psychiatric survivors, doctors and mental health workers, and then we did a walk-through of the site," Ms Crooks said.
"This film deals with one of the blackest periods in New Zealand's medical history."
A key message for the conference will be that people who experience madness are valued members of the community, she said.
"That recovery from major mental illness is far more likely when treatment is voluntary and our human rights are respected.
"Treatment plays a very small part in recovery. Housing, families, employment, being valued and all the things that make life worth living play a much greater role."
Other speakers include human rights lawyer Tony Ellis, the chairman of the New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties, Mental Health commissioner Mary O'Hagen and Human Rights commissioner Warren Lindberg.
Governor-General Anand Satyanand opens the conference on November 22.
- NZPA
