How does one bestow credibility and
legitimacy on an area or a perspective when in the public eye, it has almost
none? How does one turn antipsychiatry into a respected area of study and practice
in the face of psychiatric hegemony? How does one attract more and more
students to this and related fields of study? How might one at the same time begin
healing the rifts between Antipsychiatry and Mad Studies? And how does one ensure that what advances are
made at one university spread to others?
There are a number of different ways, many
of which I have personally pursued over the years. One way is to endow at different
respected universities Antipsychiatry and Mad Studies scholarships. This is the
story of three such scholarships—and the struggles and strategies
involved.
An important context for this article are battles
in which I partook from 2006 until a couple of years ago which led to the creation
of the world’s first antipsychiatry scholarship, this at University of Toronto
(see http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/Current_Students/Graduate_Student_Funding/Scholarship_Opportunities/OISE_Internal_Awards/index.html ) What is likewise context is a previous article of mine, also published in Mad in America, called “Conferring Legitimacy on the
Counterhegemonic” (see https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/05/conferring-legitimacy-counterhegemonic/)
that theorizes in considerable detail what transpired during that period—the
fight, the strategies, the use of allies. A more immediate context is how the first
awarding of this scholarship was actually accomplished and the groundwork laid
to ensure that this scholarship does not go off course. The most recent context
largely materialized in the last few months—arriving at agreements with two
other universities—York and Ryerson—whereupon, upon my death, and in accordance
with agreed-on provisions in my new will,
money from my estate will be used to establish Antipsychiatry and Mad Studies scholarships in each of these
universities.
I will begin this discussion with the 2006 work
and the formal creation of the Dr. Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry
at University of Toronto, but this will not be the primary focus and so people
who want further details on it are advised to read the article mentioned above.
I will proceed to zero in on the various
developments which happened since then.
I will end with an identification of lessons learned and with an invitation
to others.
The Beginning
In 2006, I began what proved to be nine months
of negotiations with OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) and U.
of T. (University of Toronto) to get an agreement for a clause in a will which
I was drafting whereby my residual estate would go to creating a perpetual
scholarship for OISE students doing theses in the areas of antipsychiatry
and/or homelessness. To be clear, while
homelessness is a pressing concern and research area of mine, my overriding intent
was to fund students working in antipsychiatry.
Nonetheless, I was keenly aware that the academics in question would
welcome something in homelessness but not antipsychiatry. Hence, linking the two together was good strategy.
And indeed while a scholarship in homelessness was objected to by no one, antipsychiatry
proved to be a formidable stumbling block. There appeared to be no end of
objections to it. For nine months I met with who was then the current dean of OISE,
carefully addressing every objection which she had. Examples of obstacles, together with responses
that materialized were: She told me they could not mount a scholarship that
gave priority to psych survivors because psychiatric survivors themselves would
never want such a thing, whereupon, I turned to the Mad Students Society, who went
on record saying they very much wanted it.
I was told that the endowment as described was a human rights
violation—when it demonstrably was not. Correspondingly, I was told that OISE
could not create such a scholarship because no program or department at OISE
would feel qualified to oversee the giving of such an award, whereupon, I
immediately mobilized and at my urging, two different departments at OISE passed
resolutions stating definitively that they would be happy to oversee it. And so
the negotiations went. Nine months passed with me responding fastidiously to
each and every objection raised. Finally, when it started to look as if this
process would never end, I told U. of T. that unless they accepted the offer within
the next seven days (and it had not yet cleared the Dean’s office and there
were two other levels that would have to approve), I would withdraw it and make a comparable offer to Carleton
University. Three days later, with the dean’s help, the proposed endowment had
been approved by all U. of T., with no further changes required.
Fast forward a few years—Shaindl Diamond, the
executor of my will got in touch with me, worried. She knew that when I died, the residual
estate provisions in my will would have to go through the university again, and
she feared that she was not be as good at negotiating as I was. Correspondingly, she asked if I could try to
establish a small antipsychiatry scholarship at OISE/UT now, with the hope that
this would pave the way for the larger scholarship articulated in my will. I
quickly agreed.
Years of negotiations followed as I tried
to bring into being the Dr. Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry at
OISE/UT. Now this was to be a “matching scholarship” That is, I was agreeing to
personally match all amounts I could raise from the community. I promised U. of
T. additionally, I would contribute whatever was needed so that at the bare
minimum, the scholarship fund had $50,000 dollars in it. I got the approval of
the new dean quickly. And with help from OISE, I immediately took to mobilizing
the community to help fund-raise. In the
process, stellar allies like Dr. Peter Breggin, Dr. Lauren Tenney, and Reverend
Cheri DiNovo came aboard, publicly endorsing the scholarship. With these endorsements
in hand, we reached out to potential donors; and with students taking the
primary role, in particular Efrat Gold, we created a video on the significance of
the scholarship (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJyA6RyQmMo).
Meanwhile I continued to negotiate with U. of T. around wording that we could both
accept.
Did I run into problems? Yes—huge problems and legions of them. For example, throughout this process, every
person assigned by OISE to help me steward the request though U. of T. or reach
out to the press kept being “let go” unexpectedly and when they disappeared,
their correspondence with respect to the scholarship disappeared with them. My solution was to keep each and every email
that transpired on the topic (and there were literally hundreds of them) and to
forward relevant email to new people as they surfaced. What was also
distressing but in the end proved more amusing than serious, additionally, some
Canadian psychiatrists spoke openly at international conferences telling those
assembled they were hell-bent on stopping the “misguided” scholarship. This I basically ignored. What was far more
serious, one stall after another materialized. Whereupon my institutional
allies at OISE and I settled on a strategy that proved to be “a winner”. We
argued that disallowing the scholarship was at odds with academic freedom.
As we got closer and closer to the goal, a historic
meeting took place between several OISE administrators and me, during which we
hammered out provisional details on how the yearly award would work. Alas, less
than a month later, the OISE official in charge of the scholarship was let go,
with the entire email exchange between the two of us likewise gone. And again,
I began negotiating with new people. Frustrating? “You betchya!” But we soldiered
on.
Eventually, a wording was accepted and the
scholarship was approved by the University Board of Governors. Alas, however,
once the press got wind of the scholarship, I was trashed in media around the
world. Threats were made on my life. And
one mainstream professional claimed to be one of many in the process of
initiating law suits against me. Mostly I simply ignored the unfair treatment
and threats—and my students and I concentrated on creating ever new
consciousness-raising and fundraising-events.
Essentially, we counted on the old adage that all press was good press. And
so it was to prove.
What was the primary consequence of being
trashed in the media around the world? Once
in a while, I was able to convince the media to let me respond (e.g., after having been trashed in a student
newspaper—The Varsity—I convinced those
in charge to let me to write an OP Ed piece where instead of focusing of the unjust
attacks on me, I availed myself of the opportunity to educate the public about
psychiatry and antipsychiatry; see https://thevarsity.ca/2016/11/13/op-ed-understanding-what-is-at-stake)
What was totally unexpected and likewise thrilling, a billionaire in the US who
otherwise would never have gotten wind of this Canadian development heard of
the scholarship and made a very sizeable contribution to it, which I then
proceeded to match. We now had
scholarship with a healthy amount of money behind it—something that may well
never have happened otherwise. In other words
the bad publicity helped us prevail beyond our wildest dreams!
Recent Developments Around the Scholarship
We now had a scholarship to which the
university community was committed, and everyone acted accordingly. We met, accomplished
what we needed to do to ensure that this was more than a “paper victory”. It was decided at OISE that we would pick the
first recipient of the scholarship in early April of 2018, also, so as to
ensure that the process would not go awry, that I would be in charge of
coordinating. At the urging of the administration, I handpicked the rest of evaluation
committee. I invited one person from each OISE department, and with the aid of
helpful officials, I put processes in place to ensure that students knew how to
apply. We mounted all relevant
information on the OISE website. Applications began coming in, complete with
thesis proposals and recommendations from supervisors. In April, the committee
met to select who will soon be the very first recipient of the award. And what
a glorious meeting it was!
Contrary to the worries of many that the
scholarship would be a “non-starter’ for no students would be interested, we received
four exceptionally impressive applications.
As we all of us agreed, every single one of the applications was strong enough
to be awarded the scholarship. I was granted the opportunity to clarify
antipsychiatry to the selection committee and my colleagues were delighted to
be finding out more. As we began
discussing the applications, it was evident that everyone was committed to
making the choice carefully, taking all relevant factors into consideration. Correspondingly
one hour later, with smiles flashing around the room. we had unanimously chosen
“a winner”. Truly an inspiring beginning.
And nothing could be clearer that that we had turned a corner.
Subsequent Scholarship Developments
With stories like this, the point reached
at this juncture would generally be the end of the saga, for I had ostensibly accomplished
what I set out to do. It is not the end! The point is, I kept focused on the
larger mission—both at University of Toronto and beyond. Correspondingly, I
continued to use the scholarship to consciousness-raise.
In addition to this, new stages of a more
extensive endowment journey soon commenced. The initial impetus for them was that
my will was eleven years old. So it was time to look at revisions, more
particularly, and more generally, to take stock of what I was leaving to
posterity.
The first thing I noticed is that my
residual estate (which I had scrimped and saved for and had ensured was
sizeable as well as constituting the vast majority of my estate) was still
going to a “compromise scholarship” in which the scholarship was divided between
research into homelessness and antipsychiatry research. What that meant in
essence is a huge amount of my money (moreover an amount about 15 times the
size of the scholarship that I had just endowed) would be going into a
scholarship where antipsychiatry research was only part of the focus. It soon dawned
on me, correspondingly, how easy it would be for the scholarship to almost
always get awarded to theses in the other area, with antipsychiatry thereby
pushed to the side. For a few seconds, this realization floored me. Then I
remembered Wittgenstein’s ladder. For people who do not know what I mean, in
his major tome Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus,
the brilliant philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein articulated a theory of language
that could successfully serve as a tool to arrive at a type of awareness. At
the same time, he knew that the theory was incorrect. Toward the end of this
impressive work, accordingly, he acknowledged as much. Correspondingly, he
urged readers to think of the original formulation as a ladder that gets you to
the roof top. It did its job in letting
you get where you needed to go—now you needed to throw away the ladder (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder)
Yes, I told myself, this is exactly what I
need to do with the original scholarship that I negotiated back in 2006. It has
gotten us where we needed to go; now it is important to throw it away. Why use
a hypothetical scholarship that was barely okay, when I now have a fully
existing scholarship that does the job brilliantly? Whereupon I revised my
will, replacing the former residual clause provision with the following “For
the residue of my estate, I instruct my executor as follows: To pay the Governing Council at University of
Toronto one hundred per cent (100%) of the residue of my estate to be used to
augment the Dr. Bonnie Burstow Scholarship in Antipsychiatry at the University
of Toronto at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.” And with that
change, with that fortuitous use of the Wittgenstein ladder formula, a fuller
revolution has just happened. And was this
strategic about-turn the end of the process? As it happened, no.
As I quickly realized as I continued reviewing
my will, I could further adjust my will so that the revolution in process could
be bigger still. Why limit myself to a scholarship at one university only when
we could accomplish more?, I asked myself.
Now to be clear, I had only enough savings for one huge scholarship—and huge,
it certainly will become upon my passing.
However, why not try to endow smaller scholarships in a similar vein at
other universities—Would not this create synergy and bestow exponentially more legitimacy
on the area? I immediately thought of
the other universities in the Toronto area.
Could I not to some extent cover all three universities in Toronto so
that wherever any student went in the city, they could access a scholarship of
this ilk? And might not this in the fullness of time even culminate in like-minded
counterhegemonic scholars at different universities working together?
So asking myself and so reasoning, I reached
out to a few of my allies at Ryerson University and York University who also teach
in the general area. Thrilled, they immediately committed themselves to helping
both now and after my demise. Noticing myself that both of these universities
had strengths in Mad Studies, which itself could act as a bridge and
conjecturing that here additionally was an opportunity to bring Mad Studies and
Antipsychiatry closer together, I decided to work at creating scholarships in
both universities for students doing theses in either of these areas.
Knowing from experience that the first
objections that would be raised would likely be that there were few courses and
little or no faculty in the area— with help, I first created a list of faculty
in these areas at each university as well as lists of the relevant courses that
were taught. And with this information in hand, I got in touch with the relevant
university administrators, prepared to make the case, beginning with Ryerson.
With Ryerson, the issue of faculty and relevant course was checked out with
record speed, and the only real complication that I came across is with what is
called the “variance clause”.
A variance clause is a standard clause which
is always included in endowment agreements.
It gives the institution in question the right to use the money for
something somewhat different than what is spelt out. If you are trying to endow anything, you can never
get around having negotiate a variance clause. And if the scholarship intended
is highly counter-hegemonic—here is a key place where you are likely to be
faced with seemingly insurmountable problems. Indeed, it is one of the principle
factors that held up the University of Toronto scholarship for years. What in essence you have to do is rein in the
degree of discretionary power that officials want granted the university even while
negotiating a variance clause that takes into consideration the organization’s
needs (and changing needs), all this while ensuring that your intention will
actually be honoured not only now but long after your demise. And it is with
this last part that a benefactor has to be especially careful.
Now by this time, I had become adept at finding
solutions and what also helped, I was dealing with a much more nimble
university, moreover staff who were both surprised and delighted that someone
who had been neither faculty or student at their university actually wanted to
give them money. Hence, while we were forced into some tricky “back-and-forths”
with wording—within four days we had come to an agreement. Three weeks later,
an agreement had likewise been reached with York University. Whereupon, I
revised my new will accordingly. And I
sent the additions to my lawyer.
The upshot? About a week ago (April 26, 2018) my new will
was officially signed and witnessed. If
I might be allowed an exclamation here—halleluiah!
Lesson to be Gleaned from the Foregoing:
·
Piece by piece a person can
mount a revolutionary change even when it seems impossible
·
Be strategic, not reactive
·
Take every setback as a time to
reflect, every obstacle as a learning opportunity
·
Gather your forces around you—psych
survivors, students, colleagues, on-side administrators
·
Leverage the espoused values of
the institution that you are trying to influence (e.g., note, in this story,
the strategic use of the value academic freedom)
·
Do not worry about personal
attacks and bad publicity—all publicity is good publicity
·
Know that you can seldom just
accept the university’s standard variance clause. Figure out what is needed to safeguard what
you are trying to achieve and act accordingly—even when doing so adds years to
the process.
·
Keep your eyes on the “big
picture”, and when you have ostensibly won, just take this as a time to expand your
horizons
·
Be at once 100% visionary, 100%
principled, and 100% pragmatic.
·
Use every conceivable moment as
a cherished opportunity to educate and organize.
·
As with Wittgenstein’s ladder,
use as tools what helps you reach your goal, while being prepared to cast away
formulations and achievements no longer helpful.
Closing Remarks and an Invitation
A
quiet revolution has just happened—a formidable piece of counter-hegemony. We
now have antipsychiatry scholarships ensconced at all three universities in a major
international city. And with this, antipsychiatry has made sizeable inroads
into academia. We have not only laid down infrastructure and built in
safeguards—human and other—we have altered the discourse.
To be clear, this is just one aspect of the
gargantuan job that has to be done to make universities work for us and more
generally and more importantly, to make society as a whole work for us. And it
is absolutely critical that people concentrate on other and in many respects
more important parts of the struggle. To
keep with the focus of this particular article, however, in ending, let me ask:
If we can have antipsychiatry and/or Mad Studies scholarships embedded in every
Toronto university, why can’t we “decolonize” other cities similarly? How about New York? How about Tokyo?
Roughly speaking, I have provided, as it
were, a road map to be followed, used for inspiration, varied, as the case may
be. And in whatever way feels right to you, I invite others able and interested
to take up the challenge. Please note,
we already know that the fight to create such counter-hegemonic scholarships is
not only a meaningful one but a fight that we can actually win.
Correspondingly, it can but contribute to the winning of other battles. Who is
to say what this might lead to down the road with respect to individual freedom? Valuing of difference? The way society understands and responds to
“personal troubles”? Societal recognition of hidden racism, sexism, poverty, et. al.? The very existence of
psychiatry?
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