Building Psychiatric Alternatives: The Weglauf Haus in Berlin with Kim Wichera
When it comes to mental health crises, there are incredible and highly effective healing alternatives to psychiatric institutionalization worldwide! These respite centres offer agency, choice, freedom, and coordinated care, in place of the dominant “medicate and separate” model. Activists, clinicians, peers, healers, and researchers have been building and uplifting these models for decades, many of which are more cost-effective and keep people out of hospitals for longer or indefinitely. The issue is, no one is talking about them. Here in Berlin, I got to sit down in person with Kim Wichera, an artist and activist who has spent their life devoted to uplifting alternatives to coercive treatment and fighting for those who society has left behind.
“You have innovative programs with people with lived experience working in the system, but not in positions of power…The system tries to reform itself, tries to co-opt critique, and it creates a tragedy in a sense. People who can change the system are not yet in positions of power to change the system.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode - Building Psychiatric Alternatives : The WeglaufHaus in Berlin with Kim Wichera:
Disillusionment with the psychiatric system & why it so easily causes harm
History of Berlin’s anti-psychiatric movement and why there is a deep need for alternatives
How the respite center Weglaufhaus came to exist as one of two centers in Germany
Germany vs U.S. mental health system
“Members of the community sometimes behave in a way that we do not understand. For sure, a lot of people are suffering and asking for support, but at the same time there is a bigger question of: how in our society do we want to give space for people to be? (...) You may want support or not, but instead of locking away people, and having this media picture of people being violent just because they are speaking in a way you don’t understand.”
About Kim Wichera:
Kim Wichera [GER/PL] (they/them) is an artist and activist based in Berlin, Germany. They play live for dance / theater / performance productions and composes hypnotic sounds for multi-channel installations, virtual reality videos, experimental films, radio art and movement. Their work have been part of the Biennale for Electro-Acoustic Music, the CTM Transmediale Festival and TanzTage Berlin. For self-government projects, international organizations and activist groups, they speak at conferences, gives lectures and publishes books as a co-editor . They have spoken at the UN, at various universities and community spaces in Germany and at conferences in the USA, Turkey, Italy, Austria and France. Member of INTAR [International Network Towards Alternatives and Right-based Supports] and IDHA [Institute for the Development of Human Arts New York].
DEPTH Work - A Holistic Mental Health Podcast
This is a space for those who love to dive into the underbelly, to revel in the mystery, question assumptions about what is normal, play in both/and, and honour the wide range of human emotions.
As a complex trauma survivor, holistic counsellor and co-founder of a mental health institute, I learned that there is immense wisdom in our pain and what we call crazy is just what we are yet not willing to understand and explore. Let’s dive in!
LINKS:
www.idha-nyc.org
