Shannon E. Hardie

Shannon Elizabeth Hardie

High Park Manor,

1926 Bloor Street West,

Toronto, Ontario,

M6P 3K8

Canada

ShannonEHardie@hotmail.com

2009

I am writing today, to advocate for psychiatric survivors and addicts in the name of identification, recognition and program proposals. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder in 1998. I fell ill with this mental disability in Spain in 1998, while studying at the Universidad de Salamanca, only to recover in 2004 November entering a now three year remission. Incidentally, in many forms, I have had the opportunity of experiencing a ten-year study of Canadian poverty from 1998-2007. My experience of Canadian poverty is consumer survivor based however cross-associated with welfare recipients, the working poor, immigrant settlers, the elderly and the homeless population. Incidentally, I have been of the experience of housing projects for consumer survivors since 2001. I have experienced abject poverty, slum conditions, and marginalization as attributed in some aspect to the consumer survivor experience. Following my experience, I vow to advocate for social, economic, political and cultural change.

To introduce my academic history, in 1994 I initiated a study of Spanish and International Development at Dalhousie University; I cross listed with the University of King's College for Philosophy, the University of St. Mary's for International Development, the Universidad de La Havana for Cuban Studies, the Universidad de Salamanca for Spanish Studies and the University of Toronto for Spanish and Film Studies. I decided in my third year to focus on National Development as I couldn’t justify the poverty I found here at home. I left my university studies in 1999 with what I believed to be a two-credit shortage on a four-year degree. Following in-depth advocacy, I have the intention of returning to the marginalized, structural opportunity, psycho-education and the means to income creation.

I feel that I must emphasize the end goal of my opportunity is to aspire to become a peer support worker, working on a team of community treatment, hired in part as a consumer survivor representative. I have applied Sociological theories and practices to better the discussion and further, to gather the information that I could apply to my advocacy work. I am of the school of thought that consumer survivors would be served appropriately by fellow consumer survivors, who could provide relativity, mediation, advocacy and an understanding of needs and possibilities. The Peer Support roll is en vogue today, working on a team of community treatment hence, an understanding of consumer survivors in education is implicit

Patricia Deegan is a consumer survivor who received her Doctoral Degree after years of coping with a mental illness. She can be found on the Internet with her writings on the consumer survivor. She is an inspiration, hope and opportunity for me. Inclusively, I worked as a consumer survivor representative for 2006-2007 at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health on the Empowerment Council Board. At present, I have been given the invitation to implement a psycho-education group at the Peace Ranch in Caledon, Ontario. The director of the Peace Ranch called me their "champion", “Resident Advocate” and arranged for me to take an Intentional Peer Support training with Shery Mead, a human rights movement pioneer, who handed me a certificate. At a Mental Health and Addictions engagement hosted by the Central West Local Integrated Health Network (LHIN) I encountered a mental health practitioner who, after reviewing my invested advocacy unto the LIHN: "Disenfranchised", invited me to speak to her staff on the Toronto consumer survivor experience. I was also given the invitation to publish my work at that engagement. Since then I have published two issues of my magazine Me.decine, have been published in the Canadian Mental Health Association Magazine and have made two speeches for the Peace Ranch fundraisers.

My studies of Spanish and International Development at Dalhousie, applied to national development, have made me relate with understanding and circumstance to Spanish immigrants and have made me have insight, solidarity, analysis, innovation and mediation in my advocacy. I am enthusiastic about the opportunity of applying my accumulation of studies on Canadian poverty to the Consumer Survivor Experience Part One: Identification. I perceive of my experience of ten years of poverty as having provided me with field studies. On this path I will hopefully bring greater opportunity to consumer survivors. I have related my studies on Canadian poverty to theory and fact in the included reports on The Consumer Survivor Experience.

I have written two essays: The Consumer Survivor Experience: Survivor Currents-the Survivor and The Consumer Survivor Experience: Survivor Currents -the Dislocated. "The Survivor" is an identification of marginalized consumer survivors and is mental health based. "The Dislocated" is an identification of the street culture that many marginalized consumer survivors belong to, and is addictions based. These essays are necessary for identification of the ethnic group that service providers interact with.

In the day of the client centred, client driven model, advocacy on clients behalf is necessary to defend and accommodate, identify and recognize the needs and conditions of consumer survivors. For the service providers to understand the consumer survivor experience, the Consumer Survivor Experience Part One: Identification is relativity and best encountered through their courses of studies. It is an age of mental health in the institutions wherein there are multiple forms of government provisions. It is an age wherein social work encounters consumer survivors as their clients hence a short book on the experience would be beneficial to the said education.

Please consider the writings as a voice from the margins.

Yours sincerely,

Shannon E. Hardie

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