Shocking Treatment

Shocking Treatment was a performance exploring how psychiatry has hurt Queer people under the guise of psychiatric treatment performed at the Wellcome Collection on October 8th 2022.

homosexuality can be cured headline

I started my talk:

I am Queer in the head. What I have learned in my many years in the system is that psychiatry does not love Queerness. It has never loved me, and it has never loved the many generations of Queer people before me. It has institutionalised, lobotomised, castrated, over-medicated, aversion-therapied, pathologised, ECTed the head and Electroshocked the genitals of people it has deemed sick, punishment couched as treatment.

In response to my experience of studying Wellcome archives, I created a ‘Rorschach Test’ made of fanny prints and asked the audience to ‘diagnose’ the gay ones.

Here is what I said about being Queer in the mental health system