Opening Comments From the Margins: Speaking up on mental health Syd Tutton, National President Canberra, 24th July 2009
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of this land and expressing my respect for the elders of this country, past and present. In a society such as ours almost every aspect of life is viewed through the prism of individual responsibility and individual endeavour. There is some positive value in this view. It is seen, for example, to encourage and acknowledge individual ingenuity and enterprise. There is also, however, an enormous downside to this philosophy and it is this downside that is the core concern of the St Vincent de Paul Society. I am speaking, of course, of the fact that this almost exclusive focus on individual success leads to an unacceptable level of blame being placed on the shoulders of those who are deemed to be failures. Forgive me for putting this so bluntly but to put it any other way would be to water down the severity and cruelty with which so many of our sisters and brothers are treated as a result of this dominant philosophy of individualism. This is essentially an economic individualism, a view of the world that sees the human only in terms of economics. As a British sociologist has recently put it: This “economic man� is like John Wayne, riding into town, then cantering off into the sunset, indifferent to how he has affected the town. But we know very well how the town has been affected in reality. In a prosperous nation such as ours those who are struggling on a low income are punished and made to bear the brunt of economic insecurity. The first peoples of this country are punished for having been colonised and dispossessed. Sole parents, people with disabilities and people experiencing long-term unemployment are blamed for being excluded from the labour market. And people living with a mental illness are stigmatised and left without the services they need or the respect which is their human right.
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