We Are All Sick!

Hospital for Self Medication is a self-organised hospital. It is an experimental space for developing threads of health care with a communist texture; threads from which we can hopefully weave the fabric of a new community of the exhausted, the displaced, the ill, the disabled, the traumatised, the injured, the weathered, the suicidal. We need a new hospital built by the sick.

The Hospital for Self Medication is an experimental institution that will work with critical forms of care and therapy. We want to lay bare and challenge the violent roots and practices of traditional health care. We will speculate, search for and try out new ways. Our bodies and minds have been dissected into increasingly smaller sections within the regime of present-day medical care. The specialisation and separation of the capitalist system structuring our ideas of health care have to be countered by collective and everyday forms. We would like to put the mind-body back together and reclaim our own experience of the fuzzy contours of our physical selves.

Mental Health

Our focus is mental health, but mental health involves not only the whole of our bodies but also the whole of the society that we face every morning. Illness within capitalist mental health is individualised: it is your illness; illness is an interior of yours. If you are not able to perform a normal everyday life, you are labelled ill and need treatment to recover your ability to reproduce what is alien to you. If your disability is a threat to society, mental health care is the treatment. Damaging pharma and in some cases electroshock therapy are considered as the only cure. As you bear the weight of this treatment, the outside world you are discharged into remains the exact same thing that made you ill in the first place. With the Hospital of Self Medication, we look at the everyday as a site of alienation, but also as a site of struggle against what makes us ill. Our hospital is situated in the everyday and not a distant location in a clinic separated from our daily mess and material reality.

Social Ills

The more we work, the more we produce the means of our own submission. We create and recreate the source of our own misery. Capitalist relations constitute a breakdown in which we live. My own breakdowns were breakdowns amidst already sick social relations. No deep inner mysterious code to decipher. Only a species-being with all the faults and errors that being human offers in the context of an ever-developing crisis. What I experienced was a breakdown in the family, among my friends, in my community. Breakdowns are truly social; they are a collapse of your social relations. You and I, your friends, and your friends’ friends. Still, we are made sick by an abstraction. The planet also suffers these ills. The new hospital will examine the violence of the capitalist relations that we live in and reproduce everyday.

Care for the Carer!

Care has always been labour. Care has always been forced. Care has been unpaid work in many households. The idea of the private secluded family is nothing more than a white bourgeois fantasy. Today, families are cut through by all kinds of monetised reproductive services, everything from house cleaning, childcare, take-away food, and care for the elderly, to surrogacy. Care is a specialised, racialised, and gendered activity fully integrated within capitalist relations. The division of care labour exploits the precarious, migrants, and paperless in an endless grind. Feminised and racialised in character, care has become a toxic service: a forced and monetised relation. Reproductive labour, as always, exploits the already impoverished and comforts the privileged. Care has become un-care. In the capitalist hospitals, I met many nurses who shared their human subjectivity with me in their willingness to help me recover. They were amazing. The system was sick. The Hospital of Self Medication will fight against this bullshit, the privatised professionalisation of the care sector.

We Are Not Patients!

To be a patient means suffering in silence. A lot of waiting rooms. The capitalist hospital wants you to become a patient, to accept the passivity of being a patient. You are the object of the doctors and their pharma. We as patients need to abolish ourselves as such. Communist patient collectives are collectives that have liberated themselves from being patients. Their main concern is deinstitutionalisation. The process of deinstitutionalisation is a process of developing alternatives, new forms of collectivity beyond that of the isolated patient, and the proliferation of the sensations of not being sick, moving towards new ways of communal life.

Anti-therapy

Our interest is based on a wide range of experiences with professional therapy, both within the hospital system and outside of it. The question is whether therapy should be a specialised practice at all. What I have experienced in the Hospital for Self Medication is a form of layman’s therapy, a form of communal conversation and care. I think we must move towards a non-therapeutic therapy that does not hold the patient down in the role of patient. This also means the end of the role of the therapist. The patient is compelled as a patient to abolish themselves and thereby their opposite, the therapist, which determines their existence and makes them the patient. We must leave the false binary therapist-patient behind to experiment with collective care. Here we are talking about a liberated care relation that is built on the belief of self-organisation and self-empowerment as processes of struggle against an inadmissible present. Care and therapy will merge in the communist hospital.

Do We Want to Recover?

Recovery means returning to normal, returning to capitalist relations. Have a good recovery, my friend. Welcome back to the ice-cold waters of egocentric calculations; the productive notion of the body, ready to work. But there is no recovery from life within the trauma. Suffering is part of living capitalism. I am exhausted, you are exhausted, we are exhausted. We don’t want to recover any of this.

For Medication

Most official pharma is about compressing emotional impulses and destroying memory. We want a medication that makes you remember more rather than less. We want medication that can enchant the body and the mind. We want to experience new sensuality instead of feeling numb. We have worked with sound as medication as well as with poetry. New drugs have to be tested.

Space as Therapy

Can space be therapeutic? The Hospital for Self Medication is a concrete space where we experiment with organising our bodies collectively. There are no beds, no chairs, no desks. It is a soft space permanently under construction. The location of traditional asylums outside the city shows a principle of segregation that is intended to be both therapeutic and architectural. In other words, conceptions of psychiatric care always carry an implicit thinking of space that should be understood not only in terms of architecture but also in terms of its urban and territorial context. Our Hospital is within the fabric of a household where people live. It is a living, talking hospital in our attic: you access the hospital through our kitchen. We are connected, occasionally through our in-house radio station. We know that the city we live in is alien to us, but that is where our sick friends are living their lives.

A New Language of Madness and Care

In the language of madness, the border between words and action is blurred as words constantly slip into becoming action. The language of madness reconnects to the wound, putting into perspective the present-day suffering, finding words and creating sentences giving form to traces of the trauma that has been erased or repressed. We don’t talk about the trauma, the wound, because it is counter-productive to the social relations of the present. This is not easy. This is a struggle, and we have to develop the language as we go. Care is struggle. This language is action as new utterances emerge. Care for the other is listening to the trauma, as the language of madness is being produced. The language of madness is out of control. Don’t domesticate this new language, weaponise it.

Care Income Now, Sick Pay for All!

Care is politics. Care can become new social relations based on lived communism. Professional care is exploitation. Care Income Now! We want to support carers everywhere. In the home, in the hospital, in the workplace. More self-organised, community-based hospitals! Against the economisation of care! Stop killing us with your capitalism! Abolish the capitalist hospital! End work, cars, mass production, tourism, wellness and health industry, pharma! We need a new hospital built by the sick! We need to weave new weapons; we need the soft blanket of communist care!