AN AUDIENCE WITH AN ALLY offers an informal, interactive space for you to ask the questions you want to ask.
About the ERNI Movement
The ERNI Movement seeks to collect Human Rights allies who wish to take a position on the way in which distress, including extreme distress, is routinely understood and responded to across the globe. These may be people who have used mental health services or who currently use mental health services along with Teachers, Social Workers, Psychologists, Mental Health Nurses, Community Workers and University Lecturers. The ERNI Declaration is a shared position statement that posits that EMOTIONS ARE NOT ILLNESSES. It states that ‘people experience a range of emotional distress including misery, a sense of failure, despair for the future, self-loathing, worry, loneliness, heart-break (and so on).
Find out more about The Erni Movement here
The ERNI declaration is a Human Rights deposition created by a group of professionals and people who have used mental health services in the UK who were deeply concerned about the way in which human distress has almost universally been medicalised and the implications of this for people’s lives. The founders experienced ethical dissonance that made providing or accessing help often unbearable and, whilst being aware that there was an increasing evidence base for alternatives to ‘treatment as usual’ and international groups of allies, the lived reality for many people was that they still felt alone in their views in the context of professional services working to the dominant world view. The ERNI declaration was created to quantify allies and, in doing so, illustrate widely the growth in number of those who do not ascribe to the medicalising of distress and the disordering of difference.
Since its inception three years ago, the declaration has been translated into ten languages, endorsed by leading authors in the field and has been signed by hundreds of people who use, work within or interface with so called ‘mental health services’
This event will be recorded for delegates who can’t make it live.
Get tickets here
 to hear about their crucial work.){kind=link}
