Aidan Shingler talks to Theresa Rahman and Joe McConnell

JM: Could we start by talking about when you first began to have the experiences which have led to the work you have created?
AS: Well, I was nineteen, but really it was as a result of my experience of what was diagnosed or labelled schizophrenia that I embarked upon an art career, because it was manifest very visually, imbued with signs, symbols, synchronicity and significance. As a result of that I went to art college to learn the vocabulary and language of visual media – it was a very conscious decision to embark upon that route. Subsequently my work has evolved into a campaigning mechanism, using art as a campaigning vehicle, not least to highlight the spiritual and creative potential of schizophrenia, but also to highlight the human rights violations often perpetrated by the psychiatric community on those it is entrusted to assist. That is a betrayal of trust.

To talk about diagnosis, I use the word schizophrenia but I redefine it to my own ends: basically for psychosis read psychic, for schizophrenia read spiritual conflict.
I regard diagnosis as sabotaging the experience that I had, and I think a message to the (awful term) ‘user movement’ is reclaim and validate your own experiences, because they are invalidated so often by the psychiatric establishment and fraternity.

TR: When you’re saying it’s possible for people to validate their own experience, is it that they could formulate a new vocabulary for themselves and/or a new sense of meaning?
AS: Basically when I talk about sabotaging the experience, there is a whole vocabulary that is imposed upon the individual to perceive themselves – as ill, as deluded, as being diseased. All these are compounded with the diagnostic labels, all that infuses into the psyche of the individual that has experienced altered states at their most vulnerable point. And I think that if you take that on board – those definitions and words and that imposed clinical understanding, you take on that hue. So basically, for me, there is a big danger that it creates a victim mentality – people who perceive themselves as such. And to be honest, I know this because I've been there myself, I've experienced this myself – when I took on board the psychiatric influence and intervention and took on board their definitions, I entered a terrible space in my mind. It is about articulating for oneself what one experiences, rather than taking on the hue of what orthodoxy understands. And that can be done, I think, as a collective – as a Survivor or Refuser movement, collectively redefining experiences – but it can also be done individually and I think that's really important.

JM: You were talking just before we started about the phenomenon of labelling, which does seem to be a theme in your work as well, but if we could ask how you respond to the labelling that is put on you within the context of disability arts.
AS: Indeed. When I launched Beyond Reason in 1996, I was involved with the disability arts movement to facilitate the exhibition of the work – and the disability movement were great in assisting to get that on the road. But suddenly I found myself labelled, and the work was about challenging labels as much as anything else. An uninvited ‘label’ was that I was embraced and called a ‘disabled artist’, which is not something I actually invited myself and I wasn't comfortable with. Again, that is not to dismiss the philosophy and motives of the disability movement, which I embrace absolutely. Within the context of the exhibition Only Smarties Have The Answer that is now exhibiting at the Diorama, I am setting that in the context of disability but in the context of psychiatry having a propensity to disable, rather than as a disabled artist myself.

While we are on the subject, I think it would be worth talking about disability and talking about the word ‘disability’ which I do have difficulty with. For me it is a word that has negative connotations, in the sense that it has a disempowering feel to it, rather than an empowering one. I just feel that whilst I acknowledge the politically correct understanding, which is disability as being disenfranchisement – which I can appreciate and really wholeheartedly concur with – I think there is ambiguity there. I think that the disability title opens up the door to misunderstandings and all sorts of public perceptions from ‘little poor old you’ to ‘freak’, dare I say. If we were to use the term ‘anti-disability’ in the same sense we talk about anti-discrimination, that for me would be a slogan and a banner I would comfortably and willingly march under. But sadly I’m not sure that the disability movement would be willing to adopt such a radical term at this juncture. I live in hope.

TR: As part of your own personal experience, what other artists or media have influenced you?
AS: The artists Calder and Duchamp: they are the most akin that I can see to me, in relation to the media I use, or I’m akin to them, and I know that subliminally if not consciously I’ve been very affected by Calder. That’s not in relation to the content of the work, that’s the vehicle through which it’s communicated, the style in which it’s done in a sense. Regarding content, I don’t know of other people who are using their work as a campaigning tool to highlight the spiritual and creative potential of schizophrenia, but I’d love to meet them, whoever they are, if they’re about. But on a more superficial level I just love the work of Andy Goldsworthy – I just think he’s a highly evolved human being, actually, without wanting to sound elitist. I see him as having an exquisitely sensitive mind, and see his work in an age of humanity when we’ve moved on. I can see many more future artists working in this way in this way. Basically I think he's ahead of his time.

JM: Do you think that since you began in 1996, anything has changed within the system?
AS: Certainly psychiatry has become more sophisticated; whether or not it has become more sensitive is another issue. But coming back to this term which I don’t like, ‘user’, user involvement has changed. There was absolutely no window of opportunity for users in the 70s and 80s so things are changing in that way. That is the way we will reform the system and I think it is potentially really very exciting that that is happening.

TR: Would you like to talk about your current campaigning work?
AS: I’d like to talk about the Kiss It! XX Campaign, which is an invitation to survivors of the psychiatric system, friends and allies, to apply injection plasters in the form of band aids or elastoplasts in the form of two Xs to the seat of their pants, trousers or skirt, assemble in London and walk on Valentine’s Day 2005 to strategic locations like the Department of Health, hopefully culminating at the Imperial War Museum that was the old site of Bedlam hospital. The campaign is called Kiss It !XX and the idea is that we make a humorous and defiant mass gesture or a series of defiant mass gestures, which probably speak for themselves by bending over. I’m hoping that the event will culminate in what I’m terming a celebration of survivor empowerment – an event that will really give us something to celebrate, something to sing about and consolidate the day, and also the history of the Survivor Movement, and take things on from there. Obviously the idea is to generate media attention and open up the debate. Again the specific thrust of the campaign is about pointing out human rights violations in relation to forced drug treatment.

JM: Are you aware, outside of a psychiatric system, of any healing communities?
AS: Part of my work is a research project that I'm working on called Cry for Sanctuary, which is all about creating environments that bypass the psychiatric system but incorporate into them what may be useful – it’s very much an embryo project. But there are beginning to be communities that bypass the psychiatric system, healing communities: they are very few and far between. But when their value becomes recognised I can see them mushrooming in the fullness of time. That would hopefully give people a choice of environments or places which they are drawn to rather than forced to go to. That seems to be the way and that will only happen when the places and the people working in them are non-judgmental, accepting, truly compassionate and non-threatening. Basically psychiatry itself is responsible for many crises because – and I would include suicides in that – people are threatened or intimidated about using the system. In relation to mental health, the word ‘service’ is, I think, a deceptive term. If it were not, why then, when I was receiving psychiatric hospitality, did the sheets of my bed have the words ‘Health Authority’ indelibly stamped on them? It is literally an authority.

I can see change happening, but these things take time and things happen from experience and ideas. The initial word asylum came from the Quaker word: they were literally sanctuaries or asylums for people who were experiencing what they termed spiritual conflict. But that’s been subverted and superceded by the psychiatric fraternity, and asylums obviously have very different connotations now. I’m not in the business of reclaiming words like asylum: they’ve been stained and tainted by the shameful history that psychiatry has never openly acknowledged that it has, as a professional body. So I redefine it – sanctuary is what I’m looking for.

Just for the record, talking about the shameful history of psychiatry, it has lamentably and regrettably carried aspects of that shameful past into the present. Before psychiatry can heal others it must first heal itself. What psychiatrists don’t often realise is that they too are also under observation and the eyes of truth are watching.