crazy radio: the domestication of mental illness over the airwaves

8/3/2019 Crazy radio: the domestication of mental illness over the airwaves

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Crazy radio: the domestication of mental illness over the

airwaves

Tiziano Bonini

Abstract

May community radio be a therapy for patients who suffer from mental diseases? Can

radio be a useful tool both for recovering the selves of the patients and for the

normal people outside the hospitals, helping to communicate less stereotyped

images of the mental illness? This article will try to answer these questions, analysing

two different case histories, the ones of Radio la Colifata of Buenos Aires the first

radio station to be totally conducted by patients and of Radio Rete 180 of Mantova,

Italy, the last born of this genre. The article is the result of ethnographic research

conducted in Buenos Aires and in Mantova through the methods ofparticipantobservation of the live radio sessions and in-depth interviews with the patients. Theexperience I had studying these crazy radio stations led me to the belief that

community radio practice further enhances the feeling of being at home with

ourselves and with others and can effectively work as a tool of social connection and

participation, not only in the case of mentally ill patients as it will be shown here, but

also in other cases of Otherness (i.e. asylum seekers, migrants, prison inmates, etc.).

Keywords

mental illness

de-institutionalization

community radio

social connectionrecovery of the self

Introduction

Community radio is a wide and complex universe. What I have chosen to analyse in

this article is a precise portion of that universe, a precise galaxy, that of the stations

run by mentally ill patients and based inside mental health departments, and I will do

so by considering two very significant examples of this kind of community radio.

The first, which is the mother of what I will define here as crazy radio stations and

one of the most creative, is Radio la Colifata which, since 1991, has broadcast from

the patio of El Borda Hospital in Buenos Aires. The second is an Italian station basedin Mantova: Radio Rete 180, the most recent of its kind.

This study is based on fieldwork I have carried out in Argentina and in Italy. I visited

Radio la Colifata in 2000 and I went several times between March and June 2005 to

visit Radio Rete 180. I was thus able to do twelve in-depth interviews with the

patients involved in radio production.

The reason why I conducted this research is the same that prompted me in a

previous study to investigate radio listening practices inside prison, another place of

social exclusion, another total institution (Goffman 1961).

Audience-research literature lacks any focus on marginal kinds of audiences, and

painful social experiences have been pushed to the margin by the development of


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modern societies, which has involved a complex reorganization of the spheres of

experience. With the emergence of specialized knowledge systems and institutions,

some forms of experience have gradually moved away from everyday life and have

been relegated to particular institutional environments. For example, the experience of

chronic illness (either physical or mental) or the death of a loved one is more and

more often regulated by a number of institutions specialized in the care of the ill andassistance to the dying. These and other forms of experience get separated from

everyday life and assigned to institutions, access to which is often limited or

controlled in various ways.

The most painful instances of this sequestration of experience (Thompson 1995) are

represented by prisons and mental hospitals, institutions established at the beginning

of the nineteenth century (Foucault 1975).

What these two radio stations show is that doing radio inside a mental hospital could

be a major tool for the opposite process a de-sequestration of experience.

Methodological noteI visited Radio la Colifata on one occasion in 2000 taking part, as an observer, in one

of the Saturday radio broadcasts in the patio of El Borda Hospital. But it was only in

the winter of 2005 when I discovered the existence of Radio Rete 180 in Mantova

that I decided to study the phenomenon of crazy radio.

I made two visits to Radio Rete 180 between March and April 2005, carrying out

participant observation of radio production, and conducted twelve in-depth interviews

at the station in three different sessions between May and June 2005. In each session I

met three to four patients. All the interviews were individual, lasted between 15 and

30 minutes and were recorded on a minidisc. I used open questions to the patients,

always starting with the same questions: Do you listen to the radio? What do you

usually listen to? Do you want to tell me what your relationship with the radio is? My

focus issues were two: (1) the difference of meaning between listening to and making

radio, and (2) the meanings generally associated with the radio by the patients,

exemplified by the question: What does the radio mean for you? It was very difficult

to have a dialogue with the patients, even though they trusted me because they were

used to seeing me at the radio studio over the previous two months. Their attention

was very fragile and they got tired very soon. Four of them, among the twelve that I

interviewed, positively surprised me with their depth of view. Here I will report the

most powerful and significant answers given by these four wonderful men and

women.

It all started with an old tape recorder: Radio la Colifata and the airing of

mental illness

It all started when Alfredo Olivera, a young psychologist at El Borda Hospital, put a

small tape recorder into the hands of his patients (Olivera 1998). Holding that strange

box they could say whatever they wanted. Then Olivera would ask them to pass it on

into the hands of another patient. Soon after, many local radio stations asked him for

those unique recordings. This great interest in his experiment encouraged him to take

the idea further, founding a radio station that would transmit directly from inside the

hospital. In 1991 Radio la Colifata finally acquired the right to broadcast, using a very

small transmitter of 300 watts. Its name was chosen by the patients themselves: la


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colifata in the local slang means la loca, the crazy one. Radio la Colifata stands for

Crazy radio.

Currently the station goes on air every Saturday, from 14.00 to 18.45, on 100.1 MHz

FM, covering the whole hospital area and southern districts of Buenos Aires.

The hospital cares for 1,200 patients and every Saturday between 30 and 50 of themparticipate in the broadcast around a table in the centre of the patio.

Radio la Colifata has become a model and has paved the way for a flourishing group

of similar radio stations which followed its example and include Radio Estacin

Paraso based in Sanatorio El Peral in Santiago in Chile; and Radio Vilardevoz, in the

Hospital Psiquiatrico Vilardebo in Montevideo, Uruguay. This model has reached

Europe as well: four similar radio stations were recently launched in Germany and

Spain.

Radio la Colifata communication models

Radio la Colifata is an instrument of communication for patients who suffer from

mental illness. Their words are transmitted through four different models ofcommunication, each of them building different relations between patients and

society, between the inside and the outside.

1. A radio programme, broadcast every Saturday from 14.00 to 18.45 on 100.1 MHz

FM, gives the inmates of the hospital an opportunity to talk to people outside, to

people who are normal. Radio here is the medium that takes the inmates voice

into society, and has the power to take them outside the walls of the total

institution of the asylum.

2. Edited micro programmes are fragments and excerpts edited on the basis of the

Saturday broadcasted material. They last around two to three minutes and are

rebroadcast by, at present, 55 radio stations in Argentina and Uruguay. Radio la

Colifata used to send them CDs that contained 20 micro-programmes and asked

them to broadcast these programmes within two months. Now the stations directly

download the micro-programmes from the website of Radio la Colifata. The

stations are asked to send back to la Colifata a copy on cassette or CD of their

broadcast together with the comments and the reactions of their audience: these

recordings contain the broadcasting of the micro-programme transmission and the

phone calls of the listeners that followed. Once they get back to la Colifata, the

recordings are listened to with the patients, who have the opportunity to listen to

their own voice and to the audience replying to their programmes. This gives the

inmates the opportunity to reflect on themselves and to listen to the voices ofpeople outside, talking about their programmes. Radio here is the medium that

takes the voice of society into the hospital.

3. Inmates become journalists. When special events occur, some patients are askedto go out in the street to record interviews with ordinary people, while others can

go to the stadium and work as radio reporters during the matches of the Boca

Juniors team. Thanks to this journalistic practice, the patients can re-enter society

not only with their voices but also with their bodies. The sequestrated experience

of mental illness breaks the barriers and re-enters society through voices broadcast

by radio and the presence of journalist/inmates in social settings like streets,

shops and football stadiums.


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4. The Internet. La Colifata has an Internet site with an archive of the programmes

broadcast and a kind of visitors book where visitors can leave a message which

will be read on air every Saturday at the beginning of the programme. In this way

the inmates can hear the voice of unreachable people.

Colifata case history: VicenteVicente is a 60-year-old illiterate man who was been interned 15 years ago or more,

according to Alfredo Olivera (1998). In the beginning, Vicente was very shy and ill at

ease with radio. He contributed to the programme when there was a brief silence, or a

pause, careless of what was going on, or of the turn-taking in interventions, and

started to talk about God because he believed he was the true representative of God on

earth. Trying to find a place for Vicente inside the programme and to include him in

the communication flow, Olivera and the other patients decided to give him the

chance to close the transmission with his delirious talk show.

It happened once that a listener of a micro programme that included Vicentes talk

called the radio to leave a message in which he defined himself as a brother at heartof Vicente. Olivera decided to make Vicente listen to the message before his closing

talk. Vicente listened and then started his programme as usual, talking about God, and

talking just for the sake of talking. Then, at the very end of his talk, he looked around

for the first time and said: Goodbye, Brothers. Now he opens every programme with

a greeting to all the listening brothers, and he also talks about himself, about his

previous life and not only about God. He looks towards the radio tutor at the panel

control, whereas before his gaze appeared lost. He continues to talk about God, but he

also tells the story of his life, his job in a farm with the horses and the loss of his

family when he was young.

The de-institutionalization of mental illness: brief portrait of an Italian

paradigm

In Italy there are no longer any mental hospitals thanks to a statute of 1978, called Act

180/78, better known as the Basaglia Act (after the name of the psychiatrist who

proposed it). Basaglia intended the Act to be followed by a number of services of

social assistance and projects oriented towards the reintroduction of the mentally ill

person into society. According to Basaglia:

The closing down of the asylum uncovers the link between power and

knowledge, but then we need to keep on destroying the institution, whichis a more complex and dangerous movement, since it implies an

ideological suspension, an infinite procrastination of the mental illness

discourse. (Basaglia 1982)

The purpose of the reform that led to the closing down of the asylums was to de-

institutionalize mental illness. But what does de-institutionalize mean? The term has

an Anglo-Saxon origin and stands for the overcoming of total institutions. In 1975 the

American National Institute of Mental Health defined it as the practice of taking the

patient out of the asylum and handing over care and responsibility for him to the

outside world (family, associations, or society). The term in the American context

became a synonym of de-hospitalization, implying a reduction in the number ofasylum beds but without any kind of policies for social inclusion. On the contrary, de-


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institutionalization in Italy as from the late 1960s assumed a more complex

meaning. It was influenced by the social mood of the time and was absorbed by the

anti-authoritarian movements that paved the way for the approval of the reform act. It

also turned out to be a key word for shaping a new paradigm of relations between

illness and health (Venturini 2003). According to Venturini, the de-institutionalization

process consists of three steps in which the de-hospitalization only represents the zerodegree. The first step that follows the patients discharge should be his psycho-social

rehabilitation, then his social inclusion, and lastly the promotion of social value, the

third step of the process, which should have an effect on the mental health of the

community, modifying the stigma and the social representations of the illness. In fact

the final purpose of the process of de-institutionalization is to produce a change in the

way a community culturally manages mentally ill people.

Unfortunately, so far, 27 years after the Act, only a few steps have been taken in this

direction. But the history and practice of Radio Rete 180 tells us that perhaps radio,

with its classical functions of participation, connection and identity (Menduni 2001),

could be an effective tool of de-institutionalization.

Radio Rete 180: the voice of those who hear voices

The patients who take part into the radio project are people who normally live at

home with their parents, or people who have been hospitalized for a maximum of

three months. These people come daily to the hospital to work on their therapies.

Radio is conceived as one of them.

Radio Rete 180 does not have a frequency but it has plans to apply for one. Its

communication tools are similar to the ones of Radio la Colifata, but less effective,

due to the lack of a frequency.

1.Recorded radio programmeEvery Friday afternoon, between 15.00 and 17.00, around 2030 patients gather in the

radio room to take part in the programme. The programme content may vary

considerably. I took part in an election contest between two candidates of the two

opposite parties in the city. They came to Radio Rete to present their programmes and

answer the patients questions. Between one reply and another, the patients sang a

song, read poetry and short stories written by them. This kind of event gives them the

opportunity to express themselves, to become part of the radio flow, meet public

persons and be listened to by them.

2.Broadcast of the recorded programmeEvery programme is recorded and then edited into a suitable version for a local radio

station in Mantua, Radio Base, to broadcast. This gives the patients the opportunity to

reach societys ears, and to listen to themselves when they are at home with their

parents.

3. The InternetOn Radio Rete 180s website there is a place where it is possible to download some of

their programmes. Through the Internet the existence of the radio can be heard outside

the city of Mantua.


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Discussion

Even if the Argentinean model is more structured and effective than the Italian, they

are both excellent examples of what Brecht thought radio should have been: a

communication tool, a horizontal, bi-directional and socializing tool (Brecht 1975).

The microphone works as a threshold, a virtual space, between two opposite worlds:

that of the mental hospital and its opposite the one outside. When the microphone isturned on, these worlds are virtually in touch. For the patients doing radio is like

overcoming a ritual task; they are indeed undergoing a rite of passage. Ritual passages

change the status of the person who undergoes them. Similarly, while doing radio, the

patients see their status changing, from people without a voice, without attention,

without responsibility, into responsible people (people able to respond), who are, even

virtually and temporarily, reintroduced into society. In the eyes of society they are no

longer the crazy ones: they are the guys from the radio. They, the inmates, repossess

their own words. Now they have someone to address:

What I like most is doing interviews, finding people to talk to. Its not like

in this case, where you are interviewing me. Id like to be the one whodoes the interview.(Francesco, 32 years)

I believe that listening and doing radio are two different kinds of

emotions. Listening is something more interior, something that pushes you

to reflect on yourself, even to ask yourself some questions, to work on

yourself. Doing radio, on the other hand, is a bigger task: you have to

translate what you have inside your soul for the people outside that cannot

even see or know you. You have to be able to be understood, to

communicate something, to check whether your message hit the target or

not. This makes me feel more responsible than before. I grew up.(Cinzia,28 years)

Through radio, the space between the hospital and society, between the inside and the

outside once a separated space becomes an osmotic and a liquid one, full of

porosities. The de-sequestration of the experience of mental illness leads to the

inclusion even if fragile and temporary of the patients into the public sphere.

Doing radio helps me forget the voices I normally hear. I used to hear

voices, so I wanted to take part in the radio because it makes me feel

better, it makes me feel a person like the others, accepted into the norm.

It makes me feel together with other patients, who share the sameproblems as me, so I minimize my problems, they liquefy. Radio makes

me lose solitude.(Luisa, 46 years)

So far, there are almost no clinical studies about the effects of radio as a therapy for

recovering the patients self. The only one is a study of Alfredo Olivera, the

psychologist who founded Radio la Colifata. He observed that doing radio prevented

patients being re-hospitalized: in fact, none of the patients who underwent the radio

therapy and were discharged in 2004 needed to re-enter the hospital, while 66% of the

discharged patients whose radio therapy was interrupted had to re-enter the hospital1.

1 See A. Olivera (2005),La Colifata, radio terapia des-estigmatizante,http://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos.cgi?wAccion=vergrupo&wIdGrupo=0479 . Visited June, 4,

2005.
http://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos.cgi?wAccion=vergrupo&wIdGrupo=0479http://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos.cgi?wAccion=vergrupo&wIdGrupo=0479http://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos.cgi?wAccion=vergrupo&wIdGrupo=0479http://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos.cgi?wAccion=vergrupo&wIdGrupo=0479


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In addition, Olivera adds that radio therapy helped patients to be discharged: 35% of

the internal patients who did radio in 2004 succeeded in being discharged (Olivera

2005). As a psychologist, Olivera saw that the recovery of the self is not only a result

of clinical therapy, but has to do also with the social effects of radio (Olivera 1998).

From what I could observe, the positive effects of radio as a therapy are strictly

related to the de-sequestration of the experience of mental illness through radio: thepatient, the Other, becomes one among the others: it makes me feel a person like

the others, as Luisa said. S/he is no more an alien, a foreigner. To be a foreigner is,

Kristeva argues, to be of no account to others. No one listens to you, you never have

the floor Your speech will have no effect (Kristeva 1991). Being recognized by a

community, first by the community of the patients, then by the larger community

outside the hospital, means no longer being a stranger, healing the feeling of being out

of place. Through the radio, the Other, as conceived by Kristeva, is able to shift to a

position inside the public sphere.

Radio practice for mentally ill patients acts as a tool for the domestication of their

otherness, as a frame inside which they can feel comfortably at ease with the others:

What pushes me to do radio? Some feeling inside me that makes me create

something that belongs to myself, something that I can feel as being a

product of myself. When people listen to me I am proud of myself, I feel

at ease, like when I was a child at home. If I just listen to radio I cannot

get that feeling. (Edda, 50 years)

Conclusion

After several visits to Radio Rete 180 and my interviews with the patients, I have

been left with the belief that radio aroused in the patients an undiscovered sense of

place and belonging. When I asked one of them what he was going to do the next

Friday, he proudly answered me that he had to go to the radio. Even if the radio studio

was located inside the hospital, he perceived the radio as an autonomous space, a

place where you can feel at home, de Certeau would say.

If radio listening can arouse a certain feeling of being at home, of inhabiting a

place as I found in the meanings attached to listening to radio in prison (Bonini and

Perrotta 2005), I believe that community radio practice further enhances the feeling of

being at home with ourselves and with others and can effectively work as a tool of

social connection and participation, not only in the case of mentally ill patients as has

been shown here, but also in other cases of Otherness (i.e. asylum seekers, migrants,prison inmates, etc.).

Contributors details

Tiziano Boniniis a doctoral student in Media, Communication and the Public Sphere

at the University of Siena, researching media, migration and globalization. He also

holds a research scholarship in Radio Languages, Theory and Techniques at the

Communication Institute of IULM University, Milan. He has written a book on the

history, the aesthetics and the social uses of radio and the Internet.

Contact detailsThe Communication Institute, IULM University, Via Carlo Bo 1, 20149 Milan, Italy.


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E-mail: [email protected]

References

AA.VV. (2003),Psichiatria democratica. Trentanni, Pistoia: Associazione CentroDocumentazione.

Basaglia, F. (1982), Scritti, Torino: Einaudi.

Brecht, B. (1975), Scritti sulla letteratura e sullarte, Torino: Einaudi.Foucault, M. (1975),Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York:

Random House.

Goffman, E. (1961),Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and

Other Inmates, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Kristeva, J. (1991), Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University Press.Menduni, E. (2001),Il mondo della radio, Bologna: Il Mulino.

Olivera, A. (1998), Utilizacin de los medios de comunicacin como potenciales

productores de espacios de salud, athttp://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos.cgi?wAccion=vergrupo&wIdGrupo=0479

________ (2005), Visited June 4, 2005.

La Colifata, radio terapia des-estigmatizante, at

http://lacolifata.openware.biz/archivos. Visited June 4, 2005.

Thompson, John B. (1995), The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media ,

Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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crazy radio: the domestication of mental illness over the airwaves

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