OPSEU Ads Come Down, Get Jammed
filed in Canadian Current Events, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Violence on Nov.12, 2008
The controversy over the sensationalist ads by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union continues. In a Nov. 10 press release, OPSEU acknowledged the ads “may be moving”, but vowed to keep them up. However, the billboards outside Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, which depicted a battered woman and implied she was beaten by a mental patient, were taken down shortly after protests reached the billboard company. A press release from OPSEU today confirms the ad “provoked a heated debate within the community over whether the union and the victims of the violence should publicly remain silent in the face of mounting assaults, for fear of further stigmatizing mental health patients.”
OPSEU continues to run the image on its website and seems to be unapologetic; in fact, they state they are “challenging community agencies concerned about the stigma of violence to urge CAMH to do a better job to protect the workers who care for patients at CAMH, as well as vulnerable patients who are also at risk.”
It’s OPSEU, though, that has the history of being one-sided in this discussion, and their lack of sensitivity to patients and the violence perpetrated against patients by staff, along with their refusal to apologize to users of mental health services, in this instance, merely reinforces that fact. Such attitudes from OPSEU and CAMH staff can only, in the end, delay the broader systemic changes needed to make CAMH a safer, healthier place for everyone.
Today, CMM received a copy of this re-appropriating of the ad into a different message:
November 17th, 2008 on 12:43 pm
Click on link above for update.
November 21st, 2008 on 3:08 pm
What was the true meaning of posting this OPSEU ads up around the CAHM campus and bus shelters.
Contracts? + Agreements? = MONEY
November 21st, 2008 on 9:39 pm
It’s clearly ‘discrimination’ – so present the issue to the Courts,and The Human Rights Commission.
That in it self, would be interesting!
The Human Right Commission covers discrimination/rascism, however stigma is less defined.
Little softer word, not as much spark as discrimination.
November 25th, 2008 on 11:03 am
I am glad the Toronto Star wrote about the posters, I did not know they were there.
Is there a union for patients to advocate for them against abuse done to them, and be able to put up pictures of the victims of abuse , I don’t think so.