Stanford University Centre in Oxford

Tuesday 18th June, 2024.

Panelists: Dr. Lorna Collins, Professor Paul Lodge, Dr. Roxana Baiasu, Georgina Aasgaard.

Lorna’s blog about the academic workshop in Oxford, 18/06/24

The workshop goes very well. I improvise, I leave stuff out that I forget, I add stuff in that is not particularly relevant, but it seems to flow. I am responding to the room. I realise that I find it much easier speaking to this audience – a different kind of doctor, not a medical doctor, but largely a doctor of philosophy or research, rather than clinical. I feel safer here, it is like known, home territory. I realise I’m trying to impress. I recall my old ambition, I used to want to be Professor Collins, Not now, possibly never in the future, but at the workshop, I feel myself reliving it.

And I feel safe because these people are never going to lock me up. They are not judging me as ‘mad’ in terms of insane or someone who has no capacity and who will be detained because they can’t think for themselves and they are unsafe and a danger. They think of me as ‘mad’ which is a concept or a category or that defies concepts and categories and is a formative position that should be celebrated, recalibrated, reappropriated, reclaimed.

[…]

I am very honest. Again and again, participants say to me: “You are so brave”. They keep using this word “brave”. Have I said too much? Why is it brave to be honest? Have I overdone it? 

I don’t feel brave, I feel exhausted. But I am enjoying the audience and the collaborations I am making in the space. It is good because people find my input novel and exciting and courageous, even though it doesn’t appear to me to be any of those things. I’m just talking about me and my perceptions of the world; my perpetual Creative Transformation.

We watch the film. I have watched it a number of times by now. I still feel vulnerable. As I see participants in the workshop staring at me hallucinating in the film, I see something happening and I have an experience inside my body. I can see it and I can feel it and I can touch it; it touches me. Hard to say this in words. But I can experience it. It is horrible. Let me try to describe the experience. Two sharks, they scavenge me. They open their enormous mouths and bear their white pearly razor-sharp teeth. They bite my eyeballs. Each of my eyeball is pulled out of their socket, manhandled, ripped up and swallowed by a shark. Two sharks, two eyeballs. I am blinded. As my eyes are taken out of their sockets, they are squelched inside the two sharks’ mouths. The whites of my eyes are squashed and hacked open by the sharks’ teeth. I feel my eyes watering as I see this and feel it. I feel what is happening to my eyes, I also see it (somehow). I am weeping. Blinded.

At last, I can breathe. My family. My animal family. Thankfully, the sharks disappear. I can see now. The experience has changed.

I am able to describe this hallucination to the participants in the workshop, when appropriate. We discuss this. It is difficult but interesting. The hallucination has become a conceptual idea to discuss and deliberate. What happened to the experience? Nothing. It is still here.

[…]

The hour turns into an hour and a half, and then we wrap it up. Gone in a flash. There is a big round of applause.

[…]

Things to learn from Oxford:

I think I maybe overdid it. I think I overwhelmed participants with my honesty. I also think I overwhelmed myself. Perhaps I should tune it down a bit in Birmingham, the next workshop. Although, I can never do that. This is real.

We need to make sure that the sound on the PowerPoint file is louder so people can hear the film better.

The handouts have worked really well; people enjoyed scribbling. Is there a way we can get feedback…without it disrupting the workshop? 

Combining the panel discussion and the audience discussion is also natural and fluid. No one overtook each other, there was time for everyone who wanted to speak, and it was.

Looking forward to Birmingham!