‘Environ-Mental Health’
on Saturday 23 February 2019,
from 1:00 to 6:30pm

Click here for booking

featuring special guest Nora Bateson

Nora Bateson , based in Sweden and the USA, is an award-winning filmmaker, social justice-oriented systems thinker, writer and educator.

Her work asks the question:

“How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within,
so we may improve our interaction with the world?”

Nora wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology and information technology together in a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems.

Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles released by Triarchy Press, UK, 2016, a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems and complexity is the core text of the Harvard University LILA program 2017-18. Her new book, Warm Data, will be released in 2019 by Triarchy Press.

A big shout out to VMIAC – https://www.vmiac.org.au/  – The Victorian Mental Illness Awareness Council – who have generously provided their spacious event venue for this independent ‘not-for-profit’ public forum.

The event is ticketed – to book please go to Trybooking – https://www.trybooking.com/BARTZ

Any proceeds will go to the International Bateson Institute – http://internationalbatesoninstitute.org/

Nora Bateson’s father, Gregory, the subject of her award-winning film, ‘An Ecology of Mind’ – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnL0ZB1SzZY and https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bateson

critiqued the biomedical model of mental illness (genetic determinants and chemical changes) and proposed a much broader, more integrated socio-ecological epistemology of mental health.

He developed the notion of the double-bind and contributed enormously to the growth of family therapy, and community and ecological systems approaches to communicative and relational health and our understanding of mental illness.

“Rigor alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”

― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

“We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong” 
― Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Gregory Bateson’s first wife was the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who went on to become president of the World Federation for Mental Health.

“Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements

are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals.”

― Margaret Mead

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

― Margaret Mead

Environ-Mental Health will be conducted over four sessions from 1:00 to 6:30pm:

1. a ‘scene-setting’ Warm Data and Mental Illness short presentation from Nora Bateson
2. a dialogue on resistance to and transcendence of the status quo hegemonic model with VMIAC Human Rights Adviser and mental health advocate and consultant, Indigo Daya
3. a dialogue on attachment, love and biological, psychological, socio-cultural diversity with systems family therapist, educator and author of ‘Rethinking Love’, Claire Miran-Khan
4. a dialogue on climate/environmental/relational threats/opportunities – mutual self-help, media ecology open dialogue and peer support with MemeFest founder Oliver Vodeb and Laceweb curator Les Spencer.

Intention: The purpose of the event is to engage with and explore the full range of situations, contexts and relationships and determinants and dynamics that influence mental health and mental illness in the 21^st Century.

What to expect: to participate in a lively, thought provoking exploration of our current global and local social, cultural, political, economic, ecological and cosmological challenges and opportunities and how they impact our individual and collective emotional, psychological and mental health.

Anticipate: the offering up of many solutions to currently intractable mental health system crises, a broadening and deepening of the context and relationships relevant to mental health and mental illness and much ‘food for thought’ for the forthcoming Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health.

Consumers: Consumer/survivors of institutional psychiatric services are encouraged to attend; as are mental health professionals; carers, family and community members; as well as human rights and social, cultural, democratic, ecological and climate justice advocates and activists. 

Here’s the ticket booking link again: https://www.trybooking.com/BARTZ

Inclusion: If cost is a barrier for you, please contact Daryl Taylor on 0497 097 047 to discuss how you can secure a place.

Nora Bateson’s social media sites and links are listed below:

Engaging Emergence: https://vimeo.com/258433882 

Twitter https://twitter.com/NoraBateson?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

WordPress: https://norabateson.wordpress.com/ 

Medium: https://medium.com/@norabateson 

Linked in: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nora-bateson-b4a2456/detail/recent-activity/posts/ 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/norabateson 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/norabateson/ 

Website: https://batesoninstitute.org/ 

Film: http://www.anecologyofmind.com/ 

Reviews: http://www.anecologyofmind.com/reviews.html 

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bateson  

In 2019 the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health will begin deliberations.

‘The royal commission is going to give us the answers we need. It is going to change lives. It is going to save lives. Only a royal commission will help us build the mental health system our community deserves.’
― Daniel Andrews, Premier of Victoria

“VMIAC welcomes the Labor Party’s promise of a Royal Commission if re-elected. We believe that an inquiry into mental health services in our state is long overdue and urgently needed. As a peak organisation representing Victorian people with an experience of mental distress or emotional issues, VMIAC hear hourly from people who are hurt and distressed by their lack of access to support, or their treatment within Victoria’s mental health system. The impact of treatment is often worse than the problem people presented with. VMIAC believes that the terms of reference to this Royal Commission must be wide ranging and led by the people experiencing these traumas. We need the Royal Commission to have the same focus as any royal commission: the people who’ve been hurt, not the people with the power to harm.”

― Maggie Toko, VMIAC CEO

https://youtu.be/cC0txyEaRQ0 and: https://www.vmiac.org.au/royal-commission-into-mental-health/

“Mental illness remains a serious health issue in Victoria and throughout the country, with one in five Australians experiencing a mental health illness or disorder, and almost half experiencing a mental health condition at some point in their lives. In addition, the national suicide rate has spiked to its highest rate in the past decade, more than 3000 Australians, and more than 600 Victorians, taking their own lives in a year. In the face of these challenges, however, Victoria also has the lowest funding per head of population of all the states and territories for mental health – despite significant funding boosts from the State Government. This has led to what many refer to as a ‘broken’ mental health system, which is what Premier Andrews has said he hopes to fix with the results of the royal commission.”

― Amanda Lyons, Journalist, RACGP

Source: https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/will-the-promised-victorian-royal-commission-into

“The dominant model of progress and development reflects one particular worldview: modernity. Modernisation is a pervasive, complex, multidimensional process which characterises our era. Industrialisation, globalisation, urbanisation, democratisation, scientific and technological advance, capitalism, secularism, rationalism, individualism and consumerism, all part of the processes of cultural Westernisation and material progress (measured as economic growth) …. In contrast, psycho-social dynamics are all about relationships: between us, separately and together, and with other things or entities, both physical and metaphysical. They describe the ways in which social conditions affect individual psychology and behaviour and vice versa, and how perceptions, expectations and values influence the intrinsic meanings of life events and social situations, and so affect our emotional responses. These interactions can bring satisfaction, happiness, contentment and fulfilment – or cause stress, depression, anxiety, isolation, insecurity and hostility. They frame how we see the world and our place in it, and so what we do in the world, shaping our personal lives and, collectively, the societies in which we live.”

― Richard Eckersley, Is the West Really the Best?

The post ‘Environ-Mental Health’ – a dialogue with Nora Bateson appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, […] if we judge the United States of America by that — counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Senator Robert Kennedy, 1968

We have known for a long time that judging an economy’s progress and success in quantitative (financial) terms leads to dangerous distortions and misplaced priorities. In 1972, Limits to Growth warned of the potentially devastating environmental effects of unbridled growth and resource depletion on a finite planet. While some of the predictions made were delayed by the extraordinary resilience of the planetary system, recent research suggests that we are now very close to witnessing the collapse scenario of ‘business as usual’ that the authors warned of. In their 30 years up-date to Limits to Growth the authors emphasized:

Sustainability does not mean zero growth. Rather, a sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. […] it would begin to discriminate among kinds of growth and purposes for growth. It would ask what the growth is for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether the growth could be accommodated by the sources and sinks of the earth.

Meadows, Randers & Meadows (2005: 22) 224

The calls for ‘de-growth’ (Assadourian, 2012), post-growth economics (Post Growth Institute, 2015), prosperity without growth (Jackson, 2011), and a ‘steady state economy’ (Daly, 2009) have become louder and have found a much wider audience in recent years. All these more or less anti-growth perspectives make important contributions to our rethinking of economics with people and planet in mind, but they might be over-swinging the pendulum.

As a biologist who is aware of how growth in living systems tends to have qualitative and quantitative aspects, I feel uncomfortable with demonizing ‘growth’ altogether. What we need is a more nuanced understanding of how as living systems mature they shift from an early (juvenile) stage that favours quantitative growth to a later (mature) stage of growing (transforming) qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

It seems that our key challenge is how to shift from an economic system based on the notion of unlimited growth to one that is both ecologically sustainable and socially just. ‘No growth’ is not the answer. Growth is a central characteristic of all life; a society, or economy, that does not grow will die sooner or later. Growth in nature, however, is not linear and unlimited. While certain parts of organisms, or ecosystems, grow, others decline, releasing and recycling their components which become resources for new growth.

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson (2013: 4)

Capra and Henderson argue that “we cannot understand the nature of complex systems such as organisms, ecosystems, societies, and economies if we describe them in purely quantitative terms”. Since “qualities arise from processes and patterns of relationships” they need to be mapped rather than measured (p.7). There are close parallels between the difference in how economists and ecologists understand the concepts of growth and development. While economists tend to take a purely quantitative approach, ecologists and biologists know how to differentiate between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of both growth and development.

It appears that the linear view of economic development, as used by most mainstream and corporate economists and politicians, corresponds to the narrow quantitative concept of economic growth, while the biological and ecological sense of development corresponds to the notion of qualitative growth. In fact, the biological concept of development includes both quantitative and qualitative growth.

(ibid: 9)

Life’s growth patterns follow the logistic curve rather than the exponential curve. One example of aberrant quantitative growth in living systems is that of cancer cells which ultimately kill their host. Unlimited quantitative growth is fatal for living systems and economies. Qualitative growth in living organisms, ecosystems and economies, “by contrast, can be sustainable if it involves a dynamic balance between growth, decline, and recycling, and if it also includes development in terms of learning and maturing” (p.9). Capra and Henderson argue:

Instead of assessing the state of the economy in terms of the crude quantitative measure of GDP, we need to distinguish between ‘good’ growth and ‘bad’ growth and then increase the former at the expense of the latter, so that the natural and human resources tied up in wasteful and unsound production processes can be freed and recycled as resources for efficient and sustainable processes.

(ibid: 10)

The distinction between good growth and bad growth can be informed by a deeper socio- ecological understanding of their impact. While bad growth externalizes the social and ecological costs of the degradation of the Earth’s eco-social systems, good growth “is growth of more efficient production processes and services which fully internalise costs that involve renewable energies, zero emissions, continual recycling of natural resources, and restoration of the Earth’s ecosystems” (p.10). Capra and Henderson conclude: “the shift from quantitative to qualitative growth […] can steer countries from environmental destruction to ecological sustainability and from unemployment, poverty, and waste to the creation of meaningful and dignified work” (p.13).

Nurturing qualitative growth through the integration of diversity into interconnected collaborative networks at and across local, regional and global scales facilitates the emergence of regenerative cultures.

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by Tim @ Photovisions

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