Chapter 15
Crazy Becomes Normal—Argentina
WHILE STUDYING FOR HIS DEGREE IN PSYCHOLOGY, ALFREDO Olivera worked Saturdays as a volunteer for Hospital Borda, a 148-year-old institution near Buenos Aires. El Borda is the largest of Argentina's oversaturated and poorly resourced hospitals, and its property includes an outdoor garden where Alfredo's arts and crafts program met. It occurred to him that the beauty of this weekly program was that it opened the doors to volunteers who came from the community and created meeting opportunities inside the psychiatric hospital—but it wasn't working as planned. The patients were mainly impoverished people who had been committed by relatives. Many had been institutionalized for more than ten years. They didn't know how to relate to the outside world coming in. So in actuality it began and ended each Saturday without having any impact on the patients. When all the volunteers packed up and left, the patients remained isolated and socially abandoned. They lived in their own private world within the walls and confines of El Borda. When they were pronounced well enough to leave the hospital, they were lost—emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically—and totally unprepared for life outside.
Alfredo became intrigued by the thought of developing a more meaningful connection with the patients while he was at the hospital, so when friends at a small community radio station asked to interview him on conditions there, he saw his opportunity. Instead of doing a regular radio interview, he decided to interact with the patients by recording their views and playing them on air instead. The idea came to him as he recalled his prior experience in having run a literacy program in a poor community with no supplies, resources, or officially designated space. That experience taught him that a program could grow in a distinctive manner if the students became the constructors of their own school, because such a program could be assembled with the community and operated in just about any physical space. He decided to try to help the patients construct their own radio interview and then assess if it had any impact on their psychological well-being. After all, he was still a student and anxious to learn how best to relate to people in hopes of being an effective psychologist.
The patients seemed to enjoy the interview, and the first tapes aired on the community radio station as planned. They were such a hit with the listeners that Buenos Aires network radio shows very quickly picked them up. Given that success, plus his knowledge of journalism from his journalist father along with his childhood fantasy of being a radio announcer, Alfredo conceived of a radio-type program to help socialize the patients in this overcrowded mental hospital. At the time Alfredo began his project in the early 1990s, the Internet was in a fledgling stage. CompuServe had just begun the first e-mail service one year prior. The world wasn't wired, computers were not part of daily life, and information resources were definitely not available at a click of a mouse. There was no such thing as a reality TV show and no other program anywhere in the world like the one Alfredo envisioned. So Alfredo devised a simple way of using short taped segments that he would send to local radio stations. It was to be the first radio show recorded at a mental institution and the first ever using patients as the broadcasters.
Originally (and to this day), the idea in itself was not about making a radio show; it was about developing an entire process of reconnecting the patients to the community and in doing so create a greater awareness in the community that not all mental patients were dangerous and of little or no value to society. The show's two primary purposes were to provide a way of getting patients to talk about their issues, their pains, and their fantasies, and to re-introduce them to the world outside El Borda. At the same time it aimed to destigmatize mental problems as well as decrease exclusion of mental patients as a societal issue.
Describing the first meeting where a group of patients came together around a table in the garden of the psychiatric hospital to talk about distinctive things in life, Alfredo says:
These conversations were particularly interesting because the things they talked about didn't have to do with a conception based on passing or killing time, or how to make life better at the hospital. Rather they decided to see if they could create a situation that resulted in a gathering of patients who talked about very interesting things. Therefore, the first few themes that they talked about were complex and profound. They decided that the first one should be about the role of women in society.
Because they had no broadcasting equipment, Alfredo would record these conversations on tape and edit them into short audio clips, which radio stations in Buenos Aires would then broadcast to the outskirts of the city. Within weeks, the radio stations started to get calls and comments from listeners about the audio clips. Alfredo would tape the full radio programs, including the comments from the radio station's audience and then play the entire recording back to the patients so they could hear the engaged feedback and questions from the outside world. So each taping session at El Borda now started with listening instead of just having the patients start talking. This became a valuable therapeutic skill for isolated mental patients to master.
When a caller suggested creating a name for the radio broadcast, the topic intuitively called for community involvement and listener engagement—an interactive deliberation between the patients and the community. Of the forty names nominated, La Colifata, an affectionate way of referring to madness as “gone crazy,” was finally decided on by the patients themselves. From then on what motivated this project were the listeners, who began to phone in and who started to listen intently to the sometimes bizarre but surprisingly often profound comments from people they thought were hopeless. From there, the most interesting aspects of La Colifata have been the therapeutic impact on the patients and also, and maybe of equal importance, the social and community mobilization that developed around the experience.
The problem with mental illness is that it is so complex and has so many variables that one interventionist, expert, or specialist is often not enough to provide satisfactory help. And at El Borda, with resources so limited, the patients couldn't get that sort of collective help in any event. But as the community started to get involved with the patients, the design of the show permitted anyone—a butcher, a farmer, or an auto mechanic—to help construct the program by interacting and intervening. They all added their unique perspectives. They could improve it, enrich it, and therefore affect its evolution to the point that their involvement formed an integral part of the project in and of itself. The show as well as the community of listeners and patients became transformed by everyone's total and open involvement.
The spontaneous action of the audience and the ability of both the audience and the patients to make space for each other continually altered and evolved the program. Soon, individuals and groups of listeners started to ask how they could collaborate above and beyond just listening and talking. They began to donate all sorts of useful items, including a small broadcast team, radio equipment, and an antenna to allow production of a real radio program instead of the audio clips that were being disseminated to participating radio stations. Other gifts included an old car (named “the first crazy mobile unit”), which necessitated that residents get permission to venture outside the walls of the hospital to broadcast. A unique gift was donated by an entire community in one area of Buenos Aires: a “free vacation” in another part of the city so patients could experience life outside El Borda. The inmates were so overwhelmed by this kindness and openness that they decided to give back to the community and started to use the “crazy mobile unit” to gather items that they could then donate to an organization in that community that supported street kids.
Each one of the listener offerings provided the patients and the community with another level of acceptance that was mutually reinforcing and life changing. A microsociety was being constructed by everyone involved, and it was changing the relationships between people. Audience and presenters were no longer at the level of sane and the sick, but rather at a level of connection and recognition of necessities, capabilities, and potential. And these newly formed relationships, though limited at that time to the Buenos Aires community, pointed toward a much larger way to help change relationships in a similar way around the world.
Former patient Hugo Lopez, who became a veteran presenter in the show while at El Borda, has now helped set up similar projects in Italy and Spain: “Our final goal is to rid the world of nut-houses. You should know that people on the outside are just as crazy as us loonies in here.”1
What La Colifata really intends to do is bring out the potential of others. Those who take part on both sides of the radio program now understand how participation has transformed them. This methodology has many aspects that can be useful for similar projects with different populations dealing with different issues—all leveraging dialogue with sectors of a community that tend to be excluded, segregated, or marginalized. Today, technology makes it much easier to create a radio-type show that incorporates the voices of differently abled people and identifies and appreciates the creation of a space where being different is an asset and not a boundary.
Since its inception, La Colifata has gained an ever-increasing fan base around the world. More than fifty “Station Colifatas” worldwide now broadcast the program or similar ventures from the original Argentine base to listeners in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Chile, Uruguay, and Mexico. La Colifata was featured in the 2009 movie Tetro, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and the patients recorded an album at the hospital with the famous European singer Manu Chao. Two years later, La Colifata participated in an album with the popular Spanish group El Canto del Loco. (The musicians were so enamored of the program and the participants that their disc not only has the patients from La Colifata introducing the songs, it also includes a documentary DVD about La Colifata that explains the complexities and meaning of the program.)2
A poignant example of the show's impact comes from Spain. The audience for El Canto del Loco in Spain consists of teenagers and young adults, mostly from fifteen to twenty years old. One of them was an eighteen-year-old who called in to the Spanish show. After buying the El Canto del Loco disc, he described an encounter with his neighbor from the second floor. Because the neighbor often talked to himself, the caller had never bothered to speak to him and rather avoided him. But after hearing the album and learning about La Colifata the eighteen-year-old asked his neighbor a question for the first time. Before the young man listened to the album, Alfredo reflects, “There were certainties built in his head that didn't allow for him to perceive the world in a different way. He opened up to questioning those certainties because of connecting to the reality of La Colifata.” Like the young Spanish listener, audiences around the world have had their consciousness raised by the show's departure from the conventional radio show format and by its dynamic message. Now, both the radio program and the model it created have spawned hundreds of replications among a variety of populations for a multiplicity of issues.
In 2010, after talking about La Colifata at a conference in Germany, Alfredo realized that his work really does make a difference:
It had to do with something very simple which is that this group of people celebrated the liberty of speaking and expressing themselves and that there were others who listened to them. Neither the speakers nor the listeners were aware of the others' existence before this program. To celebrate the power to speak and be heard is very basic but so impactful at the same time. And now the methodology is legitimated as a psychological practice and it's slowly validated.
The communication mechanism of La Colifata became a catalyst that created a space to highlight the random, the desperate, and the dormant potential of every single person involved, whether by producing, presenting, or listening. It helped create a reality that had not existed before by making everyone involved a protagonist. It created change by making room for everyone to be a changemaker.
Alfredo knows that La Colifata has done more than change him over the years; it has now become a part of him. He gave birth to this creation but he feels that the best thing that could happen would be for it to stop being his and become significant in our culture. Like many other social entrepreneurs he has learned that he has built something that is not only his but something for the entire world to enjoy and learn from.
On April 20, 2011, La Colifata passed its twentieth year. To celebrate, it can be heard live for the first time around the world through the Internet, along with twenty years of shows and audio clips streaming twenty-four hours a day at www.lacolifata.org.