About Advocacy France

It is in problems of the stigmatization of the psychosis and of its reflected on the social bond and of the citizenship which was born in 1996, This organization was constituted starting from the expression of the experiments of the users and the professionals, on the report of the difficulties of access to the rights and the recourse of the handicapped people, labelled sick mental and of the effects of the mark which can stick to this label.

ADVOCACY France an NGO its aims :

To promote a movement of action of the spokesman of the users of mental health (advocacy) in France when their words are not heard because they are or were labelled sick mental and/or users of the services of psychiatry and/or in psychological difficulty with the entourage.
To create services and actions of access to the allowing recourse that the opinions of the users are taken into account, their heard requests, the recognized access to the responsibility, the dignity and the rights of the users in all fields of the society
To help the patients/users to be social actors, with being responsible through Convivial Spaces Citizens supported by an organization making work users and non users as voluntary in partnership
It is a question of making work together volunteers, users of mental health considered ordinary citizens : no users, professionals, parents, friends, and users/(ex) users of psychiatry considered as expert people from their personal experiment of illness.

One of the goals declared is to promote the practices of the advocacy by adapting it to the culture and the French situation
It is in particular a question of supporting all the forms of recourse in the situations of exclusion, segregation, privative measurements of personal freedoms.
The role of the person advocate is not superimposed on that of lawyer
The advocacy is a practice of social mediation which introduces a third, amplifying the request of the patient/user, without speaking in its place, and thus makes it possible different the point of view to find an adjustment in a respectful dialogue.
The person can thus smell herself listened and recognized. It is as in a function of witness, of engaged witness, as ADVOCACY- FRANCE finds its raison d'être.
Little by little the collective project of association ADVOCACY-France grew rich by the practices of self-help, solidarity between users and a practice of empowerment in CONVIVIAL SPACES CITIZENS
Convivial Citizens Spaces Advocacy places of setting of a pedagogy of emancipation towards the self-determination and empowerment of the users in mental health

Self-directed Space by users in mental health
Its places to reinforce the bonds of solidarity which can replace logics of assistance which are using in care institutions. This is why we speak about space, because it is a question of a place where the shoring of the group can allow the person in psychic suffering to publicly hold a place with whole share. This space managed mainly by the users under the impulse of paid organizers, users in mental health, is a social place of meetings and activities. This place makes it possible to fight against insulation and the segregation by proposing a social alternative to these two evils which discuss mutually.
Largely open on outside and the associative world, the CCS accommodates :
Regular demonstrations (philosophic chats in a café) or specific (exposures, meetings associative or inter-associative, meetings of professionals...).
Collective workshops are organized in two directions:
to gather tools of information on the rights, to train the participants in the reception and the listening of the people who come to get information, to arrange mediations towards external people resource
To organize activities centred on the everyday life, the culture. These activities are set up according to the located needs or of the offers of service suggested by the actor-participants and the professionals.
Within this framework there is already a workshop of visual arts and a workshop of initiation to data processing and multiple activities are creating. A small monthly newspaper is carried out by the participants

The partnership
The partnership articulates three branches of social activities which have the reputation to function in closed loop:
The sector of the mental health with its teams of psychiatry centred on a medical model which is far from being sufficient
The sector of the social services, in particular in direction of the people in social precariousness
The sector of the handicap which is too often perceived like addressing itself to the physical or sensory handicaps with the detriment of the psychic handicap.