Synopsis: ‘The Truth Teller’.
‘The Truth Teller’ is a first-hand cathartic yet considered snapshot of Richard Mclean in the context of his artistic expression and experience of the state of Mental Health in Australia and Abroad.
‘Recovered, Not Cured, a journey through schizophrenia’, (Allen and Unwin), was my autobiographical art book that was released to high praise in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Japan. It received a Human rights award from the HREOC and SANE Australia’s ‘Book of the year’, amongst many other accolades.
The first book was written in the midst of working as a graphic designer - and was indeed be a purging of ideas and pure experience, told in an unflinchingly and matter-of-fact style to distance the dischordancy of my past and define, in physical written terms, an epoch I would not wish upon my worst enemy.
Since that time, I have travelled Nationally and Internationally advocating for the Mentally ill, giving TV, Radio, and presentations for different media, organizations, and universities. My waking passion for bringing mental health issues has seen me on prime time TV, and even speaking in Australian Parliament.
It seemed a natural progression to evolve my career into that of an advocate for those with Mental Health issues, and did so as a consumer consultant in a mental health service here in Melbourne.
I am, even now, more shocked and appalled at the treatment of the mentally ill in this country and abroad, and the resources allocated. The bane of my life involves the knowledge of extreme stigmas in terms of mental health, associated with gaining government funding to eclipse the need of our citizens, whom to this day are being locked up in jails, drugged to the eyeballs, deported, and killing themselves. Covered up-in shame.
Personally, I am also a web designer and engage in many multimedia interviews with prominent and not-so-prominent people, create music, traditional and digital art.
My personal experience with mental illness has fostered a great deal of recordable and transferable material, much of which will be released on www.richiemclean.com to coincide with this new project. It promises to be a worldwide multimedia release of epic proportions, followed up with public speaking, advocacy, and performances.
I anticipate this book to be a highly controversial and blatantly truthful document, facilitating the beginnings of more community and media awareness, that there is something dreadfully wrong, with our ideas on what mental health means to us, and its treatment of such by society, peers, and authorities.
Personal philosophy and the creative process will be existentialistically celebrated in conjunction with pure fact and observation.
This will be a book like no other: from a world-celebrated author on his experience with schizophrenia. And as part of the books journey, it is also revealed that Richard, apparently, does not have schizophrenia at all.
A must read for those with any amount of empathy, and certainly for the one in five, that at sometime in their lives, suffer the burden of mental illness. This book promises to be an extremely personal journey in sound, music, interviews, words, and first hand experience of being employed as a mental health worker, and a consumer.
Richard McLean, January, 2006.
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Thank you, from those that have to endure, and for those whom the suffering has not yet begun.
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