Author: humanlinks

The “Humanlinks” Photo team

The Humanlinks photo team started its activities with a small core of students at the beginning of 2016, after the prompt of George Krallis (Social-Intercultural Worker, Special Social Groups Motivator, NDI Psychotherapist).
All the members were amateurs in relation to the photographic medium, but over time they cultivated their personal view and aesthetics. The aim of the group is the gradual discovery of the unique relationship that can arise from each person’s personal contact with the art of photography, the externalization of emotions and the love for art and human being.

The Team’s activities are:
• Techniques of photography and photography history lessons
• Seminars and lectures on photography issues
• Photo exhibitions

HUMANLINKS

Who We Are – Primary Goal

We are a group of people tested in the past on mental health issues. We come from every economic and cultural background, as well as from every educational level.

Our team members suffer from the whole range of mental disorders. This fact does not differentiate us, but it unites us more and more deeply, emerging principles that determine our mode of operation and supports relations between us. Respect, understanding and unconditional acceptance of each member and with interest and availability when someone invites us to support him. In this way we train and reinforce the concept of self-help, which is our main therapeutic goal in coordination and co-operation with our special therapists.

 

Past

In the past many of us have been hospitalized, in psychiatric institutions, Others, we ended up resigning from life and, in denial, we were unable to get out of our homes. Our lives have reached the very end of human experience experiencing the loss of ourselves, our identity and our social status. Every reference to our mental disorders has excited our emotional feelings in our family and social environment or more. What we received from people was fear, anger, sorrow, deprecation, etc. Because without knowing it we were identified with the disorders and symptoms. First, we ourselves, we beat ourselves, guilty, of the stigma that characterized us. From defense we wounded our families or anyone who was on our way with good or negative intention to us.

 

Today

Today we are in a position to say that no one is blame for it! When we started to recover, we saw the truth and we realized that there are no final guilty in this circumstance. There are simply people and a society that suffer.

Feeling lucky in his great misfortune to get sick, the right moment has come to come between us and the coordination of a mental health professional who believed in us and saw what we really are, created and organized our team .

 

New bases

First of all, we had to be trained to manage our own disease and symptoms. Many times this was very difficult and we had to make a big fight but we did it willingly. Not because we did not have another choice but because we had tried one puff from the other, the most luminous the freedom, the love and the pure between us and the life motivated. These “pushed” every day our hope and gained ground every time of our new and authentic self.

We began to set the new foundations of our lives, but never to deny the disease that was always there and looked at us. On the contrary, we have been reconciled with it, and we have let it lead us to the better, now and not as before, with our resistance, to the worst.

So we started to grow up and do “normal” things that all “normal” people do. Let’s go out, make friends, flirt, and go to concerts. Our own desires and our talents have slowly begun and so we have organized groups of special interest such as photography workshop, our coffee shop Basketball team etc. We therefore began to recognize this particular self and share it out and receive for the first time, praise and recognition that made us embarrassed because we did not know it.

 

The idea of the festival

Having been deeply grateful for the better life we have today, first to ourselves, to the team members, the people who supported us, and to the region that has been hosting us for the past 4 years, we had the inspiration to organize a series of events, a gift of return and gratitude to all of them.

A two-day festival, in the Acropolis area, which we felt from the beginning as our place and perhaps, for the first time in our lives, that we belong geographically somewhere, never feeling undesirable. On the contrary, we were all discreetly welcome.

With the festival we want to cover, on the whole of the matter, the basic parameter of human life, Mental Health.

We would like to be informed and sensitized by the inhabitants and others who are interested in this big and misunderstood topic.

We will also be there to support those who need it through our experience of strength and hope.

We envision a festival that will not belong to a particular group but to the locals of the region and Athens more widely. Our philosophy is that all of us, ourselves, our friends and those who live or work here are involved, and we are actively involved in its creation.

 

Together with volunteers

Wherever we shared our idea, everyone welcomed it, none of them exempt, and declared willing as volunteers to participate in whatever way they were asked. We addressed a number of our friends, with whom we shared our idea and created a wonderful group, valuable and willing to contribute to the festival, volunteers, with great appetite and joy.

The team is not static, it is alive, it breathes up in numbers and ideas. Everyone comes from different origins, as we do, forming a colorful set of people who envisions and wants to contribute with love to this idea.

 

Call

We want and organize a series of actions that will illuminate and give freshness to specific issues, sometimes difficult, in the hope that they will leave behind something very positive and stable.

We do not want to restrict ourselves to something that can leave, perhaps, very good impressions but will soon be forgotten.

We envision a live sowing in the heart of the region and its people that will grow and blossom.

We all know that one of the serious issues emerged in recent years in our country is the issue of mental health. For us this is not new, it is part of our everyday life. All our lives are in crisis. So having our own and our families find the solution, we want to transfer our experience to others who will need it.

We therefore invite you to celebrate together without any suspension, with generosity and love for ourselves.

Because what we do in our lives, we do it, ultimately, for our mental health, because it is now recognized that everything begins from there.

 

“Humanlinks”

Our site: humanlinks.gr

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