A small, hard-working consulting firm in Africa, we formed to address the lack of people with psychosocial doing the work themselves to drive change
Our goal at the Psychosocial Disability Rights Project is to provide effective solutions designed to drive social change, promote human rights and set the groundwork for effective legislative and policy frameworks that will embrace all of human diversity. All challenges have solutions, it is all about striving to achieve them with integrity and hard work. Life was never meant to be a picnic. Our s
ervices are carried out by consultants. Annie Robb is a consultant the founder and manager of PDRP and identifies as living with a psychosocial disability and was a founding member of The Ubuntu Centre, South Africa's first independent DPO for people with psychosocial disabilities. After being institutionalized in a psychiatric institution, she completed her post graduate studies in 2009 at the University of the Western Cape where her thesis, A Sentience Explored, was well received. Frustrated at the dominance of medical professionals speaking for and moulding the discourse around psychiatry and mental health, she set about to change this by forming a consultancy to do the work exclusively by users and survivors and people with psychosocial disabilties. Most of this work has been done on a volunteer basis and funding has also been accessed that impacted positively on promoting the voices of people with psychosocial disabilities. Annie's specialities are proposal writing, strategy formulation, workshop design and delivery, report writing and speech writing. She is dedicated to lifting the silence out of the shadows of ignorance and oppression. Consultants are: Luyanda is a holder of indigenous knowledge and is a leading practicing sangoma in South Africa. 1:500 people in Southern Africa visit tradition healers when experiencing a crisis, mental disturbance or what western medicine calles "mental illness". It is estimated that 70% or more African families and individuals will visit a sangoma for healing and guidance in these times. Luyanda is a knower and diviner and works with the Psychosocial Disability Rights Project to promote the rights of people with psychosocial disabilities to have full autonomy over their decisions in life, to confront the continuing colonization of the African Continent to the Western Medicine, global capitalization or pharmaggedon of the pharmaceutical industry, to make known the rich and deep understandings of madness in indigenous culture and to preserve this history. Other consultants are academics and DPO specialists with many years experience working with international mechanisms such as the United Nations and African Union and they reserve the right to not be public until requests for their details are sent.
