Nikosia Radio is an experience linked to a continuous process of research/action in the Anthropology of health field. A space for co-theorisation, analysis and visibility of the problems associated with psychological and social suffering.
Nikosia’s experience is the result of an ongoing process of collaboration between the principal researcher and a group of more than 100 people undergoing psychiatric treatment. It is the outcome of the psychiatric patients’ situation analysis, which reveled the social suffering associated with the mental health problems stigma.
In most cases, stigma causes a worsening of recovery itineraries, accentuates symptomatologies and grief processes. Nikosia aims to provide answers and transform this situation, to give rise to the expression and articulation of situated knowledge, the profane knowledge that derives from visual experience.
If mental health is partly dependent on our bonds, Nikosia is not only a space for communication, but also a territory of relationships and shared construction of responses against stigma. And it does not only have repercussions on the lives of those who participate in the experience, but also contributes to broadening and diversifying public and social knowledge about human afflictions..
Nikosia has inspired the creation of more than 40 radio stations in Spain that try to give a voice to psychiatric patients. La Colifata Radio in Argentina and Nikosia Radio in Catalonia were the first of their kind in the world and have inspired thousands of experiences all over the world.
At the collective level, the general evaluation of the experience is defined as "very satisfactory" by 90% of the people who took part in it. For them, the experience results in an increased level of empowerment, social participation, bonding, de-stigmatisation and autonomy.
