ABSTRACT
The event took place in Oslo in May 2004. It was a conference called Coercion and Voluntariness in Psychiatry, and invitations were sent to all kinds of people interested in the subject. The author shares some of the experiences from the conference: why it turned out to be different, and why it is hard to forget it. The idea was born sometime during 2002. Tom Andersen came to the author one day and said that he had been thinking of arranging a conference addressing the use of coercion in the field of mental health care. Tom Andersen met with the group of consumers and the relatives a couple of days before they went on stage, to discuss their expectations and tell them about his ideas about how the conversations might proceed. The professionals were invited to a similar discussion, but logistics prevented them from gathering before the conference.
