MHSJN: Power of Collective Organising in Mental Health w/ Micha Frazer-Carroll & Emily Oliver
Dear friends,
On Friday, February 6th at 6.30-8.30 pm the Mental Health Social Justice Network invites survivors and practitioners to a hybrid meeting at Birkbeck for a critical gathering on mental health and the collective power of radical organising. Hosted by Micha Frazer-Carroll (journalist and author of Mad World) and Emily Oliver (member of Red Therapy Collective), this workshop discusses histories of movements, struggles or collectives that have brought together those who use or work in mental health services - this might include service-users, 'patients', a therapist or health worker, someone who has/identifies with a diagnosis or someone who experiences mental distress and doesn't want to access services as they stand.
The tensions within mental health systems are stark, embedded in frameworks, institutions and infrastructures that enact violence through diagnostic systems, coercion, restraint, and forced treatment while simultaneously being so underfunded that people cannot even access services that are nominally available. Those working in MH, many with lived experience themselves, are also caught daily in this bind: for those committed and wanting to care, working with limited resources and burn out, structurally positioned to uphold the harmful dynamics, tick the boxes, make the impossible choices.
Organising between those who use (and refuse/cant access) or work in mental health has emerged at different times and in different ways over time. In this session we want to look at what has happened when survivors / service users and practitioners of various kinds have sought to organise together what contradictions and tensions they have contained, how they been navigated and what we might learn from them today. This might include the sorts of spaces that have been built, how madness and care has been conceived, and what sort of care has been built towards, including those debates about reform, abolition or otherwise.
However you identify in this context, you are invited to come join us for the discussion.
Zoom link to follow.
We will be following this meeting by hosting a Entrar Afuera service-user / practitioner health activism group based on Barcelona on Friday 27 February, 6.30pm.