Decolonizing Mental Health Webinar Series:

Join CLASP for a quarterly learning series focused on decolonizing mental health care, I.e. not relying entirely on the biomedical model, and emphasizing the importance of healing-centered care. Each quarter, we will host a conversation with mental health experts about the colonization of mental health systems, the key frameworks required to decolonize mental health, programs that are healing-centered frameworks into action, and how public policy can support these movements.

This series is part of the healing-centered liberation policy framework we launched in 2020. Healing-centered liberation policy thinks beyond what is and demands what should be. It requires new decision-making structures, acknowledges failed and abandoned policies, and recognizes both historical harms and ongoing discrimination. Because our current mental health system is steeped in historical and structural racism, we must reimagine how public policy can respond to inequity beyond our existing systems.

April 13: How the Transformative Justice and Healing Justice Movements Inform How We Must Approach Mental Health Systems

Transformative justice and healing justice are two key frameworks that underpin our understanding of how to decolonize mental health systems. In this conversation, we will provide insights into both movements, speak to leaders in the movement around transformative mental health, and discuss why understanding cross-movement organizing is critical to transforming mental health systems and policies.



Speakers:

Jessie Roth (she/her), Director, Institute for the Development of the Human Arts (IDHA)

Jessie is a writer and activist with a decade of experience organizing at the intersection of mental health and social justice. She is a longtime member of IDHA, supporting the development of initiatives such as Decarcerating Care, a panel series exploring mental health, community safety, and abolition; and Mental Health Trialogue, a forum bridging the perspectives of peers, family members, and providers. Inspired by personal and family experiences with the mental health system, Jessie’s work is focused on the healing power of storytelling and the importance of cross-movement organizing for mental health liberation. Her writing has been published in the book We've Been Too Patient: An Anthology of Voices from Radical Mental Health and Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.

Noah Gokul (they/them), Program Coordinator, Institute for the Development of Human Arts

Noah is a Queer multidisciplinary artist and educator here to create liberated worlds through art, storytelling, and sound. They grew up in Oakland, CA/unceded Ohlone land, and identify as a trauma survivor with sensitivities to the world around them. They use music and art for meaning-making and the healing of others, integrating these passions into their work as a peer for young adults in a first-episode psychosis program. They have facilitated in a wide variety of settings at the intersections of anti-oppression, trauma, incarceration, Caribbean ancestry, music, and mental health. Through their incantations they create spaces of radical imagination and possibility.

Upcoming webinars in the series:

May: Confronting the Medical-Industrial Complex

To understand how to build a better system, we must first interrogate the existing system and how we got here. In this conversation, we will discuss how the medical-industrial complex came to be, how it maintains its power, and how we can learn from existing movements to shape policy and systems change.

September: Healing-Centered Frameworks in Practice

In this conversation, we will hear from programs that are operationalizing healing-centered frameworks. We will learn how communities built programs outside the medical-industrial complex, how they center healing justice in their programs, how they are funded, and how policymakers and advocates can better support their work.

December: Policies to Decolonize Mental Health

In this final conversation, we will bring together knowledge from the previous sessions to discuss how policy can be a tool for decolonizing mental health.

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