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Closing Out BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month
As we close out July, BIPOC Mental Health Awareness Month, we would like to share a few more resources. We hope that you'll find them helpful, and hope that they spark some conversations.
CLASP’s mental health work centers on systems and policy change with an explicit focus on how race and ethnicity affect a person’s interactions with systems and services. We are working to reimagine how our national, state, and local mental and behavioral health systems could better serve people living in households with low incomes. The resources offered from CLASP provide insight into key issues, strategies, and principles surrounding mental health.
Upcoming Events
Decolonizing Mental Health: Questioning the Role of the Medical Industrial Complex
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If you missed our 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, we've posted a recording on the CLASP website [[link removed]] . Each quarter, we host a conversation with partners in the field about the colonization of mental health systems, the key frameworks required to decolonize mental health, healing-centered programs that work, and how public policy can support these movements.
On July 26 , we hosted a conversation with Cara Page, this time to talk about her and her colleagues' work to acknowledge and disrupt the medical-industrial complex. We spoke about healing justice as a political movement, and how we can learn from the disability and transformative justice movements to support marginalized populations to receive support and care. We also discussed her latest book anthology, Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety [[link removed]] . It was a great conversation, and we hope that you enjoy it too!
This webinar series is part of the Healing-Centered Liberation Policy framework [[link removed]] 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.
CHECK it out [[link removed]]
New Resources!
A Policy Framework for Youth Peer Support
The existing mental health system is failing to meet the needs of young people, particularly people who are Black, brown, and indigenous, who live with disabilities, and who identify as LGBTQIA+. The current mental health system is also experiencing a workforce shortage, with many young folks unable to access care, particularly in mental health deserts. In their report, Giving the (Young) People What They Want: A Policy Framework for Youth Peer Support [[link removed]] , Kayla Tawa, Emily Kim, and Marissa Howdershelt advocate that youth peer support offers a solution to both of these problems. Despite the promise of youth peer support, it remains unavailable to most young people and is generally concentrated in grant-funded programs. This report identities the key barriers to expanding youth peer support as well as the best practices that states can implement.
read the report here [[link removed]]
The damage we do when we throw around terms like "crazy"
Using the words “crazy” and “mad” have a deep history, and can be highly stigmatizing and harmful for many marginalized populations, because of the barriers they already experience in the health care system. CLASP senior policy analyst Isha Weerasinghe breaks it down in this op-ed [[link removed]] , published by Word in Black.
check it out [[link removed]]

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