Artwork for Social Power and Mental Health, by Life Craft art group.

Today is the first day of ‘Social Power and Mental Health’ – a conference that explores the diverse links between power, inequalities and mental health. Designed and produced in partnership with practitioners, researchers, academics, as well as experts by experience, at all stages, the conference hopes to foster a dialogue between a wide range of groups. Events will be running all this week, 19-23 April.

You can see the full programme of events here – and sign-up for individual panels and talks here. BSL interpreters and live captioning will be available at all of these events. They are also being lived-streamed on CRASSH’s YouTube channel.

An abbreviated programme is below. Be sure to check out our art gallery and film festival too!

PROGRAMME OF LIVE EVENTS

Monday 19 April

16.00-17.30 (BST) – Panel Discussion: Covid and Mental Health

Speakers:

Nadia Mbonde (New York University)
Visions of Black Futurity: The Politics of Self and Community Care at the Intersection of the Double Pandemic of Covid-19 and Police Brutality

Lois Liao (London School of Economics)
Do you see what I see?: Applying Pierre Bourdieu’s Theories to the Intersectional Research of Social Class, Race and Mental Health

Cassie Lovelock (London School of Economics)
Covid-19, Mental Health Carers and Increased Dependency; How are Carers Coping?

Peter Unwin & Joy Rooney (Worcester University)
Effects of Covid-19 on the Mental Health of a University-Based Group of Service Users and Carers

Tuesday 20 April

17.00-18.00 (BST) – Panel Discussion: Black Mental Health

Speakers:

Aude Konan (they/them) (Writer and Playwright)

Furaha Asani (she/her) (Researcher, Teacher and Mental Health Advocate)

Maya McFarlane (she/her) (Women’s and Non-Binary Officer of the CUSU BME Campaign)

18.30-20.00 (BST) – Session 1: Psychiatry and Other Systems

Speakers:

Paper 1: Wendy Burn & Adrian James
The Stigma of Mental Illness, A View From the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists

Paper 2: Ruth Smith and Anna Smith
Chemical Imbalance or Social Power Imbalance?

Paper 3: Neil Armstrong and Lamis Bayar
Power and Its Surprises: Locating and Dis-locating Asymmetries in Mental Healthcare

Paper 4:  Simon Duffy
Peer Supporter as Leaders in Community Development

Local Journey 1: Wendy Joyce Clarke

Wednesday 21 April

14.30-16.00 (BST) – Session 2: Activism and Hope

Paper 5: Samuel Hosking
Lessons to be Learned from the Experience of Funding Cuts to Mental Health Services at Lifecraft

Paper 6: Keira Pratt-Boyden
Stigma and Social Power: Mental Health Activism in London

Paper 7: Liz Rotherham
Building Resilience

Paper 8: Annie Whilby
BP(h)D

18.30-20.00 (BST) – Keynote Session 1

Keynote: Imogen Tyler

Thursday 22 April

13.00-14.30 (BST) – Session 3: Social Inequalities and Justice

Paper 9: Rianna Walcott
On Mental Health Support Access and Treatment Outcomes for Black Patients

Paper 10: Peter Beresford
Challenging the Psychiatrisation of Politics and the Politics of Psychiatry

Paper 11: Helen Spandler
Restorative Justice: A Radical Aproach to Mental Health Reform?

Paper 12: Dorothy Gould
We Want Power Too: Perspectives from Service Users and Survivors from LGBTQ+ Communities

16.00-17.30 (BST) – Stigma and Survival

Paper 13: Sonji Shah and Nicole McIntosh
Peer Support and Abolition

Local Journey 2: Jo Fox

Paper 14: Helen Spandler
Hidden from History? Lesbian’s Experience of Psychiatry

Local Journey 3: Michael Brown

Friday 23 April

17.30-19.00 (BST) – Keynote Session 2

Keynote: Rai Waddingham
Listening to ‘Mad’ Voices in a Crazy World

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Find out more at the event website or view the event poster.

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We are pleased to host a sound installation produced by the artist Amanda McDowell. ‘Hold Me in a Tender Circle of Listening’ is an immersive audio piece that contains the oral testimonies of five women from the British Library’s ‘Mental Health Testimony’ project (an archive of interviews recording the history of mental health care in the old asylums, from the points of view of those who were there). Using only the sounds from these oral interviews, the piece weaves together different testimonies into a circle of communal listening. Describing the sound installation, Amanda has written:

The work uses only the sound from these oral history interviews and brings women’s voices together, away from the isolation and gaze of the psychiatric institution and archive, into a circle of communal listening. The artist is driven by an ethics of entanglement – as someone with her own psychiatric experience and the daughter of a woman who has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for over forty years. This entanglement is a strategy, a way of working that blurs boundaries between the self and other; the material and immaterial; the past and present. The work is also a response to the terrible failure of psychiatry to listen, which has been repeated again and again over decades and decades. Through an extended process of listening to and reassembling women’s voices, the artist asks how historic and current silences within psychiatry and the institutions of ‘mental health’ might be opened up to create empathic encounters where trauma is allowed to speak.

About the artist

Amanda McDowell is an artist/researcher who works with sound, image and text to explore memory, trauma and transgenerational haunting. Practices of deep listening are central to her work, which is currently exploring the experiences of women in UK psychiatric institutions. Amanda has recently completed a PhD at the University of Kent. She has worked in the voluntary sector supporting prisoners and refugees, and at UK universities. She has a BA & MA in Social / Applied Anthropology and an MA Screen Documentary. Her MA film was nominated for a Royal Television Society Award (2009). You can find out more about Amanda’s work here.

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We heard from two speakers, Furaha Asani (a researcher, teacher and mental health advocate) and Maya McFarlane (the women’s and non-binary officer of the CUSU BME campaign), with discussion chaired by the writer, activist and playwright Aude Konan.

Aude began proceedings with a poll that revealed a high proportion (89%) of our online audience identifying personal experience of mental health issues. In the discussion that followed, all three speakers unpicked the relations between mental health and anti-Blackness, racism and inequality more broadly. This involved two key topics of debate.

The first was the potential for educational spaces to be traumatic and violent for Black students. Maya relayed her experiences studying at Cambridge University, where she noted that support for Black students was often limited to signposting Black students to other Black students and staff for support. Instead, Furaha argued that universities need to take the lead in addressing the ugliness of racism—including examining their own histories as institutions that have benefitted from racism in the past and present. If universities are to position themselves as sanctuaries of justice and equality, then they need to practice what they preach.

The second topic discussed was the forms of disadvantage within the category of Blackness. Furaha noted the topic of colourism, whilst Aude focused on the differential vulnerabilities experienced by different categories of migrants—something that has been starkly brought into view following the Windrush Scandal. Maya drew this point out with reference to the caricature of the ‘strong Black woman’—specifically the damaging notion that the role of Black women is to shoulder pain for the greater good. Such a caricature is not only inherently racist and sexist: it also has implications for how (and if) Black women seek and receive support with their mental health.

In drawing these two topics together, Aude noted the need for a feminist point of view that takes into account the intersecting disadvantages faced by Black people. To address these systemic disadvantages takes real action in the present. Given anti-Blackness is a global phenomenon, it requires a global solution—now.

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This conversation will explore anti-Blackness, Black feminism and mental health, with topics including the hostile environment and migration, anti-Blackness in education and Black experiences of navigating the (mental) health system.

Speakers:

• Aude Konan (they/them) (Writer, Activist and Playwright)
• Furaha Asani (she/her) (Researcher, Teacher and Mental Health Advocate)
• Maya McFarlane (she/her) (Women’s and Non-Binary Officer of the CUSU BME Campaign)

To register for this event please sign up here. This discussion will take place on Zoom and will be live streamed on CRASSH’s YouTube channel.

Join in the conversation #SocialPowerMH.

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Bethan Mair Edwards and Jo Edge (Mad Covid)

Akiko Hart (National Survivor User Network)

Sophia Siddiqui (Institute of Race Relations)

Helen Spandler (University of Central Lancashire)

Mutual aid is something that people do cooperatively to ensure their collective survival. During the current Covid-19 crisis, mutual aid has become all the more important to those experiencing mental distress.

Our discussion examined some of the longer history of mutual aid in the UK, particularly its emergence in marginalised communities. Sophia Siddiqui (from the Institute of Race Relations) provided vital detail into the history and influence of mutual aid amongst black working class communities in the UK – with health being implicit to the success of these movements. Sophia shared some of the findings of a recent set of papers in Race & Class which are a must-read in helping understand our contemporary times (find out and read more here).

Bethan Mair Edwards and Jo Edge outlined the brilliant work being achieved by Mad Covid during the current corona virus outbreak. In the course of just 12 weeks, the group have helped to provide various forms of mutual aid to mad communities – as well as ensuring that the voices of those with severe and enduring mental health conditions were heard and recorded (including their Mad Covid diaries and Quaranzine).

These activities were linked with the ongoing work of the National Survivor User Network, represented by Akiko Hart. Highlighting the uneven geographies of mutual aid in the UK, Akiko outlined different examples of neglect, discharge from services and the switch to online services – all of which have had disproportionate effects on different people and places.

Finally, Helen Spandler (University of Central Lancashire) reflected on the centrality of mutual aid to survivor activism. Helen explained how mutual aid achieves more than just collective assistance: it is also an exercise in prefigurative politics – demonstrating the kind of society we might like to live in now and in the future.

Questions from the audience covered a range of topics including: how to practice socially-distanced advocacy, implications for ongoing power imbalances between psychiatrists and patients, the relationship between the state and mutual aid, and the future direction of care. All questions were collated and shared on our Twitter page.

Thanks to our panel, Ed for chairing, and all who joined us over Zoom!

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