As the movement for racial justice gains momentum in the United States, there has been a lot of conversation around how to divest funding from the police and reallocate it to mental health care. Although the notion to replace “cops” with “care” is well-intentioned, psychiatric survivors, their family members, and advocates are well acquainted with the oppressive nature of the mental health system. Too often, both mainstream and progressive group discussions immediately revert to a model of "caring" for "the mentally ill" in hospitals and other confined settings that are functionally no different than the jails and prisons that they propose to replace.

IDHA seeks to advance a discussion of alternatives to policing and criminal justice that is rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors. In this context, it is crucial to center the particular ways in which psychiatry has been used to exert control over Black bodies, not unlike the prison system. From the historically racist roots of diagnosis; to the ways in which the pain of racial oppression is erased or made invisible due to the subjective nature of psychiatric diagnosis; to the significantly higher rates at which Black communities are diagnosed with “serious mental illness,” it’s clear that unilaterally replacing policing with more mental health care is not the answer.

On Monday, September 14th, IDHA is hosting a community discussion that will bring together frontline organizers with a range of perspectives on how to maintain the safety and health of our communities in ways that are free from the police, rooted in survivors' experience, and designed to preserve the rights and autonomy of those in crisis. We will hear from panelists who have developed creative models across the country, both within and outside of the existing system. We seek to disrupt the notion that struggling community members are “diseased” and “disordered,” rather than in need of care and support. We will be asking the difficult questions about how to create community-based alternatives to cops in our neighborhoods and what it will take to lay the foundation for a new paradigm of engaging with what is called “mental health crisis.” We invite anyone who is interested to join us in this discussion, including but not limited to: individuals with lived experience, trauma survivors, clinicians, peer specialists, family members, activists, and artists.

Please register via Zoom to join. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with call-in details.

NOTE: ASL + CART will be provided. This webinar caps at the first 1,000 people to join, and will also be broadcast live on IDHA’s Facebook. The session will be recorded and shared with all registrants.

Panelists

Asantewaa Boykin

Asantewaa Boykin is a San Diego, CA native, Emergency RN, daughter of Valerie Boykin and granddaughter of Bertha Brandy. Her poetry combines her love of words, storytelling, and resistance. Exploring topics like; space-travel, black-femme militancy,& motherhood. Which describes her first full length poetry collection, “Love, Lyric and Liberation.” Asantewaa is co-founder of APTP (Anti Police - Terror Project) an organization committed to the eradication of police terror in all of its forms. Along with being a dedicated nurse she is also a founding member of the Capital City Black Nurses Association. Asantewaa along with a brave group of organizers and medical professionals developed Mental Health First or MH FIRST a mobile mental health crisis response team aimed at minimizing police contact with those who are in the midst of a mental health crisis. While her greatest honor is being the mother of her son Ajani and bonus daughter Aryana.

Tim Black

Tim Black is the Director of Consulting at White Bird Clinic. With a background in runaway and homeless youth, harm reduction, and street outreach, he began working for CAHOOTS as a Crisis Intervention Worker in 2010, before moving into an administrative role as the CAHOOTS Operations Coordinator. His work with White Bird and CAHOOTS has put him in touch with cities across North America looking to implement services based on the CAHOOTS model of behavioral health first response, including Olympia, WA’s Crisis Response Unit and the STAR Program in Denver, CO. Outside of his work with White Bird Clinic, Tim serves as the Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eugene’s Community Supported Shelters.

Stella Akua Mensah

Stella Akua Mensah is a Black, gay, Neurodivergent Psych Survivor, writer, Transformative Justice advocate, abolitionist, and artist from Chicago. She studied Literary Arts at Brown University, writing magical realism centering on themes of inherited trauma, Madwomanness, and Black Diasporic approaches to healing. Stella now serves as a Peer Support Housing Navigator for Homeless Women in Boston. She recently published the piece ‘Abolition Must Include Psychiatry’ with the Disability Visibility Project. She is a 2020 Crip Camp x Adobe Fellow in Honor of  Ki’tay Davidson. Her ongoing passions center on transformative, decarceral, and communal care, as well as experimental and post-colonial artistic exploration.

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu

Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu (she/they) is the Director of Project LETS; a national grassroots organization led by and for folks with lived experience of mental illness, Disability, trauma, and neurodivergence. Their work specializes in building peer support collectives and community mental health care structures outside of state-sanctioned systems of “care” -- grounded in principles of anti-racism and Disability/Transformative/Healing Justice. As a skilled facilitator and curriculum developer, they have led hundreds of trainings across various sectors for students and practitioners. They have also served as a consultant for mental health policies, program development, and accessibility. As a queer, mad, Disabled, neurodivergent human with lived experience of psychiatric incarceration, they are an active community organizer invested in disrupting multiple systems which disproportionately discriminate, harm, and kill our community members worldwide. 

Neil Gong

Neil Gong (he/him/his) is a sociologist at the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is working on a book that compares community-based mental health services in public safety net versus elite private settings. Most recently, Neil authored a piece in the LA Review of Books entitled "How Defunding Abusive Institutions Goes Wrong, and How We Can Do It Right." 

Moderator

Noah Gokul

Noah Gokul (he/him) is a queer educator, artist, musician from Oakland, CA. He identifies as a trauma survivor, and has used music for personal healing and for the healing of others, as a Peer Specialist working with young adults. He currently is a consultant for COR (Confronting Structural Racism) program in the Jewish Board, organizing programming for an agency wide anti-racism initiative. He strongly believes in reimagining what we call “mental health”, through a holistic lens rooted in anti-oppression framework.