Free Peer Support
To be a part of the psych establishment can be maddening. In addition to being a container for the traumas of the world that bear down on people seeking care, in order to provide this care, one is forced to witness the inhumane treatment they receive by the establishment. I’m offering one free support session each week to anyone who wants to process their experience as a psych related worker in hospitals and community clinics. Contact me if interested.
Non-Carceral Crisis Support to Give Out as a Provider
For some people, the involvement with police and the psych establishment has caused more harm than good and there are community, peer-based, alternatives to 911 or 988 that avoid police engagement and forced hospitalization.
Please text “THRIVE” to begin your conversation with us 24/7/365, from anywhere: +1.313.662.8209
1 (800) 604-5841
(877) 565-8860
Online and phone support and support groups'
They build peer support collectives, lead political education, develop new knowledge and language around mental distress, organize and advocate for the liberation of our community members globally, and create innovative, peer-led, alternatives to our current mental health system.
Readings
Contact me if you have specific areas of interest related to radical psych/psychoanalytic theory/schizoanalysis/establishment psych critique, etc. that you would like to learn more about and I will be happy to provide some reading recommendations.
*Hoping to update this page with more resources and writing in the future.
Moving Toward Better Mental Health Care
In order to move forward toward a better mental health care for the people, I believe that as mental health workers we need to be able to:
continue to develop a more complex biopsychosocial model of emotional suffering that takes seriously the psycho-social as mediating factors of the biological;
identify how and why the current psych establishment is failing so miserably to address the current crisis of emotional distress and suffering; and
have clear goals for what would be more emancipatory and objectives for getting there through both disrupting from within the establishment and creating new models outside of it.
The links above go to some of my related writing on these questions, which I am working on updating and consolidating eventually into a book form. Additionally, I hope to write a shorter version directly addressing these questions soon.
In short, I believe it is essential that we move away from a biologically-focused, segregative approach to mental illness, in preference for a conceptualization that privileges psychic and social factors and focuses on a diversity of real community based, transformative approaches. Most of the so called community clinics simply replicate the establishment model on a smaller scale. Radical social clinics must be non-hierarchical and focused on community transformation and mutual aid in addition to providing individual therapies of depth for those most hurt by the current social order.
Other Resources
The North American Network For Alternatives to Psychiatry
As the name suggests, a group promoting radical alternatives to establishment psych work.
The Psychotherapy Action Network
A group fighting for the inclusion of therapies of depth, insight, and relationship.
Mutual Aid/ Social Therapy (MAST)
A peer-sourced model for democratizing mental health help and resources. I like this model a lot, however, in my opinion, it is still too focused on the cognitive behavioral framework and can be modified.
Link to MAST resource drive. This has a lot of helpful resources for providers even if not leading a MAST group!
Mad in America’s mission is to serve as a catalyst for rethinking psychiatric care in the United States (and abroad). They believe that the current drug-based paradigm of care has failed our society, and that scientific research, as well as the lived experience of those who have been diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, calls for profound change.
Tracking the expanding uses of coercion, incarceration, and force by mental health care systems.
Institute for the Development of Human Arts
Transformative mental health education and community development.
A radical mental health clinic that aims to develop truly accessible and sustainable provision of psychotherapy for the working-class and the oppressed in the broadest senses of the terms, attentive to the interrelations between axes of oppression, and transcending national borders.
The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis, Brooklyn
a foundation building a community of practice for therapists, patients, activists, and theorists to develop and apply insights around community psychoanalysis.
Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis, Brooklyn
The Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis is a new project that explores how political thought can generate new approaches to clinical practice in psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapies.
Our activities include publishing Parapraxis, a magazine of psychoanalysis on the left, hosting open, sliding-scale seminars, lectures, and short courses, a telephonic clinic, supervision groups, and movement psychoanalysis/ group consultation.
They build peer support collectives, lead political education, develop new knowledge and language around mental distress, organize and advocate for the liberation of our community members globally, and create innovative, peer-led, alternatives to our current mental health system.
A peer-to-peer counseling model with low cost training.