Canada, Kenya, Australia: Colonial Encounters, Human Rights and Mental Health Laws, with Marina Morrow
Canada, Australia and Kenya are all signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. Yet, each country retains domestic laws that continue to sanction human rights violations, such as involuntary detainment, forced treatment, seclusion, and restraints. This seminar will present findings from field research and policy and legal analysis from the Realizing Human Rights and Social Justice in Mental Health project (www.socialjusticeinmentalhealth.org). We begin with an overview of the relationship between colonization and psychiatry to illustrate how mental health law has come to be used disproportionately against racialized communities.
We shed light on the structure of psychiatric power by sharing narratives from interviews with individuals who have experienced human rights violations in mental health. These stories reveal how psychiatric power is influenced by intersecting experiences of colonialism, racism, sexism, poverty, and sanism. Through this illumination, we expose the profound social and structural inequities that permeate the mental health care system, perpetuating social injustices. We argue that system change must move beyond legal and policy reform to support a paradigm shift in mental health care that will bolster innovative recovery and human rights-oriented community care that supports the autonomy, dignity and well-being of people.
Speaker Profile
Marina Morrow, PhD is a Professor at the School of Health Policy and Management in the Faculty of Health at York University and a renowned international expert on mental health, policy, and equity. Her research has developed novel intersectional approaches and academic-community engagement models that have been translated into mental health policy and practice in Canada and internationally. In her work, Morrow uses mad studies approaches to better understand the social, political, and institutional processes through which mental health policies and practices are developed and how social and health inequities are sustained or attenuated for different populations.
Register below and join us on Wednesday, January 15, at 10 a.m. ET
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