Since our founding in 2016, IDHA has put on six “live” training series, amassing an incredible wealth of transformative mental health knowledge. In 2019, we decided to develop a scalable and iterative mental health training model that proliferates rights-based, peer-centered, and holistic approaches, and shifts dominant medicalized narratives toward a paradigm of polyphony, humanity, care, and support.

Here’s some of what we’ve been up to since:

• Surveying 50+ people to understand the needs, desires, and current frameworks of those who may be interested in taking a training like this

• Conducting 23 lived experience interviews with people from 8 countries who identify as being impacted by the mental health system

• Consulting with individuals with lived and professional expertise in the Global South to facilitate direct engagement with service users and marginalized groups in other countries

• Hosting a series of curriculum development groups with activists, artists, peers, clinicians, researchers, and advocates to develop the training content

• Engaging in a virtual video production process to create the curriculum

IDHA’s Transformative Mental Health Core Curriculum centers the impact of structural oppression on our well-being, amplifies voices of lived experience alongside research and professional perspectives, and introduces concrete tools, modalities, and language for addressing issues that so often end up inappropriately medicalized.

Those who take this training will be introduced to a systemic, historical analysis of mental health, understanding how racism, sexism, classism, ableism, sanism, and other forms of oppression intersect with the mental health system; diverse narratives of those with lived experience and the powerful impact of current grassroots movements; a plethora of community-based and peer-led practices that support healing on a personal, interpersonal, and community level; and how to apply a transformative mental health lens to their lives and work.

Here are a few at-a-glance details:

• Audience: Care workers and healers, including but not limited to mental health professionals, peer support workers, community care workers

• Format: Online and self-paced with "drip content" released each week; cohorts of people will through the experience together, convening in optional study-into-action groups; videos will be supplemented by readings and resources

• Length: 8 weeks, with 2 hours of video content per week

This project seeks to help fill a critical gap in the siloed movement for transformative mental health, bridging a range of stakeholders and amplifying an abundance of alternative tools and practices.

Amid growing momentum to transform how we provide care and support to those experiencing mental distress, we seek to draw upon knowledge and traditions across a range of movements (mad pride, disability justice, critical psychiatry, etc.), disciplines (psychology, philosophy, creative arts, humanities, medical science, etc.), and geographies.

Time and again at IDHA, we’ve heard about the need for a “primer” or 101 resource for folks who are just starting to explore this area. You may be familiar with our existing self-paced “intro training” called Rethinking Mental Health. This is what we’ve been pointing folks to over the last few years, but there is a need to build something even bigger and more comprehensive.

Dominant approaches to mental health education have been primarily developed by clinicians, rarely with the input of individuals with various forms of lived experience. IDHA recognizes the ways in which the oppressive and carceral nature of the mental health system disproportionately impacts people of color and those with other marginalized identities – further excluding these individuals from shaping training opportunities. We also acknowledge that people of color have been historically underrepresented in mental health activist spaces, including IDHA.

IDHA is committed to uplifting the perspectives and narratives of individuals and communities who have not historically had a voice in the development of mental health training, including people of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, current/prior mental health service users, psychiatric survivors, and disabled people. Although the first iteration of our curriculum is being developed for a U.S. audience, we recognize the impact that Western medicalized approaches to mental health have had on other parts of the world, particularly in the Global South.