ENROLLMENT IS NOW CLOSED FOR PSYCHOLOGIES OF LIBERATION
THANK YOU TO ALL WHO JOINED US!
Series Overview
Around the world, we are witnessing rising authoritarianism, racist nationalism, increasing inequality, and widespread violent conflict. The COVID-19 pandemic and escalating climate crisis are reminders of the precarious and interconnected nature of life on our planet.
Researcher China Mills asks: “What happens when issues such as distress, suicide, and terrorism get framed as global mental health challenges?” The answer can be found in a “disease model” that is rapidly spreading around the world -- stigmatizing distress, pathologizing human experience, and proffering narrow solutions to complex problems. Traditional healing systems are being displaced, leaving a biomedical and behaviorist approach in its wake to address attendant rises in crisis.
In an effort to expand access to models of mental health that support collective liberation, we must resist reproducing colonial dynamics, and center the need for person-centered, locally-rooted responses to global problems. At the same time, as globalization continues to make the world smaller, we have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other cultures and permitting ourselves to accept a plurality of paradigms and solutions. Ancient and modern practices of witness-bearing and storytelling help restore wholeness to fragmented minds, spirits, and communities. Relationships rooted in trust and dialogue make deep change possible.
IDHA’s four-part Spring 2021 series will explore injustices in global mental health and present grassroots, liberatory responses from around the world. Transformative mental health requires challenging ingrained narratives that keep us individually and collectively stuck -- narratives that claim some groups of people are inherently superior to others; that we can harm others without harming ourselves; that marginalized people get what they deserve; that widespread abuse is disconnected from trauma; and that the forces creating inequality should be dictating the solutions to it. We are delighted to present an intercontinental offering of scholars, practitioners, and individuals with lived experience sharing analysis and relational practices for the transformative human arts. Join us as we discuss how to maximize human potential, together.
“The social and biomedical sciences offer tools to verify efficacy, but often lack the imagination or critical theory to actually do the dreaming up of any new ways forward. I am so grateful for IDHA for filling that gap and creating such powerful dialogue and transformative thought.”
—IDHA training participant, HEALING SYSTEMS
Schedule and Format
Registration includes the 2.5-hour class session, as well as a suite of supplemental areas of engagement to aid ongoing learning, growing, and healing. Please note that all main sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants after, in case you aren’t able to show up live due to a time zone difference or other conflict.
Accessibility: ASL translation and live closed captioning will be provided for all four main class sessions (not including the discussion groups).
Main Class Sessions
Unsettling Global Mental Health: Unpacking Power, Epistemic Justice and Coloniality
Saturday, March 27, 2021, 12-2:30 pm EST
China Mills and Akriti Mehta
Global Grassroots Responses: Weaving Together Healing and Social Justice
Saturday, April 24, 2021, 9-11:30 am EST
Bhargavi Davar and Evan Auguste
Applications of Two-Eyed Seeing: Indigenous Practices for Social and Emotional Wellbeing
Saturday, May 22, 2021, 12-2:30 pm EST
Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy
Mutual Accompaniment and the Liberation of Psychology: Widening Circles of Solidarity
Saturday, June 19, 2021, 12-2:30 pm EST
Mary Watkins and Alisa Orduna
Supplemental Areas of Engagement
Mighty Networks
All participants will be invited to our School for Transformative Mental Health forum on Mighty Networks. This is our virtual learning community where you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other students and your faculty.
Discussion Groups
Each class will be followed by a thirty minute break, and then an optional 90-minute discussion in the same Zoom room facilitated by IDHA organizers for participants who are interested in digging deeper into the material. These discussion groups aim to foster participatory and dialogic approaches to learning.
Resources
We’ve put together a robust suite of resources to aid your ongoing learning. This includes forthcoming blog posts that sync with the classes, and a Supplemental Study Packet with recommendations for further reading and study.
Project-Based Learning (FULL SERIES ONLY)
For the first time, IDHA is excited to offer an opt-in project-based learning component. Interested participants who register for the entire series will join others for a six-month process of brainstorming, researching, applying the content of the classes to their own lives, workplaces, and/or communities. With some light guidance from IDHA organizers and informed by a lens of epistemic justice, this will be a largely self-directed pursuit — a way to both enhance and lift up learning as a revolutionary and movement-building act. Check the box for "project based learning" during registration and you will be invited to a closed group on Mighty Networks, and prompted by our organizing team to check in on status at regular intervals. Participants will be encouraged to write about their projects when the course is finished on the IDHA blog.
Questions? Email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.
Unsettling Global Mental Health: Unpacking Power, Epistemic Justice and Coloniality
Saturday, March 27, 2021
12 - 2:30 pm EST
Facilitated by China Mills and Akriti Mehta
Global Mental Health is a growing field of study and practice that seeks to improve access to mental health services for people worldwide. As the movement gains influence, its critics have argued that Global Mental Health is born of a Eurocentric understanding of well-being largely based on biopsychiatry. As such, the globalization of these approaches threatens to recreate colonial dynamics by undermining local healing systems, deemphasizing the value of community support, and erasing the experiences of those most impacted.
In this session, we will unpack and reflect on some of the key assumptions that underpin Global Mental Health and some questions that arise in response: What happens when issues such as distress and suicide get framed as global mental health challenges? Who defines what is health versus illness? Who determines what counts as evidence and what evidence counts? Can, or should, mental health be global? In contrast to Global Mental Health, we seek to recognize, appreciate and tap into the deep wells of knowledge that have been developed by users/survivors/persons living with psychosocial disabilities in the Global South.
Learning objectives:
- Understand some of the key assumptions guiding Global Mental Health, and why they may be problematic
- Ground our understanding of, and future action in, Global Mental Health, within the organizing and knowledge production of users/survivors/persons with psychosocial disabilities (especially those within the Global South)
- Recognize and appreciate the significance of cross-border networks and social movements of users/survivors/persons with psychosocial disabilities in the Global South
- Recognize the importance of power within Global Mental Health Understand the importance of colonialism and coloniality within Global Mental Health, through appreciating the intersections of epistemic injustice and epistemicide
- Appreciate the nuances of a rights-based agenda for global mental health, focusing on the UNCRPD and its significance for rethinking Global Mental UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health
China Mills' research traces different facets of the global mental health assemblage. She explores the ways diagnoses travel and circulate around the world, and what happens when issues such as distress, suicide, or terrorism get framed as global mental health issues. China is the author of the book ‘Decolonizing Global Mental Health: the Psychiatrization of the Majority World’ (Routledge).
Akriti Mehta is a survivor researcher who has experienced mental health services in India and the UK. Her experiences of mental distress and mental health services as well as the work of other users, survivors, and persons with psychosocial disabilities led her to critically re-examine what ‘madness’ means. Akriti works as a researcher on the survivor-led EURIKHA project and as part of her role, examines knowledge production by persons with psychosocial disabilities, mental health service users, and survivors of psychiatry in the global South. She is interested in movements led by users/survivors/people with psychosocial disability in the ‘global South’ and how they influence and are influenced by local and global shifts. She is currently pursuing a PhD examining psychosocial disability activism and advocacy in India.
Global Grassroots Responses: Weaving Together Healing and Social Justice
Saturday, April 24, 2021
9 - 11:30 am EST
Facilitated by Bhargavi Davar and Evan Auguste
As biopsychiatry and forced treatment spread around the world, traditional healing systems are erased in favor of approaches that fail to center the impacts of structural violence and oppression. In response, movements and communities across all continents are promoting culturally-grounded approaches that foster independence, inclusion, and autonomy. Bapu Trust in Pune, India and Sawubona healing circles created by the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) in the U.S. are two examples of community-led efforts that seamlessly integrate survivor-centered mental health advocacy with traditional healing systems and values.
Bapu Trust is an advocacy, policy, and training organization that creates, pilots, and monitors community inclusion programs throughout India. The Sawubona healing circles emerged as a way to address challenges specific to Black first responders during the COVID-19 crisis by equipping them with African-centered healing methods. In this session, we will explore how both Bapu Trust and ABPsi are creating powerful, widespread networks of community care that uplift the needs and agency of those who are most impacted by oppressive systems. We will bridge psychiatric survivorship, research, and practice, and introduce methods of fostering healing environments in which every person uses their own capacity to make choices and heal themselves through the use of culturally-grounded practices.
Learning objectives:
- Review the historical context underpinning Bapu Trust’s work, including the CRPD and Bali Declaration in 2018
- Identify the success of Bapu Trust’s community care practices, specifying characteristics that are relevant and transferable to other contexts
- Introduce ABPsi’s Sawubona healing circles as a form of culturally-grounded practice embedded in Afro-centered theory
- Explore how to incorporate culturally-grounded principles and techniques, and how to adapt techniques and principles for different communities and contexts
- Propose methods of “reclaiming community” that center inclusion and autonomy
Bhargavi Davar, PhD is a childhood survivor of the Indian mental asylums. She identifies as a person with a psychosocial disability having endured long-term trauma from those experiences. She completed her PhD on the ethical and epistemological foundations of the mental and behavioural sciences and the possibility of human freedom within those disciplines. Her work has been on gender, culture and disability studies, and the basis for the modern mental health policy frames in Asia. She is Director of the Bapu Trust for Research on Mind & Discourse, Pune; and Convenor for an Asia Pacific advocacy platform called ‘Transforming Communities for Inclusion, Asia’ (TCI Asia Pacific). Her work through these organisations is to advocate for the full realization of all human rights for persons with psychosocial disabilities, especially the right to live in the community.
Evan Auguste is a fifth-year doctoral candidate at Fordham University completing his degree in clinical psychology with a focus in forensic psychology. He has focused his research on the impact of racial trauma on justice-involved adolescents and on leveraging African-Centered psychology to optimize interventions. As a part of his clinical training, he has consulted and provided evaluations for justice-involved people seeking parole and provided treatment and advocacy to justice-involved people in forensic hospitals. As a Haitian-American, he also writes on and advocates for leveraging the history of Haitian scholarship and practice for the well-being of Haitian people. He is currently the Chair for the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi) Student Circle and the Co-Chair for the ABPsi Sawubona Healing Circle initiative.
Applications of Two-Eyed Seeing: Indigenous Practices for Social and Emotional Wellbeing
Saturday, May 22, 2021
12 - 2:30 pm EST
Facilitated by Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy
NOTE: CE credits are available for this class. Learn more about CE credits for the series here.
Two-Eyed Seeing was initially coined by Elder Albert Marshall as a means to give indigenous epistemology and knowledge equal status to mainstream scientific perspectives and knowledge. In M'iqmaq, the word is Etuaptmumk. In English, it is the idea of explanatory pluralism. Within most indigenous cultures, the mind cannot be considered separately from body, community, and spirituality, unlike the silos created in the dominant culture. Healing cannot happen without involving the body, the community, and the spirits.
This class will introduce the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing to explore healing from an indigenous perspective in relation to the mainstream, evidence-based model of mental health. We are especially interested in healing approaches for people with so-called severe mental disorders, those in medication-assisted treatment for opiate use, and for people who have suffered the effects of immediate and historical trauma. We will explore stories of Maori and psychiatry collaborations and see what this can teach us about indigenous approaches to mental health therapies. This program was originally designed for practitioners who provide counseling in indigenous communities, but is relevant for anyone who is interested to see how indigenous practices could enrich their work and learning including other mental health workers, activists, and students.
Learning objectives:
- Explore definitions of mental health rooted in social and personal wellbeing and how these views differ from that of mainstream culture
- Define the origins of Two-Eyed Seeing, and apply this method of explanatory pluralism to mental health and therapeutic practice
- Specify the practices that make Two-Eyed Seeing possible, including the art of listening without judgment or interpretation, and the art of observing without presupposing
- Review cross-cultural definitions of counseling and psychotherapy
- Explain the concept of forgiveness and radical acceptance and how this fits into indigenous mental health therapies
Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and trained in family medicine, psychiatry, and clinical psychology. He completed his residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He has been on the faculties of several medical schools, most recently as associate professor of family medicine at the University of New England. He continues to work with aboriginal communities to develop uniquely aboriginal styles of healing and health care for use in those communities. He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, and Coyote Wisdom, a trilogy of books on what Native culture has to offer the modern world. His goal is to bring the wisdom of indigenous peoples about healing back into mainstream medicine and to transform medicine and psychology through this wisdom coupled with more European derived narrative traditions. .
Barbara Mainguy, LMSW, LCPC is a psychotherapist and education director for the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation. Her interests include doing psychotherapy with people who have been diagnosed as psychotic, working with people who are having chronic pain, and exploring the interface between art and psychotherapy and healing. She is co-author with Lewis Mehl-Madrona of the book Remapping Your Mind: the Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story. Barbara studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Toronto and received a Master's degree in Creative Arts Psychotherapy at Concordia University. Prior to that, she worked as an artist and artist in residence in the mental health system. She received her M.S.W. from the University of Maine. Barbara loves stars, trees, and understanding the human mind. She believes dogs might be the answer to most things. She is happiest when she is able to follow the wanderings of her insatiable curiosity.
Mutual Accompaniment and the Liberation of Psychology: Widening Circles of Solidarity
Saturday, June 19, 2021
12 - 2:30 pm EST
Facilitated by Mary Watkins and Alisa Orduna
NOTE: CE credits are available for this class. Learn more about CE credits for the series here.
Social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró carefully articulated the goals and practices of a liberating psychology before his assassination in 1989. In the decades since, psychologies of liberation have emerged on every continent in response to the collective traumas inflicted by colonialism and globalization. Today, liberation psychology is a framework for theory and practice that seeks to transform unjust social and ecological conditions.
To engage in the public practice of psychology, mental health workers, caretakers, and activists must be acutely aware of their positionality and its impacts on community work. This class will present the theoretical foundation and participatory methodologies that unite radical interdisciplinary approaches to creating individual and community well-being. We will introduce concrete examples of contemporary liberation psychology practice, crystallizing its goals and methods. We will also introduce the notion of mutual accompaniment, a radical model of being with each other, animals and the earth, and its implications in the therapeutic relationship and the work of solidarity.
Learning objectives:
- Review the ideas and practices from liberation psychology
- Critique the practices of mainstream psychology
- Analyze the systemic causes of the difficulties that people suffer from
- Differentiate an individualistically oriented approach to trauma from a psychosocial understanding
- Identify differences between ecopsychosocial accompaniment and psychotherapeutic intervention
- Discuss how a dialogical approach can mobilize people to join in solidarity
- Integrate cultural humility with the key processes of therapy
Mary Watkins, Ph.D. is founding co-chair of the M.A./Ph.D. Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies Specialization at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, CA. She works at the interfaces between Euro-American depth psychologies and psychologies of liberation. Her recent books include Mutual Accompaniment and the Creation of the Commons, and the co-author of Toward Psychologies of Liberation and Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border. She worked as a clinical psychologist for two decades, before moving to community-based work. In addition to her teaching, she currently works with forced migrants seeking asylum and with people “inside” prison who want to learn about liberation psychology.
Alisa Orduna is a community development midwife with twenty-five years’ experience working in the nonprofit and government sectors to create beloved communities where persons of Indigenous and African descent can thrive.
“As a very new clinical mental health worker who sees so much wrong with the system already, it is incredibly validating to be surrounded by so many compassionate, forward-thinking individuals who are trying to improve this system and our world.”
—IDHA training participant, Healing Systems
Pricing Tiers
*We are also offering at least ten complete scholarships to the entire series. Apply here by March 12th!
Bundled Pricing
Save more than 30% when you purchase all four courses in the series!
CE Credits
As a training institute that values lived experience as highly as professional training, IDHA recognizes the way that the credentialing system enforces a culture of professionalism and devalues lived experience. At the same time, we believe it is a radical act to offer our training content for CE credits, ensuring that mental health workers and other clinicians can apply transformative mental health knowledge in maintaining a credential.
For this Spring series, we are able to offer CE credits for two of our four classes, which are facilitated or co-facilitated by a licensed clinician. These classes are: Applications of Two-Eyed Seeing: Indigenous Practices for Social and Emotional Wellbeing and Mutual Accompaniment and the Liberation of Psychology: Widening Circles of Solidarity.
CE credits are available to psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, counselors and marriage and family therapists, creative arts therapists, chemical dependency counselors, educators, and nurses.
IDHA offers these CE credits (2.5 credits per class, a $20 value) at the General and Supporter Rate only, for no additional cost. Credits are processed by our staff after the class is over. Certificates are available following course completion at www.ceuregistration.com. For more information about CE credits at IDHA, click here.
FAQ
What’s unique about IDHA’s approach?
We value lived experience as highly as professional training, so each course will be led by both a mental health clinician as well as someone who identifies as a survivor, a mental health service user, and/or someone who has experienced a mental health crisis. This will ensure participants receive holistic and nuanced perspectives.
Who is this series for?
This course is for mental health professionals, including but not limited to: clinicians, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, peer specialists, recovery support specialists, housing specialists, nurse practitioners and medical professionals, students. and anyone who works or plans to work with and around people who experience mental health-related issues.
Where are the classes held?
Classes will be held virtually via Zoom. Be sure to download the Zoom software onto your computer in advance of the training!
Are scholarships available?
This Spring, IDHA will award at least 10 scholarship positions to mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups are given priority. Apply for a scholarship by March 12th here.
Are these classes accessible?
ASL translation and live closed captioning will be provided for all four main class sessions. Please note these services are not available during the optional discussion groups.
Do I have to show up right at the time advertised for the class?
Yes, this is a live training so please be sure you are available at that time. All sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants after. Please note that most sessions begin at 12 pm EST, with the exception of the second class (which begins at 9 am EST).
Will I have the opportunity to interact with faculty?
Yes, each live training will provide the opportunity to interact with the faculty. You can also interact with many faculty members on Mighty Networks.
What is your cancellation policy?
For any questions or concerns, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.