Crazy Making

In this episode, I speak with Sarah Redikopp about self-harm and self-mutilation. Sarah is a mad and lived experience activist-academic and PhD candidate in the Graduate Program of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Sarah’s research uses critical and feminist theory and methods to critique psychiatric knowledges about self-harm. Drawing on insights from mad studies, queer and feminist affect theory, critical and feminist disability studies, and critical race theory, Sarah’s scholarship engages directly with lived experience accounts to co-create relational, intersectional, and contextualized engagements with self-harm and to inform social justice outcomes in “mental health” research. At the heart of Sarah’s work is a commitment to witnessing across difference and intervening into the pathologization of distress to inform social change. Sarah’s work has been published in scholarly, community, and grassroots publishing venues, including Sociology of Health and Illness (2022, 2023) and The Canadian Journal of Disability Studies (2021), Canada Watch (2021), and more. Sarah lives and works as a white settler in Tkaronto/Toronto, on the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples.

In this episode I speak with Joyce Tsui. Joyce is a nursing professor in the School of Community and Health Studies at Centennial College, and a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Canada. 

Her clinical background is in the area of gerontological nursing. She's worked in the long-term care sector as a Unit Leader and Nurse Classifier with the Ontario Ministry of Health and long-term care and Behavioural Support Outreach nurse, and an interprofessional nurse educator. Her current doctoral research examines the academic accommodation process in Higher Learning institutions while interrogating practices of the medicalization of mental health challenges. In other words what Joyce's work will unearth is the ways in which college and university students become forced into medical categories and labels primarily psychiatric in order to be considered for academic accommodations in their respective school programs.

This episode marks the third episode of a series on child and youth mental health. I speak with Dr. Nazilla Khanlou. Nazilla is an associate professor in the School of Nursing and Women’s Health Research Chair in Mental Health at York University. In my conversation with her, Dr. Khanlou helps us understand some of the most pressing issues facing young people today, particularly people with intersecting marginalized identities such as disability and racialization. She talks to us about resilience, but not the individualized way we understand it, rather, a more complex notion of the concept, drawing attention to the structural dimensions of resilience and coping.

This episode marks the second episode of a series on child and youth mental health. I speak with Sharry Taylor about youth mental health, particularly, how identity develops in young people in the context of mental health and illness. She takes us on a journey of what it might be like for the developing young person as they grapple with making sense of what it means to have disruptions in their mental health. Sharry is a schoolteacher and doctoral student at the University of Toronto, engaging in research on identity theory and identity development in the context of youth mental health.

In this inaugural episode, we hear from Dr. Marina Morrow and Efrat Gold on their important work in critical mental health and the possibilities for alternative approaches that extend beyond biomedical psychiatry. We discuss coercive and damaging practices within the psychiatric discipline, as we take a close look at the role of global research collaborations in efforts to critique and resist psychiatric power and advance mental health care and policy in line with human rights legislation. We likewise engage in discussions related to the discourse of eugenics post World War II and its impact on the development of the psychiatric profession, its establishment as an institution of social control, and its legitimization and ‘facticity’ as discipline within the broader jurisdiction of medicine.

Dr. Marina Morrow is a Professor at the School of Health Policy and Management in the Faculty of Health at York University. In her work, Marina uses critical mental health and intersectional approaches to better understand the social, political, and institutional processes through which health and mental health policies and practices are developed and how social and health inequities are sustained or attenuated for different populations. Marina strongly supports public scholarship and the work and activism of the Mad movement and Mad scholars. She is the lead editor on a recent book called Critical Inquiries for Social Justice in Mental Health, available from the University of Toronto Press.

Efrat Gold is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, engaging in mad and disability studies. Through her writing and activism, she challenges dominant views of mental health and illness, moving towards contextualized and relational understandings of suffering and distress. Gold critiques psychiatry, focusing on those most vulnerable and marginalized by psychiatric power, discourse, and treatments. Her work is staunchly feminist, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive. Through explorations into norms, meaning-making, and constructions of legitimacy, Gold unsettles psychiatric hegemony by returning to the sites where psychiatric certainty has been produced.