Compiled by Artists Jennifer Cabral, Kat Cope, and Chanika Svetvilas
Reproduced with permission.
Mental Health Resources
Project LETS
We build peer-led communities of support, education & advocacy for folks with lived experience of mental illness, trauma, Disability, and/or neurodivergence. We believe that principles of Disability Justice are key components to supporting collective healing and our human rights.
IDHA – Transformative Mental Health Education and Community Education
Transformative Mental Health understands human suffering, mental difference, and the full range of emotion, as a catalyst for generative change, rather than a pathology. Transformative Mental Health is an evolving process, not a destination.
Fireweed Collective
Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice lens. We help support the emotional wellness of all people, and center the needs of those most marginalized by our society. Our work seeks to disrupt the harm of systems of abuse and oppression, often reproduced by the mental health system.
National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)
Resources, workshops, support groups
Service/Educational Organizations
Health Justice Commons
The Health Justice Commons works at the intersections of racial, economic, gender, disability, and environmental justice to support marginalized communities to re-imagine and re-design healthcare and healing for our times. We provide health justice training and consultation, engage in healing justice movement building, and incubate community-driven solutions, which generate health abundance and alleviate the devastating health burden of social injustice and environmental racism.
Sins Invalid
Sins Invalid is a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Led by disabled people of color, Sins Invalid’s performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body, developing provocative work where paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all bodies and communities. We define disability broadly to include people with physical impairments, people who belong to a sensory minority, people with emotional disabilities, people with cognitive challenges, and those with chronic/severe illness. We understand the experience of disability to occur within any and all walks of life, with deeply felt connections to all communities impacted by the medicalization of their bodies, including trans, gender variant and intersex people, and others whose bodies do not conform to our culture(s)’ notions of “normal” or “functional.”
Tools
WRAP (Wellness, Action, Recovery, Plan)
The Wellness Recovery Action Plan® or WRAP®, is a self-designed prevention and wellness process that anyone can use to get well, stay well and make their life the way they want it to be. It was developed in 1997 by a group of people who were searching for ways to overcome their own mental health issues and move on to fulfilling their life dreams and goals. It is now used extensively by people in all kinds of circumstances, and by health care and mental health systems all over the world to address all kinds of physical, mental health and life issues.
Books
The Collected Schizophrenias Essays
Esme Weijun Wang
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies
Resmaa Menakem
Open in Emergency, Second Edition, A hybrid book art project that decolonizes mental health, published by The Asian American Literary Review
Open in Emergency is an arts and humanities intervention to decolonize mental health, a community effort, led by guest-editor Mimi Khúc, to collectively ask what Asian American unwellness looks like and how to tend to that unwellness. This special issue provided a space for artists, scholars, organizers, and community to explore structures of care that we have already been building – and to dream into being new structures, new tools, to better care for our collective needs.
An Unquiet Mind
Kay Redfield Jamison
Touched with Fire
Kay Redfield Jamison
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
Kay Redfield Jamison
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Bessel Van Der Kolk
Disability Arts and Culture: An Introduction
Petra Kuppers
Back to Top of Page | Back to Interview with Chanika Svetvilas and Jennifer Cabral | Back to Volume 15, Issue 4 – Winter 2021