This is the 2nd meeting of the Working Group. If you’re new to this space, please sign up here! Workers in the institutions of community mental health are especially invited, but all are welcome.

The institutions of community mental health are broken. Clients are captured by the institutional circuit, shuffled between supported housing, jail, hospital, day program, case management, clinic, homeless shelter, and the street. This fragmentation has made “continuity of care” a buzzword, placing hope in the technocratic expansion of surveillance, assessment, and measurement. In reality, workers are left holding the pieces, providing needed care outside our formal work roles and frequently ending up frustrated, dejected, and burnt out.

We are not alone. Though institutions are siloed, our shared work can be an occasion for solidarity. This Working Group will gather workers in many roles and contexts of care. United by our recognition of systemic failure and our desire to build something better, we aim to theorize our work, develop new approaches, and build capacity to put them into practice. We will draw on our own experience, contemporary scholarship, and historical precedents to resist the dehumanizing effects of the status quo and put forward alternatives.

The Working Group will be facilitated by Dr. Christopher Landry.

Pre-Reads:

“François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban, and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy” from Disalienation by Camille Robcis

“A Politics of Madness” by Francois Tosquelles — Linking to the PDF version as well

Future meeting dates:

• December 18, 2024

• January 29, 2025

• February 26, 2025

• March 26, 2025

• April 30, 2025