The Need for Anti-Carceral Mental Health Care

Carceral logic is rooted in the beliefs that punishment, policing, surveillance, criminalization, and incarceration uphold goodness and safety. These carceral practices are engrained everywhere — in institutions, industries, even in our interpersonal relationships and the way we treat ourselves (eg. self-punishment).

As a psych survivor and a therapist, I have witnessed and experienced some of the carceral tactics that are extended into and perpetuated by the mental health industry (my social location as a cis, middle-class, non-Black/Brown/Indigenous person was significant to my survival and recovery).

What kind of “care” involves reliance on police, forced hospitalization and the removal of choice and agency? What kind of “care” system turns mental health and healthcare practitioners into substitutes for the police? What kind of “care” industry shames and punishes marginalized practitioners for politicizing their practices?

Psych survivors and disabled folks know that abolition includes the removal of police from healthcare and psychiatric abolition. It is also known that mental health practitioners can be just as violent and harmful with carceral practices of surveillance and policing that are introduced in training and maintained through licensure.

An anti-oppressive or justice-oriented approach to mental health care must also be anti-carceral. Mental health practitioners need to not only unpack our involvement with and reliance on the police and carceral institutions, but we must also delve into how we embody carceral logic ourselves — both in our work and in our every day lives. This exploration can also lead us to uncover how we are taught to fear and act in carceral ways from our training institutions, associations, and the overall mental health industry.

Carceral practices are implemented on 3 levels in the mental health industry:

• involvement with and reliance on police and carceral institutions (such as child protection/aid services that populate the foster care system which has replaced residential schools)

• policing/surveillance/punishment practices onto our “clients”

• policing/surveillance of mental health practitioners (by fellow colleagues, colleges and associations, overall industry, and ourselves)

Here are some resources to get us started:

Read

• We Don’t Need Cops to Become Social Workers: We Need Peer Support + Community Response Networks 

• Abolition Must Include Psychiatry By Stella Akua Mensah on Disability Visibility Project

• Cops and Counselors by Jessi Lee Jackson on Inquest

• Mandatory Reporting is Not Neutral

• Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet – Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective

• Reflection and brainstorming questions for mental health practitioners around (anti)carceral mental health care

Watch/Listen

• Abolitionist Therapy: Possibilities for Transformation with Dr. Travis Heath & Gabes Torres

• Radicalizing Psychotherapy: From Multiculturalism to Abolition with Dr. Travis Heath by University of Denver

• Decarcerating Care by IDHA

• Mad Mapping: A Guide to Creating an Emotional Safety Plan by BCRW

• Willful Subjects*: Decolonizing the Psychiatric Institution by BCRW

• Policing in the Mental Health Industry with Ji-Youn Kim & Gabes Torres

Attend

• Monthly Mental Health Practice Space by Interrupting Criminalization

Explore

• Abolitionist Social Work Toolkit

• The Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work 

• Alternatives to Police-Based Wellness Checks curated by Defund 604 Network

• Defund the Police - Invest in Community Care: A Guide to Alternative Mental Health Crisis Responses by Interrupting Criminalization

From Ji-Youn’s Instagram:

• Dear fellow therapists, There is no justice in our involvement with and/or reliance on the carceral state, nor in our own practices of surveillance and policing.

• Abolitionist mental health care requires a refusal to replace police with social workers or even therapists. Mental health industry is another extension of the state and will (and does) act as another form of surveillance and policing. 1/

• The mental health industry grows alongside state violence and systems of oppression: capitalism, white supremacy, imperialism. 1/

Further points of study: Disability Justice, abolition and Prison Industrial Complex, Mad Studies, Medical Industrial Complex