Abolitionist Approaches to Mental Health

The 2020 uprisings in response to George Floyd’s murder helped bring discussions of abolishing police and prisons into mainstream conversations. Much of the discussion within the social work community has focused on shifting resources away from the police to other sources such as the mental health system. Additionally, child welfare researchers have used this opportunity to shine light on the ways that the Child Welfare system essentially functions as a family policing system. Largely absent from this conversation are the ways in which the public mental health system also serves policing and carceral functions. Involuntary commitment, the use of physical and chemical restraints, and the use of DSM-V diagnosis to further segregate and other the individuals whose behaviors fall outside of rigid, capitalistic ideas of normalcy are a few examples of the ways that mental health services uphold carceral logics. Additionally, in many educational spaces that teach about mental health to new professionals in the field, the framework of diagnosable pathology serves to further perpetuate these logics as well as the myth of meritocracy; focusing on ideas of individual “treatment� over systemic solutions like universal design.

Our roundtable will bring together scholars who also identify with a combination of the following identities: lived experience with mental illnesses, current practicing mental health clinicians, and activists. We will explain how carceral logics and mechanisms play out within mental health services. We will then explore U.S. social work’s engagement or lack thereof with critiques of carceral mechanisms within mental health. This discussion will be grounded in mixed methods and participatory research on the impacts of coercive and pathologizing practices, the emancipatory potential of abolitionist frameworks in mental health (harm reduction, meaning centered praxis, decarceration, co-production), and a reorientation to addressing underlying social and structural determinants. The panelists will present diverse perspectives on both the transformation of social work practice and participatory and emancipatory research strategies designed to center and amplify historically subjugated (user/survivor) knowledges.