Co-Production in Mental Health as a Path to Race Equality

Our service London Hearing Voices Network is hosting an online workshop, facilitated by Dr Colin King.

Part One is a first person narrative exploring the Lived Experience and two-sided world of a Gemini: The frontstage, first world, of a diagnosed black, male schizophrenic and the backstage second world of a black mental health practitioner, commissioner & teacher.

Part Two examines how these worlds are informed historically. Using the image of the travelling escalator, we’ll evaluate the ways that European diagnostic & legal frameworks and theories of eugenics emerge from the period of slavery, and how they influence values and behaviours. And also examine:—

• How race emerges in parallel with the conceptual, philosophical and psychiatric forms of whiteness that define schizophrenia

• How black men (currently over-represented in the mental health system) are exposed to forms of whiteness and intrusive models of ‘drapetomania’ in European psychiatry

• How this produces racialised compliance inside the family, school and prison system

Outcomes

• To discuss a range of models that develops whiteness as a framework for translating the experiences of a black man diagnosed with schizophrenia and his role working in the mental health system.

• To understand and explore the experience of race and racialisation in the mental health system

• To evaluate the effectiveness of cultural competence, shared decision making and co-production within psychiatry and psychology, as a path to race equality.

• To look at new critical approaches to the Euro-centric model of race, and also at anti-racist pedagogic approaches to co-production, in which the epistemology of lived experience of race, across the colour line, informs the values and behaviour of a new psychiatry.

About the trainer

Colin King is a mental health survivor and since being diagnosed he has been challenging inequality and social racialised injustices.

To find out about fees and to register