Abraham Cohen

This paper applies an Intersectionality Based Policy Analysis Framework to Ontario’s current mental health plan – The Roadmap: A Plan to Build Ontario’s Mental Health and Addictions Services – in order to identify the contextual influences, underlying values and assumptions, which promote or undermine the uptake of human rights and equity as a mental health policy priority in Ontario. We found that dominant framings of the “problem” of mental health (as lack of access, coordination or integration, as a fiscal drain, as an economic burden, and as a clinical or medical problem) served to obscure and ignore the underlying social and structural conditions that impact mental health and the human rights violations that routinely occur in the context of “care.” We discuss the implications of The Roadmap ignoring social and structural determinants of health, and by way of contrast, explore how citizen engagement and activism can support rethinking mental health policy so that it is more just and equitable.

Colonization has had extremely negative impacts on the mental health and wellness of Indigenous peoples throughout the world. In this paper we take up colonial processes as they relate to Indigenous lives and mental health in three contexts: Canada, Kenya and Australia. This work engages storytelling and the method of storywork (Archibald et al., 2019) as a way to preserve and pass on history and as a way of resisting colonial oppression. This work is grounded in an intersectional approach to social justice and decolonization (Crenshaw, 1990; Hankivsky & Cormier, 2011), and supported sharing, knowledge co-creation and joint thematic narrative analysis of Indigenous experiences of mental health and justice systems across the three contexts. Our writing team represents a collaborative process between Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors where the members of the team most impacted by colonization use stories to reflect on the impact of colonization and its specific ties to psychiatric, justice and child welfare systems. This paper is presented in three main parts beginning with “Emile’s Story,” followed by “Remembering ‘Is That You Ruthie?’” and concluding with “Navigating Kenya’s Colonial Legacy.” This work engages a process of decolonization by challenging these destructive colonial narratives through storytelling. This paper will both document and demonstrate the importance of creating space for different forms of knowledge creation within academia.

Hurricane Katrina has mobilized community-based environmental justice organizing and advocacy and injected a strong social justice analysis of extreme weather events and disaster recovery. Using interviews and observations with New Orleans activists and organizations, we examine three community and advocacy-based rebuilding and organizing projects that arose as a result of diminished local and federal government infrastructure and regulatory engagement: 1) a labor-environment coalition which rebuilt a single neighborhood block as a demonstration project that also provided safety and health training; 2) activists' analyses of sludge toxicity in diverse neighborhood and point source locations; and 3) community organizing to address the re-opening of public schools on contaminated land. This leads us to a broader examination of neighborhood activism regarding rebuilding, barriers and opportunities posed by political and state entities, and the connection between environmental hazards and public health infrastructure problems. An in-depth look at these three case studies underscores the importance of community-based environmental justice organizations for building grassroots infrastructure for effective disaster planning and to ensure that a foundation exists to advance recovery efforts, particularly in situations when government infrastructure and support is lacking. © 2011, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.