When Youth Get Mad Through a Critical Course on Mental Health

Response: This Youth Got Mad

• Zachary Sera Grant

• Mad, Queer, Gender Non-Binary, Artist, Social Work Student and Community Support Worker, Toronto, ON, Canada

Jennifer Poole’s chapter immediately transported me back to my own early years. The turmoil I lived with, the coping strategies. The privilege of moving away to university was my safe haven, but it was also what first officially introduced me to the mental health system in Canada. It was also where I received my first formal mental health diagnosis. Years later, in Jen’s class, university became the place where I began to understand the impact of intersectionality on mental health.

I entered Jen’s class out of pure desperation. I was at a point where I had to decide whether to accept the proposed hospitalized treatment for my eating disorder, continue with my self-harming coping mechanisms, or try something else. After meeting Jen purely by cosmic serendipity, I decided to try something else, Mad studies, or to be specific, SWP-905, Critical Mental Health and Madness. Many of the support people in my life were weary of my decision to put off traditional treatments to take a university course, which in their minds was preaching against the formal help so many people wanted me to accept. But as people began to see the incline in my health as directly correlated to registering and attempting to stay well enough to take this class, many of their concerns dwindled. By the time I finally made it to class, I was in most people’s minds at a stable point in “recovery,” which only seemed to increase week after week of class. It was here that I realized I was reacting to the chaos of the world around me. Where the realities of the poverty I had experienced, where my Queer Trans identity, my Madness, and the discrimination I faced due to them, coupled with precarious employment, student debts, family and health issues, led to reactions that were not always seen as “normal.” It was also here where I finally gave myself permission and credit to legitimize all the alternative mental health treatments I had tried that worked for me but were so often discredited by my friends and formal mental health team.

Jen asks, “How do they [my students] make it to class? How do they make ends meet? How do they deal with their anger and distress? How do any of my students keep going?” My response is this, it was the one place that gave me hope. No matter what was said, we were talking about things we couldn’t necessarily speak about with friends, family, or in other classes. It was a place where our intersection of identities met and were recognized and validated. It was the safest place I sat in, but it was also unsettling. Often the teachings did not always come in neat packages, some were not Western, and I had to learn how to be kind as well as critical. But it was the difficult teachings that have stuck with me to this day. Many of us would meet for hours after class or on weekends to discuss and debate. We created a peer support group and a safe place where we knew we were not alone in our struggles, where we were supported, and people like us were creating knowledge that was being validated by the university. If we were open, the knowledge was relatable and relevant to our everyday lived experiences.

But I am privileged. I am white. I am able to afford university. My work provided me with paid hours to attend an afternoon class that was seen as relevant to my employment. I have safety to be able to speak my Madness aloud and avoid traditional biomedical mental health approaches because I have formal education and work in the mental health field.

Jen states that she “will never really know what the lasting effects of introducing madness and critical approaches to mental health are for the youth in the class.” While I do not know the lasting effects of this class on all my peers, I can speak to the lasting effect on myself and my practice. While I was no stranger to the Mad movement before this class, my involvement with it has multiplied. Having previously worked as a peer worker at a large mental health institution, I was used to critiquing the mental health system while working within it. Yet, I was often afraid of saying too much; I never knew when I would be told I was too emotional, too radical, or when I needed to remain silent. I was used to being discredited by social workers, occupational therapists, or psychiatrists, with years of valued clinical experience. My years of personal experience were just not held in the same regards without letters behind my name that weren’t psychiatric diagnoses.

Jen’s class gave me the confidence to speak aloud much of what I was frightened to say. Learning how to speak so that my experiences were listened to. It gave me skills to really listen to my clients and validate what they were saying. It gave me the skills to speak up in my agency meetings when I felt sanism was alive and well. It fostered conversations around the use of language.

Difficult conversations that started in class moved into my work life, and since then, many of my coworkers have recounted their own stories of teaching. One of my co-workers spoke to me about the concern she had over people in her yoga class using sanist pejoratives. We discussed how she could address this. Later, she shared that people were no longer using the same language, encouraging each other to say what they actually meant. These people are then taking their experiences and sharing with others in their lives. What started in one university class room has spread to multiple workplaces and beyond.

Critical Mental Health and Madness opened my eyes to the possibility of what social work could be. A place where everyone is both teacher and student, a place where all knowledge is regarded as valid. A place where people are believed and validated. A place of kindness.