CSX Movement Urged to Embrace Anti-Racism and Indigenous Thought

A new study by Walter Wai Tak Chan critiques the consumer, survivor, ex-patient (CSX) movement's failure to consistently engage with anti-racism and Indigenous thought.

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The psychiatric consumer, survivor, and ex-patient (CSX) movement advocates for equity and human rights to transform mental health care. Incorporating the perspectives of former patients to influence psychiatric policy, practice, and research has proven valuable for highlighting critical issues and promoting systemic change within psychiatry.

Despite a commitment to these values, a new study by Walter Wai Tak Chan reveals that CSX organizations inconsistently engage with anti-racism and Indigenous thought, which may perpetuate harm by maintaining systems of oppression and centering a Eurocentric focus.

Using constructivist grounded theory, Chan’s study explores the perspectives and experiences of Canadian CSX leaders through interviews and supplementary data from 13 mental health organizations across Canada. Chan’s research question asks, “How do CSX organizations engage with cultural diversity and Indigeneity in their work?”

Chan found inconsistent, if not absent, engagement with anti-racism and Indigenous thought among the organizations studied. Notably, he highlights one organization, Vancouver’s Gallery Gachet, for its dedicated commitment to diversity, anti-racism, and Indigenous thought, contrasting other organizations.

He writes,

“Across the CSX leaders and organizations studied, engagement with Indigenous thought, diversity, and anti-racism has been hit-and-miss. Astute CSX leaders said the movement remains white-centric.”
“This study’s findings reveal the gap between a conceited ‘inclusion’ of Indigenous individuals and the reality that Indigenous communities have been movers and shakers in Western Canada from the very start. Across the globe, the reality is that Indigenous individuals and Indigenous ideas are agents of sociopolitical change. CSX organizations ought to reflect that.”
Gallery Gachet is identified as a CSX organization that exemplifies deep engagement with socio-political contexts through its commitment to diversity, anti-racism, and Indigenous thought. The “While We Wait” project, running from July 27 to August 31, 2024, showcases the gallery’s dedication to creative agency and integrating personal narratives with political issues such as Blackness, displacement, gentrification, and land restitution.

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Ally Riddle
Ally is pursuing a master's in interdisciplinary studies through New York University's XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. She uses the relationship between anthropology, public health, and the humanities to guide her research. Her current interests lie at the intersection of literature and psychology as a method to reframe the way we think about different mental states and experiences. Ally earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in Biology, Society, & Environment.

3 COMMENTS

  1. You are all so, so confused. Every author here is living in a so called ‘privillaged’ world of intellectual fantasies that give them an illusory sense of reality and self importance while the world about them falls apart entirely because of our blind intellectual, judgemental and materializations of these in social processes including the one that lives and breaths in everything you think and say. You are pulled by the puppet strings of social history but are even more tragic and absurd.

    It is true I’m afraid and I stick to it. Saying this is the dark night and the eclipse.

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  2. “The psychiatric consumer, survivor, and ex-patient (CSX) movement advocates for equity and human rights to transform mental health care.”….. Here’s another prime example of the psychobabble gobbledygook drek from the “mental health system” peanut gallery….
    It is the very MEDICALIZATION of common human experience which is the ROOT cause of the malaise….
    Dumping the pseudoscience fraud of psychiatry & psych drugs would be huge leap forward….
    It’s ALL HUMAN SERVICES, folks!….

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