Decarcerating Care: Strategy, Struggle & Sustained Commitment
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May 5, 2025
May 5th, 6-8 pm EDT
About the Series
IDHA organized our first-ever Decarcerating Care conversation in September 2020, in the midst of ongoing racial uprisings in the United States and globally. As abolitionists and organizers called to divest funding from the police and some advocated for reallocation to mental health care, IDHA sought to draw attention to the ways in which the mental health care system maintains white supremacist, racial hierarchies and operates on logics of surveillance, coercion, and control. In the five years since, IDHA’s eight panels have reached more than 15,000 people with urgent dialogue about alternatives to policing that are rooted in the lived experience of mental health service users and survivors, movement leaders, and disabled community members.
We have thus far explored: the importance of taking policing out of mental health crisis response; the ways in which “reforms” uphold the ongoing coercion of marginalized communities; concrete steps and tools for decarcerating one's practice; how to build community-based healing alternatives; how systems of surveillance intersect with mental health and disability; the ways in which institutionalization operates as a tool of social control; how the mental health industrial complex pathologizes acts of resistance; and how to transcend carceral approaches to mandated reporting.
About the Event
The state is escalating the pathologization and criminalization of trans, immigrant, Indigenous, disabled, poor, and other marginalized communities at an alarming rate. While authoritarian control may be more visible right now, this tactic – relying on the definition of certain groups as ‘other’ to justify their exclusion, control, and disappearance – is nothing new. Today, it manifests in involuntary commitment laws targeting unhoused communities, coercion and abuse in community-based settings, and the everyday pathologization of those resisting unjust and inhumane conditions. Politicians across ideological lines have called for expanding forced interventions as a supposed solution to social crises, doubling down on a long history of psychiatric incarceration being framed as ‘help.’ The mental health system remains a key site where state violence and social control unfold under the guise of care.
On Monday, May 5, 2025, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Strategy, Struggle & Sustained Commitment. In this ninth installment of the series, we will take stock of past, present, and future efforts to decarcerate care. As we navigate a volatile sociopolitical moment, it is essential to pause and assess our strategies. What lessons from history must guide us now? What strategies have been effective, and where do we need to shift course? How do we resist the pressure of reacting, and instead stay focused on long-term, systemic transformation? Drawing from diverse lineages and contexts, our panelists will explore where we go from here – balancing the need to meet the moment with a broader, long-term vision. Together, we will reflect on the urgency of the present while amplifying strategies that move us toward a future where radical care is accessible, just, and free from state violence.