Mad in America

Time Zone: Eastern Time

Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker whose practice focuses on mental health difference. Her work is an extension of her continued interest in using narratives as a way to challenge stereotypes in contemporary society and to create safe spaces. She has presented her work in a variety of spaces and contexts including the College Art Association Conference, the Society for Disability Studies Annual Conference, and the Pacific International Conference on Disability and Diversity. She has exhibited at the Denver International Airport, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Asian Arts Initiative, and the Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Studying Disability, Arts, and Culture: An Introduction by Petra Kuppers, and A Body You Can Talk To: An Anthology of Contemporary Disability, edited by Tennison S. Black (forthcoming). Svetvilas was the co-founder of ThaiLinks, a collective that was based in New York City and promoted awareness about issues affecting the Thai American community. She also co-founded the biennial Thai Takes Film Festival. Svetvilas was born in Buffalo, NY to Thai immigrant parents. She earned her BS from Skidmore College and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College.

Time Zone: Eastern Standard Time

Psychiatry and psychology have been used to justify mistreatment and segregation since at least the early 1800s in the United States and remained largely unchallenged in mainstream culture until the 1960s civil rights era. For example, psychiatry has been used to bolster the institutions of slavery through psychiatric disorders (“drapetomania”) and scientific reports (e.g. by Dr. Samuel Cartwright) that deemed African Americans “biologically inferior” and pathologized those who tried to escape its reins (“protest psychosis”). The ideas underpinning these ideologies persist today, evident in the disparities in diagnostic rates, as well as the disproportionate criminalization and institutionalization of marginalized communities labeled as having a mental illness. There is a direct correlation between this insidious history and present-day efforts by the state to expand involuntary commitment.

On Monday, April 17, IDHA will continue the conversation with Decarcerating Care: Histories of Coercion and Dreams for Liberated Futures. This sixth installment will explore how institutionalization has long operated as a tool of social control, disproportionately impacting Black and Brown communities, manifesting today in the expansion of involuntary commitment directives nationally. A panel of activists, survivors, researchers, providers, and other advocates will explore the history and current status of involuntary commitment in the United States, centered on the factors that have shaped how people approach mental health and the impact of this history on diagnosis and the mental health continuum. We will discuss key examples in New York City and California, demonstrating what these initiatives have in common and how they are indicative of a larger pattern. We will also share key resistance strategies grounded in lived experience wisdom.