A hard hitting documentary examining structural racism in the UK mental health system.
Our task is to dismantle the anatomy of institutional racism, specifically, its pervasion of the UK mental health system. Calling attention to its permutations. Creating an irrefutable picture that stands testament to the problem - as well as exploring what it might take to shift the landscape.
Ultimately; the film will exist as an accessible resource which can resonate to all. Encapsulating the urgent need for change.
Watch our funding trailer below
“… survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
- Audre Lorde
A powerful exploration of systemic injustice in mental health care
From the founding of psychiatry through to the roots of the modern mental health system, the film will detail the way power structures have allowed white supremacy to create shameful chasms of inequalities in the way racialised people are treated.
The film will unpack the culture of the system that professionals practice, and notably; how it has arisen against a background of race-slavery and race-based colonialism. It will be evidenced by speaking with clinicians, academics, activists, people which this impacts directly, as well as those who have been trying to challenge these issues, only to meet a myriad of barriers along the way.
We tell this story from a social justice perspective
A system of psychiatry that is modelled on treating the individual person without vigorously attending to the social factors driving it is like having an intervention model which is about treating people for dysentery when they live by a contaminated river and drink its waters - without putting effort into securing fresh drinking water for the community.
Exploring this analogy, the medical approach would focus on treating disease, public health on ensuring clean water is made available and a social justice approach would additionally attend to the fact that the likelihood of being amongst those living by the banks of the river is not arbitrary but a consequence of social inequality and political decisions. A social justice approach in psychiatry engages with the social and political decisions that lead to the current variations found in mental health services.
Contributed by Hári Sewell
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
— Frantz Fanon
What is it about the ideologies and institutions that make up the mental health system, that has resulted in structural racism being so attached to the fabric of its construction and resulting practices?
We are currently crowdfunding to support the film’s production. Any and all support is appreciated. If you wish to support us in other ways, then sharing our crowdfunding page on social media and amongst your networks - is a huge help.