Mental Health, Oppression, and Repression: A Community Discussion

On June 2nd, from 6-8 at The Holdout, Rad Brains is going to facilitate a discussion about repression, oppression, and mental health. We're not looking for speakers, necessarily, but we're reaching out to people who have experience with repression and oppression, either through lived experience or working on these issues in some capacity, to be involved in the conversation.

As an anti-capitalist group examining the intersections of what goes on in our heads with what goes on everywhere else, especially as it relates to the effects of white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalist class war, we think it's important to think through together how we experience repression and oppression on the individual, relational and community level and how we respond.

We have some questions to guide the conversation:

How do we experience repression? How do we experience oppression? What's the difference?

How do these things work on us and work on our communities psychologically?

How do we process paranoia? How do we determine what's anxiety and what's fear? What is a "real threat"?

How are our responses to oppression and repression used against us?

What tools do we have to fight repression/oppression and how do they work? How can we make them work better?

Rad Brains, a mental health collective that's part of the Bread & Roses Mutual Aid collective, is an anti-capitalist collective interested in broadening political analysis by removing mental health from the medical and personal contexts and addressing it as a community and social issue that intersects with struggles against white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. We want to open a regular space for conversations about mental health that deepen our understanding of these intersections, address the ways our community might replicate oppressive structures, and develop skills to be with one another in our daily lives and in the streets as a strategy to attack the state and resist oppression. Strong communities build strong resistance.