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No pill for this ill: our community vision for mental health

Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP)

2018-12-31

Description

The purpose of this project is to build our own vision for mental health in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). A vision that centers and builds on the voices and experiences of community members and sees mental health as political, inseparable from the society we live in, not as an individual 'disorder' that can be cured with a pill. While the goal of the community vision is to shed light on the social and political determinants of mental health, we want to acknowledge that the report is just a starting point for a broader vision of mental health. It doesn't do justice to the depth and diversity of factors that impacts DTES residents mental health, including colonialism, the pain and trauma caused by racism, transphobia, violence against women, sex work antagonism, the war on drugs, homelessness, capitalism, and the accelerating exclusion of DTES residents from their neighbourhood as it gentrifies.