Excerpts from the recent piece by writer, @Leah Harris, published in Mad in America.
During the current coronavirus pandemic, the practice of mutual aid—defined broadly as the ways that people join together to meet one another’s needs for survival and relationship—has reached the mainstream. Yet often missing from major media coverage of mutual aid is any acknowledgment of its roots in movements led by marginalized people, including Black and Brown people, disabled people, mad people, and psychiatric survivors.
People relegated to the margins of society have long known that they can’t necessarily depend on systems for their survival. For example, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief emerged from New Orleans communities of color forgotten in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, when public authorities responded to demands for help with automatic rifles.
As activist Reyna Crow from Duluth, Minnesota told Mad in America, “I have learned not through this, but previous crises that have affected me similarly for protracted periods of time, that it is those who have already been there I can turn to for real support. Systems aren’t effective or safe in my case. Community is the best way to try to ensure we all get our basic needs met.”
Psychiatric survivors have had to practice mutual aid for decades to save their own lives. “Grassroots peer support practices were developed out of necessity by psychiatric survivors,” Darby Penney wrote on Mad in America. As Penney explains, these groups arose in the 1970s “in reaction to negative experiences with mental health treatment and dissatisfaction with the limits of the mental patient role.”
To read the rest of this piece by @Leah Harris, published in Mad in America, please click here.
Comments (0)